Ceramic Or Alninco Pickups

Magnetically speaking ceramic magnets produce a stronger field than alnico.

Ceramic or alninco pickups.

Unfortunately there is no clear winner in our alnico vs ceramic magnets tug of war. The custom is ceramic the custom 5 is alnico 5 and the custom custom is alnico 2. The distortion is ceramic and the jb is alnico 5 but everything else is the same. But if you want a nice clean tone go alnico 5.

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. A lot of people automatically say that alnico is superior to ceramic in pickups. 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.

Ceramic magnets are made from ferrites often iron oxides. Ceramic pickups have more bite wich helps get a crunchy sound even if can t afford a real classy tube amp. 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. Bad ceramic pickups are bad whereas many players actually prefer high end ceramic pickups to their alnico counterparts.

The result is a slightly hotter sounding pickup with more treble response. 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. Recall our article basswood does it suck because the concept is similar.