Too Many Guitars

Quick Buying Guide

The Rough Guide to Buying an Instrument
1. Instruments as Gifts
2. Which Instrument Should I Buy?
3. Acoustic Guitars
4. Electric Guitars
5. More On Electric Guitars
6. Basses
7. Amplifiers

2. The pickups. The what? you might ask. The pickups are those vaguely rectangular things under the strings on the body of the guitar. They transform the vibration of the strings into an electric signal that can then be amplified by the guitar amp. The type of pickup is very, very important to the sound of the guitar. It's usually the reason why a particular genre of music embraces one guitar model over another.

This is the point where your awareness of your child's musical taste becomes very handy. Buy them a guitar that sounds like their favorite band and the magic will begin. You may have also created a hopeless guitar collector...ahem...

Let's break down the three main types of guitar pickup, and what they make a guitar sound like. We'll include the most common guitar models featuring these pickups.

So named because it sports but a single coil of copper wire. Single coil pickups are bright and crisp, and give a chimey quality to the sound of the guitar. They are most frequently favored by players who do not use a lot of distortion. Some famous players of single coil guitars are George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Buddy Guy, Steve Cropper (a old school soul session player who co-wrote "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" with Otis Redding). When distorted, a single coil guitar has a sharp, piercing tone, which is why it is favored by many funk, reggae, soul and rock rhythm guitarists (who strum quite a bit) and note-bending blues guitarists.
Example songs: "In My Life" by the Beatles. Anything by Clapton. "My Girl" by the Temptations.

The Humbucker (or Double Coil)
Literally two single coil pickups side-by-side, Humbuckers got their name from their hum cancelling properties. Plugged into a guitar amp, they hum less. They are also louder and thicker than their single coil brethren, making them popular with both jazz players looking for a smooth, rounded tone (Wes Montgomery, George Benson, Les Paul), and heavy rock guitarists who found that cranking them up created a thick, rich distortion. Humbuckers really form the foundation of heavy rock, with proponents such as Jimmy Page, Tommy Iommi (Black Sabbath), Angus Young (AC/DC) and Eddie Van Halen. Today's high volume heavy rock relies almost exclusively on humbucking pickup guitars.
Example songs: Anything by Led Zeppelin ("Stairway to Heaven") or Black Sabbath ("Paranoid"). Anything by Van Halen ("Jump!").

Somewhere between the single coil and the humbucker lies the P-90. It's basically a fat single coil pickup, and though it was considered a vintage style pickup for years, it has been making a comeback on entry level instruments. The P-90 has served the rockabilly and surf scenes well, and found much favor among the punk and alternative bands. On a hollowbody guitar, they can make beautiful jazz or blues tones too.
Example songs: The Clash ("Should I Stay or Should I Go?" or "Rock The Casbah"). Lots of old surf music by the Ventures. Nirvana ("Smells Like Teen Spirit").

Next: Basses