There are two types of electric guitar pickups: single coils and humbuckers. Single coil pickups came first. A single coil is just a single spool containing one or more magnets. The single coil pickup will typically have a more treble sound.

Humbuckers, were created by a Gibson employee back in the 1950's. Humbuckers are two single coil pickups that are wired together. By wiring a pair of single coil pickups together, they pick up less noise than a single coil pickup, and you get richer, fatter tone. The humbuckers were created to reject (buck) interference (hum) but allow the signal from the guitar strings to get through.

Humbuckers also create more output than single coil pickups, so they overdrive amps differently. There are also stacked humbuckers which are the same as side by side humbuckers, but they fit into a single coil slot.

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