Ceramic Or Alnico Pickups

Ceramic magnets are made from ferrites often iron oxides.

Ceramic or alnico pickups.

Due to the strong magnetic pull the alnico viii is a nice middle ground between the punch and clarity from a ceramic pickup and the sweet organic sound of an alnico which brings us to ceramic. Magnetically speaking ceramic magnets produce a stronger field than alnico. Alnico is a lot more expensive than ceramic. A lot of people automatically say that alnico is superior to ceramic in pickups.

Alnico tends to produce a very musical pickup in most. So much so that alnico is almost never used in grades of 5 or higher grades are used to tell a magnet s strength but only in comparison to magnets made of the same material. Whereas ceramic is used in metal as it sounds tight loud and cool. Alnico vii is in some pickups but this is rare.

Alnico is nice and warm and great for blues. The result is a slightly hotter sounding pickup with more treble response. Alnico vs ceramic pickups if you re into guitar or bass guitar pickups and mods you probably hear the words alnico and ceramic a lot call us today. So we often hear.

To crown a winner in our alnico vs ceramic magnets shootout we would need a way to accurately compare the two which is not an easy task. There is a lot of everything with alnico viii pickups and they are not for the feint of heart. Technically more efficient ceramic magnets took over in a wide variety of commercial applications starting in the 1960s but ceramic magnet guitar pickups were found to have a generally harsher more brittle sound with sharper peaks than their alnico predecessors.