Ceramic Or Alninco Pickups

It s like the difference between the stones and the beatles imho.

Ceramic or alninco pickups.

Ceramic magnets are made from ferrites often iron oxides. The only exception to this is the vintage noiseless ceramic which was featured a few years back on higher end strats but they have seemed to fallen out of favor and have been replace by the scn different magnet than both ceramic and alnico pickups. The custom is ceramic the custom 5 is alnico 5 and the custom custom is alnico 2. Recall our article basswood does it suck because the concept is similar.

The result is a slightly hotter sounding pickup with more treble response. Ceramic pickups have more bite wich helps get a crunchy sound even if can t afford a real classy tube amp. If forced into it we might recommend alnico only because ceramic is the magnet of choice in cheap pickups that do sound bad. Yep measuring a pickup s dc resistance will not tell you if the magnets are alnico or ceramic.

There are just too many completely subjective variables to make a definitive decision. Unfortunately there is no clear winner in our alnico vs ceramic magnets tug of war. Bad ceramic pickups are bad whereas many players actually prefer high end ceramic pickups to their alnico counterparts. The distortion is ceramic and the jb is alnico 5 but everything else is the same.

So having said that i ve noticed that as you go cycle through alnico 2 5 8 and ceramic the lows tighten up and the uppper mids become more pronounced. A lot of people automatically say that alnico is superior to ceramic in pickups. Magnetically speaking ceramic magnets produce a stronger field than alnico. There are fantastic pickups on the market which utilize ceramic magnets such as the dimarzio titan and the seymour duncan black winter.