Various Pick-up Magnet materials

[Lfalex v1.1]

I'm just curious as to the benefits of specific Magnet materials in Pick-ups.
I've encountered
AlNiCo (but there's a III and a V and stuff)
Ceramic
Samarium Cobalt (In Fenders. Also used in Headphones)
Neodymium (In the MM Bongo. Also used in Headphones and all these lightweight "neo" driver'd cabinets)

Neodymium is of particular interest. I know it can be fashioned into extremely strong magnets with a good degree of permanence, but why the pick-up applicaton? If it's that strong, it could cause intonation issures and damping problems, so the mass would be necessarily reduced. But smaller. lighter magnets are of little relevance in the context of pick-ups. So Why use it?

I have tried a Bongo, and it was stonking!

If it's that good, why can I find no aftermarket Neo pick-ups?! SD, DiMarzio, Bartolini, Delano? Nope.

Tell me more!

[stevie]

[quote name='Lfalex v1.1' post='388230' date='Jan 22 2009, 09:30 AM']If it's that good, why can I find no aftermarket Neo pick-ups?! SD, DiMarzio, Bartolini, Delano? Nope.[/quote]

I'd be interested in an informed answer to this question, too. Q-tuner makes neo pickups, by the way.

The main benefit of neodymium is its weight/strength ratio. That's hardly an issue with pickups, as standard magnet types provide more than enough magnetic flux to do the job. Personally, I wonder why pickup makers are still using alnico at all. Is it the 'vintage' thing or do they also have a practical benefit?

[alexclaber]

I'm no expert on pickups but I believe there are parameters that describe the constancy of any magnetic field and its propensity to be distorted by external forces. From what I remember AlNiCo magnets are the most prone to field deformation whilst neo magnets have a more strongly fixed field strength and shape. Whether this makes any audible difference I have no idea!

Alex

[EBS_freak]

[quote name='stevie' post='388314' date='Jan 22 2009, 10:56 AM']I'd be interested in an informed answer to this question, too. Q-tuner makes neo pickups, by the way.

The main benefit of neodymium is its weight/strength ratio. That's hardly an issue with pickups, as standard magnet types provide more than enough magnetic flux to do the job. Personally, I wonder why pickup makers are still using alnico at all. Is it the 'vintage' thing or do they also have a practical benefit?[/quote]

Exactly. It's all marketing BS. One of neo's selling points is the reduction of eddy currents similarly, Bill Lawrence, god father of SCN pickups has this written about them -

Where in the past we’d been adamant about sticking to Fender’s traditional materials, this time we deferred to Bill’s desire to test a variety of materials, some of which had never been used in conventional pickup design. The name of this series itself speaks to the result of his testing—SCN stands for Samarium Cobalt Noiseless. The magnetic force is from miniature samarium cobalt magnets which, in conjunction with the moderator bars, deliver a wider, softer magnetic field. The pole pieces and moderator bars are made from special alloys to avoid inductance leakage and circular currents, as well as for the control of the eddy current effect. The copper wire is precision made to custom specifications.

- of course, everbody is keen to avoid leakage and eddy currents... but nobody is really sure if these are contributing factors to a great sound. I mean, take some of the greatest guitar tones of all time. Most of the time they will be played on bog standard pickups where the player doesn't even care what pickups are in there.

One thing that is a common misconception about pickups is that powerful magnets are a good basis on which to build pickups... and do the debate and BS starts.

Potting, scatter winding, number of turns, type of wire, thickness of wire, length of wire, introduction of a cap into the turns (yeah, nice one Seymour), magnet type, magnet orientation, magnet strength... down to "this pickup is the best because it was wound by Doris".

The reality is, even precision made pickups made to the exact same spec, can have massively different outputs and sounds. It's a bit of a lottery out there... and even more so with all the BS surrounding it.

Too many manufacturers are jumping on the handwound pickup BS wagon. The best thing to do is audition the manufacturers pickups in as many situations as you can and hope you ultimately end up with a set that pleases you.

My take on the situation is get a set of pickups that are as flat as response as possible and let a circuit do the work. Overwind a pickup, yeah, you'll get more volume, but you'll get a mid range hump with reduced top end response. Best thing is, forget about the marketing BS let your ears do the deciding.

