Violin pickups - Are cheap ones any good?

DartmoorHedgehog

My 10yo daughter plays the violin (and is not at all bad at it).  She's got an exam coming up and is getting generally pissed off with practising, as we all do (I know I did when I had formal exams to take).  I don't want her to lose interest in playing because she's really getting pretty good at it, so I thought it might be fun to get her a pickup to play with after the exam is out of the way - silly effects are always inspiring.

Anyway, it's only going to be a bit of fun, so the cheap microphone-type pickups look tempting.  Will one of those be good enough for mucking about with a few effects at home, or are they nasty sounding?  I'm not after a perfect amplified classical violin sound, as the aim of this is to play with effects anyway.  Any tips would be most welcome - I'd prefer easily removable and obviously as inexpensive as possible for now.

DartmoorHedgehog

Quick update on this.  I bought a cheap Cherub clip-on pickup - they seemed to get favourable reviews.

Had a first play with it last night and it's really not bad at all.  Just clip it to the f-hole, plug into my pedal board and off we went, without needing a separate preamp.  Possibly the tone could be improved with a preamp, but it's actually perfectly acceptable for home amusement as it is.  Overdrive sounds pretty terrible, but she played around for over an hour with chorus, delay, wah and reverb, making some interesting (and often very nice) sounds, and most importantly having fun with music again.

It's not the strongest looking bit of kit, and the (fixed) cable is very thin, but for a fiver I'm really quite pleasantly surprised with the sound.  And nothing gets left on the violin when not using the pickup.  So overall a big success I'd say

Gassage

I find them a bit of a fiddle.