Ceramic Or Alninco Pickups

Unfortunately there is no clear winner in our alnico vs ceramic magnets tug of war.

Ceramic or alninco pickups.

The custom is ceramic the custom 5 is alnico 5 and the custom custom is alnico 2. 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. Ceramic magnets are made from ferrites often iron oxides. Magnetically speaking ceramic magnets produce a stronger field than alnico.

Bad ceramic pickups are bad whereas many players actually prefer high end ceramic pickups to their alnico counterparts. The distortion is ceramic and the jb is alnico 5 but everything else is the same. Yep measuring a pickup s dc resistance will not tell you if the magnets are alnico or ceramic. There are fantastic pickups on the market which utilize ceramic magnets such as the dimarzio titan and the seymour duncan black winter.

If forced into it we might recommend alnico only because ceramic is the magnet of choice in cheap pickups that do sound bad. There are just too many completely subjective variables to make a definitive decision. 4 personally i prefer the alnico single coils for the reasons i listed in 1. But if you want a nice clean tone go alnico 5.

It s like the difference between the stones and the beatles imho. 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. A lot of people automatically say that alnico is superior to ceramic in pickups. The result is a slightly hotter sounding pickup with more treble response.