
If you listen carefully, you might even be able to hear the humming in the background. You might start to hear why distortion and Single Coil pickups don’t exactly work well together.

Once again, each note was very distinct even though the tone was a little warmer than the last clip. To help you decide if this is something that you might be interested in, go ahead and listen to these audio clips of me using different pickups and tone settings!Īs you probably heard, each note was very defined and the tone came out very nicely. Great! So now you know some of the main pros and cons of Single Coil pickups. Produces more hum (especially with more gain or distortion).Usually, Single Coil pickups will be long and skinny like on this Stratocaster. Single Coil pickups get their name from the way that they are built which is basically a bunch of magnets with a single coil of wire wrapped around them. The magnets pick up the vibration of the metal strings which is why pickups don’t pick up sounds the way a regular microphone would. Like we talked about above, a Single Coil pickup will usually have a brighter and clearer tone than a Humbucker pickup will, but before we go into which one is better for you, we should talk about how Single Coil pickups work in the first place.īasically, the way a pickup works is with the help of magnets. We’ll kick this off by talking about Single Coil pickups. But with that being said, let’s tackle each of them individually and find out which pickups will work better for you. The answer to the question of which pickup is better depends on what you’re looking for personally, there really is no better option here, it all comes down to preference. While Single Coil pickups have a sound that is more defined, Humbucking pickups will reduce a lot of the background humming or buzzing that many Single Coil pickups struggle with. In general, Single Coil pickups will have a cleaner and crisper sound whereas Humbucking pickups will have a sound that is much warmer and full.

Each has been around for a long time, and while both of these pickups are great, which one is the better option?

Some of the most popular pickups for guitars out there today are Humbucking pickups and Single Coil pickups.
