• Ernie Ball
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  • Sterling by MusicMan

weemac

Member
Joined
Sep 2, 2011
Messages
16
Location
Stralia
Hi All!
I joined a week and a bit ago.
I just got a white SUB4 of the bay for a respectable price as I was after a well made functional bass that would allow me to sound like....well, me.
I have never owned a Musicman before but had played a few and knew that they were up to the job. (I come from more of a... Rickish background)

This bass has clearly been used (perhaps abused a bit) and survived, it has train tracks for strings and the neck has held up (I'll set it up tommorow with some fresh, more gentle strings) and the nasty scratchplate lasted about 15 minutes, the look of it is kind of dieselpunk but it felt horrible under my nails, like a blackboard...

It is fairly light and has a good resonant unplugged tone, and plugged in it sounded... well, like a Stingray!

It could become a favorite....

I have noticed that the treble is a bit hissy when dimed (which I'll rarely do) and there is a hands off buzz..... My amps are usually quiet and I put a fresh battery in it. Does this happen from time to time? (I have found some instances using the search) Is there any particular things I should check?

I actually like the finish on the body, it reminds me of the old Ovation solids. And I see the wisdom of putting a hard shell on a softer timber, one to protect it and I have heard a few instruments that sounded better that way. The black on the neck does not bother me, it reminds me of my old Steinberger L2.

I doubt I'll ever own a real Stingray, but I find it fantastic that EB chose to put the most desirable features on an economy model (2 band eq and Alnico pickup and some of the other early features) What other company does that? They usually hold back their best cards for the elite models!

Anyhow thanks for having me, and I'll be checking in frequently!

emac.
 

Ian Perge

Active member
Joined
May 28, 2008
Messages
29
Location
Evansville, IN
I just wrote up a long post in the "Why Were The SUBs Discontinued?" thread, but the short version is that as a player whose "Main Players" aren't EBMM but realize as a working Bassist that it's a classic tone worth having in one's arsenal, my SUB Sterling & SUB 5 give me over 90% of "The Music Man Sound" at a massively low percentage of the price of a New, SLO-made StingRay or Sterling & the some might consider the "negatives" of the line (the spray-on finish and painted neck, slab body so many bashed but ironically now *love* on their "Classic" line :rolleyes:) are what give me a huge "Chunk o" Invincibility" when playing in the Bad Part of the Wrong Side of town! :D

Addendum:

And I see the wisdom of putting a hard shell on a softer timber, one to protect it and I have heard a few instruments that sounded better that way. The black on the neck does not bother me, it reminds me of my old Steinberger L2.

Actually, from everything I've read & heard about the SUBs the "Truck Bedliner" finish over the Poplar body is not from the same school as the upper-end Parker Flys, which do use extremely soft & normally unusable tone woods such as Pine and others by coating them with an carbon fibre/glass/epoxy composite. Typically Poplar is rated on guitar & wood supplier sites as the "Eastern Version of Alder", sharing a great deal of its tonality but not being "pretty" enough for transparent finishes (Warmoth's description) I recall from a "Bass Player" article that up until the late '90s Music Man used equal parts Poplar, Alder & Ash on their Basses with the former two used on non-transparent & sparkle finishes - after that period transparent finishes became much more the norm and were made of Ash with Alder for solids. The reason the spray-on bedliner finish was used AFAIK was that it needed no buffing to a gloss and therefore saved a huge amount of Production Time, much like the other "SUB" features such as the painted neck (no Gun Oil & Wax finish applied in layered and buffed) and the Slab body (far less time in CNC and sanding afterwards.) Basically Poplar was used because sounded very close to Alder, it was cheaper & didn't need to be pretty when under a sprayed-on finish, as this picture of unfinished SUB 5 bodies show: you can see the vast difference in shading in the two-piece bodies down the stack...

T6.jpg
 
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Holdsg

Well-known member
Joined
Mar 15, 2010
Messages
1,320
Location
Alta Loma, CA
that's almost a yin-yang kind of bass in that pic of yours Ian. Whilst I had my SUB, I always wondered what lurked under that finish. I remember someone here posted a refin, and that one didn't look to bad all nekked.
 

weemac

Member
Joined
Sep 2, 2011
Messages
16
Location
Stralia
Ok Here is a couple of quick pix:

I gave a bass a good clean and setup with new strings. Some attention to the electronics seemed to resolve the hands off buzz I was getting..
I made an acrylic scratchplate for now... It feels (and looks) alot better.
Last night I had my brother play it (we did not plug it in) and he commented on how alive it felt. The amount of presence fresh strings adds to it is almost obscene.
If I was to classify the sound.... A P bass is yer bog stock 350 chev, A Rickenbacker is a classic racing straight 6 with three weber carburettors and the Sub is like a Rover 3500 V8 that someone stuck an old school turbo setup on... They will all perform about the same, but they do it in such different ways.

It sits well on the strap and you could play it all night with no issues..

Love it!

emac.
 

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