A guitar pickup is a transducer that converts string vibration to an electrical signal. The magnetic and piezo pickups are the most commonly used for the respective electric and electroacoustic guitars. The magnetic pickups are prone to magnetic interference between the steel strings and permanent magnets, while the piezo ones are not free from signal inference between the strings. Thus, this paper presents the development of an optical pickup for the electroacoustic guitar. The proposed optical pickup has the top-to-bottom structure. It uses two of Infrared (IR) Light Emitting Diode (LED) and one photodetector. The developed optical pickup is subjected to the evaluation with commonly used piezoelectric pickup. It becomes obvious that SNR with the optical pickup is increased by 45 percent in average, compared with the piezoelectric pickup. It can be concluded that the developed optical pickup has a potential to be applied to the acoustic guitar.
