Ceramic Or Alnico Pickups

Magnetically speaking ceramic magnets produce a stronger field than alnico.

Ceramic or alnico pickups.

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. Alnico is nice and warm and great for blues. A lot of people automatically say that alnico is superior to ceramic in pickups. So we often hear.

Whereas ceramic is used in metal as it sounds tight loud and cool. 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. There is a lot of everything with alnico viii pickups and they are not for the feint of heart. Alnico tends to produce a very musical pickup in most.

Alnico vii is in some pickups but this is rare. 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. You often hear that the sound of a pickup is dominated by the choice of magnet used in its construction. Ceramic magnets are made from ferrites often iron oxides.

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. Alnico is a lot more expensive than ceramic. The result is a slightly hotter sounding pickup with more treble response.