A single coil pickup usually has a single coil wound around a magnet bar or pole pieces. Sometimes a single coil pickup uses ferrous bar or rod pole pieces with a bar magnet fastened to the bottom of a pickup to magnetize the poles. A single coil pickup usually picks up a single harmonic within the string area. Humbucking pickups usually have two bobbins each with opposite magnetic fields and coils electrically hooked up in opposite winding direction to produce a quieter signal when in series or parallel.

A side by side humbucker used by Gibson and designed by Seth E. Lover have two bobbins that pick up a wider string vibration. Some models like our patented Stack™ Pickup have two coils on top of each other that pick up a single harmonic like a single coil pickup with out the single coil noise.