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Back then, alnico was the high-tech material of the age, and Fender continued to use it through the 1950s and 1960s.
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Sure enough, Fender started making pickups with alnico magnets as early as the late 1940s. And that they did - alnico-magnet pickups were found to produce a smooth, warm and highly musical tone.
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At its simplest, an electric guitar pickup consists of a permanent magnet wrapped in coils of wire, so it stands to reason that high-quality magnets such as those containing alnico would make for high-quality guitar pickups. Given their strength and durability, alnico alloys were consequently adopted for widespread consumer applications in which magnets with such properties were especially useful, such as electric motors, sensors, loudspeakers, etc.Īnd electric guitar pickups. In a nutshell then, alnico alloys make for very strong, long-lasting magnets. In fact, before the development of rare earth “super” magnets (i.e., neodymium and samarium-cobalt) in the 1970s and 1980s, alnico magnets were the strongest magnets you could get, capable of producing strength at their poles as high as 3,000 times the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field. Iron alloys that contain alnico display a high resistance to heat and to loss of magnetism, and are hence used to make strong and durable permanent magnets. Cobalt was soon found to be a useful addition to the mix, as cobalt alloys are highly corrosion-resistant. In the early 1930s in Japan, alloys of iron, nickel and aluminum were found to display twice the strength of the best steel magnets of the time. Second, let’s explain what’s special about alnico. What does that mean? What are alnico pickups and what do they do that non-alnico pickups don’t?įirst, let’s explain the word itself. Alnico is an acronym comprising the first two letters of three different metallic elements: aluminum, nickel and cobalt. I only went to the Baggs M-1 originally because the rare earth single coil I was so fond of sonically was prone to picking up hum.and my main bread and butter gig is in a venue with hideously noisy mains and dimmer lights.īut now I wouldn't be without the M-1, it has great output, more "air" than either a rare earth or a UST and picks up body percussion without screaming feedback problems.When guitar shopping at a retail outlet or online, you’re bound to run across mention of alnico pickups. The Blend.well I found the mic useless,boomy and very prone to feedback when dialled in at any meaningful level, and it had less output overall than the humbucker model.I sent TWO of them back thinking they were broken, only to find that that was the output level.weak as American beer (sorry 'mericans!). I found that with the 'bucker it did need some boosting when going into a PA unbalanced input, or it needed the channel turning up too much in comparison with folks Fishman USTs. They are lovely sounding, not truly acoustic sounding, but very "round" and clear, I liked the tone of the single best.I actually found it warmer than the humbucker.
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Personally I found the single coil had lots more output than the humbucker and the blend, I have owned and gigged all three, and still use the single coil in my Gibson, on a dual output with an internal mic.