The Bizarre Physics of Electric Guitars

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I was sent a magnetic guitar pick to review, so I reviewed it. Does it work? How? Why? What's the physics of electric guitar strings and pickups? Are magnets useful? Do they affect the strings? The pickups?

Thanks to Pete B. for loaning me the guitar.

And the videos critiquing it


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Created by Henry Reich

[danieljensen]

Weird that they decided to lie when "can make weird/unique guitar sounds" is WAY more interesting than "you can pick while awkwardly holding your hand 4 inches from the strings".

[moonlitmurloc]

>walks into guitar store
>shakes a powerful magnet near the guitar pickups
>refuses to elaborate, leaves

[Yupppi]

This was a fun one. Also think about it: you're not gonna lose your picks anymore because you can just stick them to the guitar.

[Nosgoroth]

"The physics is simple, the human relations are complicated" sounds like a CGP Grey line.

[haqvor]

My first thought was that it becomes quite important to avoid hitting the strings when using this thin neodymium magnet as they are quite brittle and can easily break if mishandled. I think that just gluing a couple of magnets on a regular pick is a safer idea if you want this effect and want to avoid having a sharp piece of metal close to your fingers...

[iout]

I'd argue that while it's not strictly a scam in that it does what it claims to, the advertising is still misleading in how it functions, which still makes it a scam.
Like that Fushigi ball. It could technically do everything that was shown, but the advertising misled in how the trick was actually pulled off. It's just contact juggling.

[davidg]

It's shiny.
It's heavy.
It's $50.

Exactly what a non-musician would think is a perfect gift for the guitar player they know.

I feel like there's an 86% chance I receive one of these before the year is over.

[christhesnaildriver]

What I haven't seen anyone mention yet, is the possibility of altering the magnetic characteristics of the pickup itself, by waving a strong magnet in close proximity to the pole pieces. This may be a small risk, but I've heard a very experienced musician claim he'd experienced storing a guitar too close to speaker magnets in amp cabs had weakened his pickup magnets. Exposure to a strong magnetic field is essentially how the strength of custom pickup magnets are tuned during manufacture for different tone characteristics,

[MrSJPowell]

The lack of physics knowledge in the music community hurts me as an amateur scientist, who is a musician. For as well as we understand electromagnetic and audio effects, there's a lot of mysticism that gets added to the the discussion. "It's warm", "glassy", "overdriven", "mellow". As if those words mean anything. I've seen one Fourier transform of a guitar, and only one manufacturer provides accurate information on the pickups.

All that to say, I would love a minutephysics deep dive into more electric guitar.

[CamiloSinger]

As a guitar player myself, I'm glad to see stuff like this on a physics channel :)
That being said, if you want to replicate the same sound without that pick, tremolo is what you're looking for. Of course that would require a pedal (be it standalone or a multi effects unit), or an amp with built in tremolo. Both of which are pricier than the pick.

[Tim-Eh]

You can hear the pick attack in the promotional videos. Someone probably recorded a guitar being played with a pick and mimicked the movements for the video. It wasn't just the left hand causing the strings to vibrate.

[tritoneking]

I’m a professional guitarist with 30+years experience, and have baccalauréat in physics and chemistry, fwiw. The X-pick is a scam for several different reasons:
1- they claim it works differently than what you are describing here. That’s misleading. They should know better. Therefore that is quite scammy in my book.
2- you claim that you can reproduce everything their promotional materials claim. But many, many people including myself, try as we might, following all the instructions to a T, cannot get even close to what they demonstrate on 90% of their techniques. The only technique that is unique to this pick and that we can master is the only one you play in this video. (I think they call it “hyper volume.”)
3- you are clearly playing their “hyper Wah” technique, but no one I know has been able to achieve it. If you are using an actual wah pedal, then you should disclose that.
4- calling their techniques “hyper delay” when there’s no real delay effect happening and it doesn’t sound like it, or “hyper reverse” when there’s no reverse effect happening and it doesn’t sound like it, or the EBow-like infinite sustain they demonstrate that is physically impossible, etc, etc, is the very definition of a scam, don’t you think?
5- when only one out of ten of their purported effects actually works and is unique to this pick, then it’s a scam. (Several of their effects are achievable with a regular pick, or better yet, with a metal one, so they’re not unique to the X-pick.)
6- look at all their promotional materials (using obvious overdubbing to pretend the effect can be achieved with their pick, long-winded poor attempts at humor, without much substance) and the way they handle criticism (fraudulently claiming copyright infringement, blocking, disparaging) and you can only come to one conclusion: it’s a scam.

[DannyGraves]

So the basic premise for these is that you're supposed to be hammering/pulling off (or perhaps even tapping) instead of playing the regular way and then use the magnetic pick to modulate...
I think I'll stick to my pedalboard for modulation effects.

[samuraiguitarist]

I think we ultimately had a very similar experience. As a guitarist I found no more value in it than my fridge magnet. If it doesn't work the way that it's advertised to work to me that's a dishonest scheme. I find the most egregiously false claim to be the ability to create "infinite sustain", that has been a big selling point, and the pick simply cannot do that. However you did a great job showing the nuance of the discussion.

[richardmetzler]

It would make more sense to not combine the magnet into the pick. I would try mounting the magnet onto a ring, or a thimble you can stick on the tip of your ring finger. That way, you can use any pick you want, not worry about losing or breaking it, not worry about the magnetic interactions between pick and playing, and have some independence between the picking motion and the magnetic modulation.

[scaredyfish]

Neodymium magnets are quite brittle - they’re prone to breaking if they just snap together too quickly, so I’m kind of surprised that you can make a pick out of it. I presume it must have a sheath of steel to protect the magnet.

[christopherdeangelis]

Wow, I can't believe I learned more about this product from a physics channel than any of the guitar channels.

[guitarfreakizoid]

Youtube: You've been watching guitar videos, here's some more.

Youtube: You've been watching science videos, here's some more

Channel I've been subscribed to for a decade and seen every single one of his videos: Posts a video about the science of guitars

Youtube: You don't need to see this

[TomCantDance]

I do think that you're being a bit too charitable with the ad. What you tested was one sound shown in it and not the other techniques that the sellers say it can do. For that reason, it is a scam because they're not showing the post-processing or the limitations that you found. They are lying.

[BrimmyFrags]

Very fitting time to watch this as I’m picking up guitar and finishing up basic magnetic flux physics