Electrical Engineers working for guitar companies?

[D4V1D]

I'm a senior in high school, and currently applying to colleges in hopes to major in engineering. There are two main engineering disciplines that interest me: Electrical and Aerospace.
Honestly though, one thing I'd love to do with Electrical Engineering is to work for a guitar related company, designing things like pickups, amplifiers, effects pedals, etc.
However, I don't really know how many jobs like these are even available in the EE world. Would this be a realistic goal at all? It would combine multiple interests of mine, and sounds just amazing for that very reason. However, I don't want to get my hopes up if it's extremely unlikely. Either way, I will probably dabble into electronics as a hobby.
Thanks!

 

[edgepflow]

Get your degree in EE with the goal of working for a guitar manufacturing company.

Then if you are unable to find this opening, you will have many other career choices.

And you can design guitar equipment as a hobby and maybe make a profit too.

 

[yungman]

I started out as a guitarist working on amps with switching channel even before Mesa Boogie truly came out with a true switching channel ( Mark I is not a channel switching). That was how I started out in EE. I was so into electronics I quit music all together. I only played with the Chinese TV band and backed up some famous singers from Hong Kong and Taiwan in the early 80s for the fun of it before I really hung up my guitar all together until lately.

I design my own amp and now I am actually working on eliminating noise of single coil strat pups unlike the normal stacked coil design and I am in the process of design and test to see what can I come up with. So I actually have some experience in this. Difference is I am establish, I don't need to work and I can afford to waste my time.

There is NO MONEY in this field. I even met up with an up and coming pickup designer David Allen lately and he is interested in my design. But people are so poor and so cheap in this field. You manufacture an amp in such a low volume and you can only sell about $1500 per amp. How can you make money in this selling 50 amps or 1000 pickups a year? If there is money, I would have gone back in, I got so many idea in designing musical instruments. Most people in this field really don't know much about electronics and resort to just copy one another.

If you have the passion with EE, get a real job and do it on the side. Don't think of this as a career as there are so few on these company around and nobody except the big ones like Fender, Gibson etc. Are making good money. All the small boutique company are just barely working out from their garage on the side hopping to break out one day. There are too many tinkers in this field and everyone try to modify an amp. I even know people worked in a half way popular guitar brand called "Modulus" and I visited the company few years ago in Marine County, they are not doing well and laying off people. This is a company with big star endorsement already.

Just study for you interest, get a job and worry about it later.

BTW, you can find me in Strat Talk Forums under user name Alan0354. This and that forum are my most frequent forums.