Ibanez Modern Custom humbuckers…

[Bowtomecha]

I tried a new Ibanez az standard model today. Nice specs to it and played and sounded great. I curious if anybody knows if the pickups are loosely based on any particular model. I know that the Hyperion humbuckers are based quite a bit on Duncan sentient and Pegasus humbuckers and the Fusion Edge are similar in design to the dimarzio titans. I figure that Ibanez might have went with this approach again. Come to think of it, their pickups from decades ago almost always had something of a dimarzio analogue. The modern custom humbuckers have slugs and fillister screw poles and are alnico 5. Not too hot and worked especially well with the controls with less of that abrupt ramping of the volume.

 

[Masta' C]

I think it's a bit of a misconception that Ibanez-made pickups typically had a "DiMarzio analogue".

This seemed to come about because people didn't understand which pickups were actually made BY DiMarzio and which weren't. For example, the Super 58/70 stuff, the Quantums, the V-series, the Infinity series, etc. were all designs unique to Ibanez and made in Asia by various OEM manufacturers, like Artec and Cort. But I've seen thousands of people suggest each of these was made by DiMarzio at some point over the years.

In the modern context, pickups like the Hyperion set actually ARE made by S.D. and the Fusion Edge stuff was indeed produced by DiMarzio to Ibanez' own specs.

As for the "Modern Custom" set, those are definitely going to be Asian-made pickups at that price point, but it's hard to know if they were modeled after any specific, existing designs.

To be fair, many OEM pickups made today share similar specs to various SD and DiMarzio designs without being intentional copies. The "sweet spots" for most wind and magnet combinations is pretty well hashed out at this point, so there's bound to be some overlap when looking at basic resistance and magnet specs, etc.