Ceramic Or Alninco Pickups

Recall our article basswood does it suck because the concept is similar.

Ceramic or alninco pickups.

A lot of people automatically say that alnico is superior to ceramic in pickups. 4 personally i prefer the alnico single coils for the reasons i listed in 1. 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. Yep measuring a pickup s dc resistance will not tell you if the magnets are alnico or ceramic.

If forced into it we might recommend alnico only because ceramic is the magnet of choice in cheap pickups that do sound bad. Ceramic magnets are made from ferrites often iron oxides. 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. It s like the difference between the stones and the beatles imho.

The distortion is ceramic and the jb is alnico 5 but everything else is the same. 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. There are just too many completely subjective variables to make a definitive decision.

Magnetically speaking ceramic magnets produce a stronger field than alnico. The custom is ceramic the custom 5 is alnico 5 and the custom custom is alnico 2. The result is a slightly hotter sounding pickup with more treble response. 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.