I have a question of how electric string instruments work.

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Yeah that's what I meant more so, if it was steel strings and you were fingerpicking. Let's say you take the pick ups out of an eletric guitar and put them on an steel stringed cello.

Would it sound like a pizzacato style cello still, or would it now sound like an electric guitar, since it's an electric guitar's pick ups?

Supposing the pickups had the correct shape to get the cello strings to have equal volume it would sound most similar to a fretless baritone guitar. A cello has a 27" scale, which is within the range that would be considered a baritone guitar.

If one wants to make a guitar sound like more like a bowed instrument there's a few tricks.

You can use the volume knob like Kirk Hammet:


An e-bow can make your strings vibrate without touching them:


You can do it like Jimmy Page, with a cello bow:


Notice how difficult it is to play single notes with the bow, even Fenders with relatively round radii are too flat to use a bow well. (Note, that's a Les Paul like Jimmy Page played, not a Fender)

Or finally you can just get a viol, which often has frets and has six strings. I'd love to make an electric viol tuned to match my guitars.

Oh okay that is all very insteresting. In the first video, the cello doesn't really sound like a guitar in my opinion, but just some distorted electric instrument that is not identifiable, with any acoustic string instrument.

But that's another thing is, why is the electric guitar called an electric guitar? It's not like it sounds enough like an acoustic guitar to be called a guitar I don't think. The strings are the same, which is why they thought of calling it an electric guitar, because the took the idea of the strings from the acoustic guitar. But since the electric guitar does not sound too much like an acoustic guitar, should we even consider it part of the guitar family technically?

In the first video it's not a cello, it's an electric guitar. He's rolling the volume knob up which changes the attack, instead of the jud-jud-judjudjud of the down-picked guitar it's a rounder sound with a softer attack.

Oh okay. So if it's possible to make electric instruments sound different, is it possible to also make an electric guitar, sound a lot like a spanish acoustic guitar with nylon strings for example, so you can just double the electric for both, or no?

There is something wrong in your premise, which is that electronic instruments sound like their acoustic counterparts. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. An acoustic guitar sounds nothing like an electric guitar. Same goes for Electric Violin, Digital Piano etc. - They sound nothing like their acoustic origin.

Oh okay, well they sound like them enough that I can tell what the are though. For example, when I first heard an electric banjo, I have never heard one before, but I guessed that it was an electric banjo because it kind of sounds like an acoustic banjo. I looked it up and I was right.

I also guessed a certain instrument I heard was an electric violin, cause it sounds like an acoustic. So I looked it up and I was right. So don't they sound enough like their acoustic counterparts that you can sometimes guess what they are?

yeah I get what you say and you are correct.
To experience an acoustic instrument best though you have to be in the same room with it and let the soundwave travel to your ears after being amplified acoustically. When you listen to any recording being an electric or an acoustic instrument, the sound representation is already digitalized and the means of listening (headphones/speakers) are vastly different from the natural way said soundwaves would disperse within a room after being amplified by a resonating box.
So, to best appreciate the difference,
Try an acoustic violin and an electric violin while being in the same room with both and you'll hear a vast difference. Of course you'll recognize an electric violin blindfolded since the timbre is close enough (playing with the same bow on same material strings using the same basic articulation and dynamics).
Had you listened to recordings or samples of electronic vs. acoustic instrument it would be way easier to 'mask' the faults of an electric instruments when it comes to conveying naturalism.

Another example, when you play a digital piano, you basically play samples of an actual recorded acoustic piano. So when you record a real piano with a microphone in the studio it would be much harder to spot the difference between it and a good sampled digital piano (I'm not talking about modeling since it's less realistic).

Bottom line, when you are in the presence of an acoustic piano, playing it and listening to it, no digital even comes remotely close. When you listen to recordings of both to compare - all sound is already digitalized both in recording and monitor which nullifies a lot of the 'acoustic' aspect of it.

Oh okay thanks, that makes sense.

So let's say you are creating a piece of music and you want a guitar let's say. How do you tell if you want an electric guitar or acoustic? The timbers are similar, so you can hear a similarity there, but how do you know which one to pick if you like the sound of both?

I came across this example of an electric violin, that sounds exactly like an acoustic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6WUlwabtw4

I can't really tell the difference and would have guessed it was an acoustic, unless you can tell it's an electric and there is a difference to appreciate?

Eventually you stop overthinking and just pick one even if the other might be just as good.

Or you pick electric because live it's easier to play it all on the gear you already use.

It's obviously harder to tell electric violin/ digital piano and such in the mix than when they are played solo.
And as I told you before, the fact that whatever acoustic/electronic instrument is amped and heard through speakers blurs the difference even further.

About choosing which instrument to use when composing/arranging: just experiment man, there's no shortcuts to learning from your own experience

Oh okay, well here is one thing that will help me make the decision. If you can make an electric instrument sound just like it's acoustic counterpart, then why do some musicians even bother to have both an acoustic and an electric violin for example? Why not just have an electric only, if you can make it sound just like an acoustic if you want to?

It's a lot easier to perform loudly on an electric since it's designed to be amplified, but it might also not 'feel' right for the performer to perform classical pieces on that instrument, so they might prefer to use an acoustic for aesthetic reasons.

There's also practical reasons; a performer who is performing as part of a loud band with a small number of musicians (like a rock or pop act) might choose an electric for those performances but prefer (or be obliged to use) an acoustic when performing as part of a classical orchestra.

Oh okay that makes sense. But let's say you are doing a score for a movie project and it's not live, and it doesn't matter if it's classical, modern, etc. How do you decide between electric and acoustic, especially if you can make the electric sound like the acoustic, and make it sound more classical even?

The same way I pick if I want to use the blue or the Omar when recording, I pick one and go because at the end of the day how you achieved the result matters less than whether or not you've gotten something accomplished today.