I purchased one of these to try on an open-backed tenor banjo. For the price, it's easy to say 'yes' to a trial run. I attached the pickup on the underside of the head under the bridge and ran it through my PreSonus TubePre v2, monitoring on a quality earbud so I could listen to the instrument in my other ear for comparison. The result, after some tinkering, was surprisingly good.As mentioned in reviews for similar products, the pickup comes with a cushioned permanent adhesive pad pre-applied. As I wasn't interested in a permanent attachment, I used a temporary adhesive without exposing the permanent adhesive. This produced an unsatisfactory result, though; the output volume was a bit weak (I applied an extra 15dB of gain vs my final solution), and the bass response dropped off appreciably. At first I attributed this to the 1M-Ohm impedance of the PreSonus not being sufficient to process the signal (some piezo pickups are better with a 10M-Ohm input pre-amp), but after taking the time to scrape off the foam adhesive and applying the pickup more directly to the banjo head, the response was much much better, both in volume and bass response. A larger instrument such as a bass would probably benefit from a 10M-Ohm pre-amp; there was a slight roll-off on the lowest notes of the banjo (G2). Aside from the annoyance if the adhesive, my only complaint is that I'm not too fond of the large red plastic casing surrounding the pickup; a K&K Big Shot at 3/4" is significantly less visible than this beast. I suppose some transducers are even bigger, though...Connectivity to the sound source and a solid pre-amp are key on pickups. With good placement and good adhesion, these not-so-little red gems do a fine job and are a bargain.