Ceramic Or Alninco Pickups

The result is a slightly hotter sounding pickup with more treble response.

Ceramic or alninco pickups.

At the very most you might be able to infer that if the dc resistance is relatively low say 6k ohms or less for a single coil and 8k ohms or less for a humbucker there s a slightly better chance that the magnets are alnico since most vintage or vintage voiced pickups have lower dc. The distortion is ceramic and the jb is alnico 5 but everything else is the same. A lot of people automatically say that alnico is superior to ceramic in pickups. But if you want a nice clean tone go alnico 5.

The custom is ceramic the custom 5 is alnico 5 and the custom custom is alnico 2. There are fantastic pickups on the market which utilize ceramic magnets such as the dimarzio titan and the seymour duncan black winter. Yep measuring a pickup s dc resistance will not tell you if the magnets are alnico or ceramic. 4 personally i prefer the alnico single coils for the reasons i listed in 1.

There are just too many completely subjective variables to make a definitive decision. Recall our article basswood does it suck because the concept is similar. Unfortunately there is no clear winner in our alnico vs ceramic magnets tug of war. Ceramic magnets are made from ferrites often iron oxides.

If forced into it we might recommend alnico only because ceramic is the magnet of choice in cheap pickups that do sound bad. 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. Bad ceramic pickups are bad whereas many players actually prefer high end ceramic pickups to their alnico counterparts. It s like the difference between the stones and the beatles imho.