Here’s a customization test case for a bass guitar. I needed to know if it is indeed feasible to provide custom pickups for users with very specific needs.
We do not have a bass guitar pickup (yet), although I’ve had inquiries every now and then. And so, a bass pickup makes sense! The XR has just the right ingredients to make a good bass pickup with its full 20-20 bandwidth. My initial hesitation was headroom. The prototype preamp design was limited to 5v with rail-to-rail Op Amps. We’ve since increased the preamp supply to 9v this time using discrete transistors. So that issue is solved.
My observation is that bass players are typically more forward thinking than us guitar players. In general, guitar players are still stuck in 50s(!) with our relic’d guitars and all that lo-fi accidents we embrace as mojo. Thankfully, that is changing and I see more guitar players now moving forward into the future; especially in the Extended Range Guitar community.