Every serious acoustic guitarist will have thoughts about how a guitar’s body — its shape, its bracing, the woods from which it is made, etc. — creates its sound. As well they might! The funny thing is, players of electric guitars talk the same language — even though, as this video – by Aaron Lanterman, a professor of electrical engineering at Georgia Tech – demonstrates, the sound made by an electric guitar when amplified has almost nothing to do with its body.

The sound an electric guitar makes when amplified is generated by the response that its pickups make to the movement of its strings, and people naturally assume that pickups hear a version of what they themselves hear. But pickups don’t hear at all, because pickups are not microphones. They electromagnetically detect mechanical vibrations, and that’s all they do. As the Wikipedia page just linked says: “The permanent magnet in the pickup magnetizes the guitar string above it. This causes the string to generate a magnetic field which is in alignment with that of the permanent magnet. When the string is plucked, the magnetic field around it moves up and down with the string. This moving magnetic field induces a current in the coil of the pickup as described by Faraday’s law of induction.”

Lanterman explains all this wonderfully well. One interesting thing that I didn’t know before listening to his video but should have: You’ll sometimes hear guitarists talk about the “resonance” of a solid-body electric guitar, but electric guitars only have solid bodies in order to reduce resonance. A hollow-body guitar does indeed resonate, and resonate in ways that can interfere with the pickups’ ability to detect the vibration of the strings. That’s why so many electric guitars are made from a chunk of thick heavy wood: a chunk of thick heavy wood doesn’t resonate when the strings are plucked.

This doesn’t mean that different electric guitars don’t sound different — they do. But, if they’re solid-body guitars, the differences in sound don’t arise from the composition or shape of the body or (heaven knows) the paint or the varnish thereupon.