How many guitar pickup types are there?

I was wondering if there are any other electric guitar pickup types else than the single coils and the humbuckers. I mean, completely different ones, not like the multibuckers or the compressed, narrow humuckers.
Nope, no info on Wikipedia. Nothing else but Single Coils, Humbuckers and the bass split poles.

Hello there,
I am no expert on pickups, but I will share what I know about them. There are 2 broad categories of pickups for an electric guitar, single coils and double coils (humbucking) pickups. There are many varieties within those 2 broad categories.

First, the pickups can be active or passive. Active pickups use a battery pack to power a preamp chip on your guitar. That increases the signal being sent from the guitar. Passive pickups are more common.

Also, pickups usually come in 1 or 3 string spacings to go along with the string spacing of the bridge. Fender, Gibson and Floyd Rose (sometimes called F spaced). You need to match the string spacing of your pickups to that of the bridge in order that the strings will be centered over the poles of the pickups. There is one notable exception to this, the rail pickups. Rails, such as Seymour Duncan Hot Rails or DiMarizo Chopper, do not use poles, they have a rail, that is a bar running across the pickup.

Single coils. Most common single coil pickups are the Strat type of single coil. There are other variations. The tube type single coil used at the neck of a Tele. Vintage Danelectro guitars had lipstick pickups that looked much like the Tele pickup, only longer. There are the P-90s which are a single coil with more wraps in the coil giving them a hotter sound. Even within the Strat type pickups there are variations. Some are over wound giving them a hotter sound, like the Tex Mex or the Texas Specials. Many boutique pickups are over wound. The single coil pickups used on the 60s & 70s vintage Japanese import guitars were a larger size and required a more shallow cavity. Harmony, and others, also used the Dearmond gold foil pickups which were pretty much top mount pickups. The vintage Dearmond gold foils were great sounding pickups. When one hits the market these days, it brings a healthy price (more than the whole guitar sold for new back in the 60s).

There are different magnets used, each of which have a different sound, Alnico 2, 3 and 5 are common magnets. Some use ceramic magnets, use as the lower end Squier and other imports.

The so-called humbucking pickups or humbuckers are really double coils. They have 2 single coils, one wrapped reverse from the other in order to cancel the hum. Thus the name. Humbuckers come in different sizes. Besides the normal full size humbucker, there are mini-humbuckers which are slightly smaller, close to the size of the P-90 pickups. There are humbuckers the size of single coil pickups. Some of those are the rail pickups, like Hot Rails. But others are stacked. Instead of the coils being side by side, they are one on top of the other.

If you want to learn more about pickups, I suggest you spend some time reading at the Seymour Duncan site. He takes pickups seriously and has a wealth of information available there on his site.

http://www.seymourduncan.com/support/glossary/

Later,

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