Introduced in 1987, the StingRay 5 (SR5) was the first all-new Music Man bass designed and built in San Luis Obispo by the Ernie Ball team. The five-string's styling is based on the classic look of the Silhouette guitar. Advanced active electronics combine the best of the four-string StingRay along with innovations from Music Man designers, such as a ceramic humbucking pickup with a hum-cancelling "phantom" coil for noise reduction and three-way pickup selector for series and parallel combinations. The tuners are placed in a 4+1 configuration and the six-bolt on maple neck has a rosewood or maple fingerboard with 22 high-profile wide frets. The StingRay 5 is also available with an optional piezo bridge pickup, and as a lined or unlined fretless with a pao ferro fingerboard.
In 2005, the StingRay 5 was updated with two humbuckers or a bridge humbucker paired with a neck single coil pickup and a five-way pickup switching system. The single humbucker model continues to be in production as well.
In 2006, Music Man released a Limited Edition StingRay 5 featuring a five-bolt neck plate, no pickguard, string-through body, and an ebony fingerboard. The same year, MusicMan started using compensated nuts on all their bass and guitar models except the Classic series, after having used them for the Music Man Bongo since 2003.
In February 2008, Ernie Ball switched back to alnico pickups for their Sting Ray 5s, after having used ceramic pickups for this model since 1991. The alnico pickups, which are also found in their four-string counterparts, give the instrument a sound more like a StingRay 4.
Famous quotes containing the words music, man, sting and/or ray:
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All this stuff you heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans, traditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle.... Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost—and will never lose—a war, because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.”
—Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939)
“No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
My oldest force is good as new,
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)