Much to my fiance’s horror, late last week I succumbed to a great deal on 1-day. A starter pack of an (unbranded) Strat style guitar and amp. I bought my first acoustic guitar about three years ago, and while I still have a lot more to learn about playing classical guitar, I’ve been thinking about getting an electric to play around with for a while now.

Acoustic guitars are relatively simple beasts. A string-like substance (these days generally nylon) is stretched taut, such that when plucked it will vibrate in a standing waveform with a specific frequency, and hence produce a tone. This tone is amplified and resonated by the hollow echo chamber in the body of the guitar. An ‘acoustic electric’ guitar uses a microphone in the echo chamber to pickup and amplify the sound.

Electric guitars do it quite differently, and this is where the cool physics comes in. Rather than employing microphones, which can pick up other stray sounds, the ‘pickups’ are actually coils of wire around a magnetic core. The (steel) strings vibrate across these coils, inducing current, which is transferred to your amplifier and converted to sound. In essence, it is an electro-magnet in reverse. Crank the amplifier up, and you get another cool effect – infinite sustain. The sound being amplified and projected back sets up a sympathetic resonance in the string that produced it, amplifying and sustaining its wave-form. So, pluck a note, and it just keeps going.

I’ve only had a couple of days to play with the guitar, but so far I like what I see. Having always played classical guitar, the relatively long but narrow fret board takes a lot of getting used to, as do the steel strings. But a lot of other things suddenly become so much easier – the strings at a much lower tension are so much more responsive, barre chords become simple, and playing above the twelfth fret is actually possible.