[Sigh] This is nothing new. To get a brighter sound, Wayyyyyyy back in the early 1970's some companies sold ceramic magnets to replace the alnico magnets in Gibson humbuckers to get more output and brighter tone. Well, these stronger magnets saturated the coils and only resulted in harshness. Likewise, others experimented with removing the screw poles, which only decreased output, although it did change the tone. Thirty years ago I experimented with cheap Strat-oid pickups that had two little ceramic bars affixed to the six poles, removing one. The tone dulled out. I wired a couple of these, which only had about 5 kohms' worth of wire on them, in series, and the result was passable for a garage band, but did not have good clarity. Before there were RWRP pickups, especially for the middle position of a Strat, a company made a dummy coil that you routed the back of the body and looped it around the pickups. The choke coils that Gibson used in their 345 guitars and EB3 basses are essentially humbucker coils without the string sensing to lower the impedance to get a more clear or at least a different tone. Bill Lawrence Q-filters are the same, to reduce the impedance and clarify the tone. Other dummy coil applications have been mentioned above. Kinman in Australia has taken the stack coil to an extreme level to remove hum and buzz for both bass and guitar.
The point being is that there is nothing new in the world. You just gotta look for it.
