The Music Man Sterling is a model of bass guitar designed by the Music Man company. It was named after Sterling Ball, son of Ernie Ball, the founder of the parent company.
This bass weighs nine pounds, sporting a solid body made from selected hardwoods and finished in high-gloss polyester. The bridge is the traditional Music Man chrome plated, hardened steel bridge plate with stainless steel saddles and an optional piezo feature for acoustic upright-like tones. The standard pickguard colour is either black or white. The Sterling uses a long, 34"-scale length with a maple neck featuring rosewood or maple fingerboard (pau ferro for the fretless variant). Like the other Music Man basses, the Sterling comes with Schaller tuners. The truss rod is adjustable and the neck is bolt-on type with an asymmetrical five-bolt neck plate. The electronics are magnetically shielded and a three-way switch is used for coil selection as well as a three-band active EQ with separate tone controls for treble, middle, and bass.
The Sterling differs from the famous Music Man StingRay 4-string bass in that it is lighter, smaller, has a different preamp, uses the "phantom coil" pickup technology and features a thinner neck with 22 frets than 21 actually found on the StingRay. It won 'Most Innovative Bass of 1993" in Musician Magazine. Notable users are Colin Greenwood of Radiohead, Dave LaRue (of the Steve Morse Band, The Dixie Dregs, and Bruce Hornsby), Johnny Christ of Avenged Sevenfold, Dougie Poynter of McFly, which has light up led inlays, Andy Stickel of 7 Blue Skies and Roger Manganelli of Less Than Jake, Ado Flowers of Ebony Brown and H'Edin Duranovic of Fall of Reach.
The Sterling was created as a four-string version of the highly popular StingRay 5, which also uses ceramic magnet pickups and a different preamp than the StingRay's alnico magnet pickups. New pickup configurations and five-way pickup switching debuted in 2005. Music Man has introduced a five-string version using the same body and pickguard styling as the original four-string since January 22, 2008.
Famous quotes containing the words music, man and/or sterling:
“While the music is performed, the cameras linger savagely over the faces of the audience. What a bottomless chasm of vacuity they reveal! Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures . . .”
—Paul Johnson (b. 1928)
“Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
An old kind man brave in his burning pride.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Family is the first school for young children, and parents are powerful models.”
—Alice Sterling Honig (20th century)