h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In my experience, the placement of the pickup is not only out of convenience, the oscillations of the strings are not really neat sinusforms, due to several reasons, the striking of the right hand on the strings being one of them. Thus, different places produce different sounds. This is also the reason why guitars have several pickups.
Just a reminder: forgive me for doubting you if you already knew, but an electric guitar actually produces electricity. This is the reason why an amplifier *must* be grounded, to drain off the nasty resulting current. This causes a huge 'hum' in the sound.
Aside from this: a very good article!

Hi

The reason why I omitted the placement of pickups on the guitar is because it has little to do with the way it works. When I was writing this I originally had a bit about pickup placement on the guitar, but the aside grew to become an entire topic of its own strating with the origins of sound and why the sinuses add on the guitar string, and why some sums are damped and why some enter resonance... You see where this was going. The topic grew too big, and eventually buried the original topic (how the pickup works), so I decided to remove it and to make it into an Entry of it's own... I am currently working on it.

Voltage: I stated more than once in the Entry that the guitar pickup produces an oscillating current, an oscillating voltage, which is what is amplified in the amplifier... However, I didn't go into the details of amplifiers. The reason, again, is because this has little to do with the working mechanism of guitar pickups. Thinking about it, this whole amplifying topic could be a source for many new fantastic Entries. Think about it

Thanks for the comments Goyakhla!

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