I have desinged a few, there is one particularly effective yet simple way to achive, the amplification you desire, but the circuit is a bit more complex. 1 instead of using a solar cell use a IR phototransistor, your sensor and pre-amplification is solved with this one little device. Second you will need to chain 6 of these photo transistors, into a 6 channel mixer, with a 50-60hz notch filter. You will hear a horrible buzzing sound if you don't use the notch filter. With a 9v batter you can acheve awesome gain, with no distortion. The talk of using CCD's are just rediculus. Most people don't realize that the string modulates the light's waveform, that is what causes the modulation in the sensor. Angle smangles they don't matter since the light will be modulated, and no matter what path it takes to the photosensor it will still be modulated. I have built this pickup for my experimental guitar, thinking I had a patentable Idea, but by the time I was old enought to file for a patent I found out that idea has been out there for 28 years before my implementation of it. However for experimenting and fun that is the way you would go about building a optical pickup, not rocket science, but just plain old good sound.
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