Components

• The pickup translates the sound into electricity. The spindle potentiometer (or "pot") connects to the fixed resistor, allowing for volume changes applied with a user knob. A variable resistor connects to another pot, allowing for tone control. The capacitor works as a low-pass filter for the tone control; therefore, the tone knob affects only treble frequencies. Guitars with multiple pickups employ one or more switches to allow for pickup selection.
  
  

Single-Pickup Circuitry

• Few electric guitars made today contain single-pickup circuitry. However, understanding its concepts helps with learning multi-pickup designs. In a single-pickup circuit, wire connects the components from the jack socket to the fixed resistor. The wire then runs to the volume knob's resistor, through the tone knob's variable resistor, to the pickup, then to the capacitor (connected to the tone knob's resistor) and back to the fixed resistor and jack socket.
  
  

Multiple-Pickup Circuitry

• Multi-pickup circuitry connects two or more pickups together to be used individually or in conjunction. A selector switch is added to a basic single-pickup setup and wired to each pickup. This allows for the player to choose a single pickup or two adjacent pickups.
  
  

Pickups

• Pickups affect the tone that an electric guitar produces far greater than any other piece of the instrument's electronics. Single-coil pickups, such as those in a Fender Stratocaster, often incur noise while in use. Humbucking pickups are two single-coil pickups wired together to reduce the noise. These transducers contain magnets and a few thousand wrappings of thin copper wire to help transform the acoustic string sound into an electric signal.
  
  

Modifications

• Several wiring modifications can be made to increase the sonic textures available to the player. These include adding two wires to a humbucking pickup to "split" the pickup, allowing individual use of each coil. Wiring pickups to an additional toggle switch makes it possible to use two nonadjacent pickups in unison. Performing modifications on a guitar should be done only by experienced technicians.