So back to the original question - If it's that good, why can I find no aftermarket Neo pick-ups?! SD, DiMarzio, Bartolini, Delano? Nope.

Because they haven't bought into the marketing BS. They have done their research and probably found that nobody gives a crap about what magnets are in a pickup. They just want them to sound great.

Edited January 22, 2009 by EBS_freak

[alexclaber]

[quote name='EBS_freak' post='388368' date='Jan 22 2009, 11:46 AM']The reality is, even precision made pickups made to the exact same spec, can have massively different outputs and sounds.[/quote]

I really do not believe this at all. If you make a pickup to close enough tolerances then all examples will sound so similar as it be indistinguishable.

[quote name='EBS_freak' post='388368' date='Jan 22 2009, 11:46 AM']My take on the situation is get a set of pickups that are as flat as response as possible and let a circuit do the work.[/quote]

I agree on the first point but what work should the circuit be doing?

Alex

[synaesthesia]

[quote]The reality is, even precision made pickups made to the exact same spec, can have massively different outputs and sounds.[/quote]

[quote name='alexclaber' post='388551' date='Jan 22 2009, 02:23 PM']I really do not believe this at all. If you make a pickup to close enough tolerances then all examples will sound so similar as it be indistinguishable.[/quote]

It depends on the nature of the pickup design whether there will be a resultant variance. Assuming electrical and magnetic equivalence - if the winding method, tension, overlap of the coil is mechanically consistent then you might have small tolerances to be predictable about it. Some designs, e.g. Rickenbacker scatterwound pickups, have an inherent design that builds in some chance and variance despite most of the parameters of the winding, and the winding process itself being mechanically controlled. Hand winding pickups, or hand feeding a spool to the bobbin results in enough variance to make some pickups special and some duds.

If you want to bone up on pickups, search for Erno Zwaan's " animal magnetism", it's fairly difficult to get now but you can find it.
Zwaan later got a grant from Philips and developed the Q tuner range of pickups.

[Mr. Foxen]

The money for pickups seems to be in the 'trad tone' because peolpe want to ditch the cheap ceramics in their guitars and get oldschool alnico ones. This gives the perception that alnico sounds 'warmer' and less 'harsh', but its more an issue of how well designed and made the pickups are. And the reasonable good designs of the EMG passives being totally whored out (Johnson EMG springs to mind), along with the 'Duncan designed' means that cheap pickups are actually quite good. I went from generic pickups to some pretty fancy Kent Armstrongs and there was a difference, but not a huge one. Breaking new ground in the pickup world is difficult, guitars have a particular sized hole in them, so its going to be pretty specialist before you can change things that much. Those super light aluminium jobs seem interesting, Lace pickups (?), no idea how they work, they seem different, but fit into a normal sized routing.

Someone is going to come along with the pickup equivalent to Thiel-Small parameters to predict how pickups sound, and everyone is going to be a bit annoyed but not really be able to argue with them except for going 'but my ears'.

'I don't like ceramic pickups, they sound harsh and choke my strings'

'No, you are wrong, harshness is caused by eddies in the emotive capacitance of a given magnestic coupling, therefore both ceramic and alnico can suffer from it, the harshness you hear is a result of the foontling turlingdrome aspect of the coil enamel, a thicker enamel associated with mass produced eastern ceramic magnets causing a hump in the 15-18k region which you hear as harshness.'

Or something.

[octavedoctor]

Whoo!

My brain hurts now...



GFS do Neodymium pickups, but I don't know if they do them for bass.

I heard some guitar neodymiums and they sounded sh*te.

Who says you don't want leakage and eddy currents anyway? Like the different hysteresis characteristics of various core materials (which is bound to have an effect on the cancelation spectrum in the higher harmonic range), these may be what makes the difference between a good and a bad sounding pickup.

It's all subjective anyway.

Fishman Rare Earths and Neo-D use neodynium and they sound good because the more diffuse and wider footprint of the flux picks up a wider range of harmonics, increasing the acoustic presence. You don't necessarily want that for an electric guitar...