Pickup (music technology)

A pickup is a transducer that captures or senses mechanical vibrations produced by musical instruments, particularly stringed instruments such as the electric guitar, and converts these to an electrical signal that is amplified using an instrument amplifier to produce musical sounds through a loudspeaker in a speaker enclosure. The signal from a pickup can also be recorded directly.

This article is about the instrument transducer. For the phonographic device, see Magnetic cartridge.

The first electrical string instrument with pickups, the "Frying Pan" slide guitar, was created by George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker around 1931.

Most electric guitars and electric basses use magnetic pickups. Acoustic guitars, upright basses and fiddles often use a piezoelectric pickup.

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