Seen an electric guitar? Heard the inmistakeble twang of the wonder instrument? Ever worndered how it works?

Both acoustic guitars and electric guitars have six strings. The strings in both are tuned in a similar manner and you willfina frets on both on a long neck. So what's the difference? The body!

While some electric guitars have a hollow or semi-hollow body the most popular electric guitars have solod bodies. The sound produced is through the magnetic pickups and coltrolled by several knobs. If you were to unplug the elcetric guitar and plck the strings you would barely hear the sound. Why? Because wichout a soundboard and the hollow body found in acoustic guitars, there is hardly anything to amplify the sound!

So how does the electric guitar works? It senses the vibrations of the strings electronocally and routes the signal to an amplifier and then a speaker. And how do the vibrations get sensed? By the magnetic pickup that is mounted inder the strings in the body of the guitar! Which picks up the magnetic field the string cuts when it vibrates.

Did you know that the magnetic pickup is a bar magnet which is wrapped with as many as 7000 turns of fine wire? So actually it is an electromagnet that converts motions into electrical energy. When the string vibrates, its motion is plcked up by the electromagnet and converted into an electric impulse. Isn't that wonderfully simple? And yet so musical!

Sometimes guitars use a single magnetic pickup while others have separate magnetic pickups, uder each string for example. Two or three pickups, each with their own distinctive sound produce a very rich consonance of sounds.

The early electric guitar creators wanted to amplify the natural sound of the guitar but they found that the signals were too week. It was only later when engineers came into the picture that a more direct pickup systems was used and that gave way to the rich sounds that we hear from electric guitars, today.

So the next time you hear the rich sounds of an electric guitar, give a thought to how it works and you will find science coming musically alive!