Music Man sound and pickups

I have a 2-band eq, just like my 70's one. But the sound is very different, like more aggressive highs at a lower frequency that the old one. I guess around 6k instead of 9k or even higher. Also the lows are not as focussed as the old one was.

 

Maybe you have an issue with your electronics as the 2 band circuit is exactly the same today as it was with your 1978-1979 (only the shape of the circuit board has changed). Have you looked under the control plate. I can email you the schematics so you can check the wiring.

 

The pre-amp, and pickup in the 1978 / 1979 Stingray are identical to every 2 band Stingray made between 1980, and 2017 (other than some changes to the shape of the circuit board, and the length of the legs on the 3 pots), and those used in the Stingray Classic to this day.

The only change made to the pre-amp in 1979 was that when the relationship between Music Man, and CLF soured, and all production moved out of the CLF factory, they stopped dolloping black epoxy resin on the circuit boards, to stop people stealing the circuit design (the Stingray Classic does include the black epoxy, as an added detail).

The 1976 Stingray had longer pole pieces in the pickup, and a slightly different pre-amp circuit.

In 1977 the pickup poles were shortened (it then stayed the same pickup until the 2018 Stingray Special), and the pre-amp circuit was tweaked - whether that was to compensate for the shorter pole pieces, or accommodate new components of the same value, I don't know.

In 1978 the pre-amp had another tweak - apparently just a change of components of the same electrical values.

In 1979 they stopped covering the pre-amp in black epoxy.


Regarding using old recordings as a reference :

I was recently listening back to some recordings from the early 90's, and loving the tone of my Stingray - totally different from the tone I have today, with the exact same instrument.

The thing is, I was using completely different strings, different plectrums, different recording chain, to a completely different medium (tape).

Nowadays everything is so pristine, it's hard to make a fair comparison : bright and clean Vs dark and driven - it sounds like a completely different instrument.

 

A schematic would be nice! I thought there was a difference between the 'classic' Stingrays and the later Ernie Ball-ones. So my 2-band bass is just the same as the one I had? That is hard to believe sound wise... So there might be something wrong inside.

 

Can you PM me your email address

 

Music Man sound and pickups #508

 

I was aware of the shorter magnets, but in what way was the preamp changed?

A few weeks ago I rewired and repaired an old epoxied stingray preamp from the 70's. I also took some measurements of the original pickup.

For the technically minded, the pickup was wound to 1.9k, had almost exactly 1H of inductance and 250p of parasitic capacitance. This gave it a resonant frequency of 10.1khz. The nominal input impedance of the preamp was approximately 100k (at 1khz).

 

I don't believe it was a change to the voicing / sonics of the pre-amp (as I said earlier, I don't know if the shorter pole pieces necessitated a slight modification to the preamp, to compensate. Or if it was simply a few changes of components of the same values), as there's no clear demarcation between those with the 1st generation pickup & preamp, consistently sounding any different from those with the 2nd generation.

As mentioned before, there is variation between all pre-Ernie Ball Stingrays, due to the inconsistent way the pickups were hand wound - so it's pretty random, until EB took over and standardised machine winding, based on an average of the best sounding pre-EB Stingrays.

As far as I'm aware, the changes to each generation of the preamp have been simply changes of a couple of components used - perhaps due to availability / cost / convenience of layout etc (as mentioned, since EB took over, the shape of the circuit board had changed a few times, and the length of the legs on the pots has determined how it is soldered, but the circuit values haven't changed).

I don't know anyone who has been prepared to risk destroying an epoxy coated preamp, to see exactly what's underneath each generation - but if you compare the different revisions, the wires are attached in slightly different places, or are different colours / sequences...

 

Most likely this I'd think.

Yeah I doubt the modern ones would use tantalum caps, carbon comp resistors, etc etc. But they still use that same IC. I seem to remember seeing a slightly different value for the treble cut cap when I serviced a modern stingray a while back. IIRC, it was a 2n2 instead of a 1n8 cap. But the difference would be barely audible I'd think. I'm also pretty sure the output cap was 10uF instead of 1uF. But again, that difference would be marginal, and only if you were driving a very low load impedance.

The other two differences in the modern ones that I've seen are the reverse polarity protection diode, (I mention this in the video), and the output resistor (which I added but forgot to mention). The diode will reduce the voltage by about 0.6V and therefore the headroom and I guess ultimate battery life. But again this has no real audible effect. IME headroom is not really something that 2-band stingray players really complain about very often. As for the output resistor, it's simply a 1k resistor between the volume pot and the jack. This is pretty much standard practice for opamp audio circuits that feed a capacatitve load (your guitar cable). Again, this has no audible effect.

 

Shouldn't be too hard to figure out in the long run (if the data isn't already available somewhere).

The 1978 preamp is identical to the 1979, except that they stopped covering the preamp in black epoxy in '79.

When Ernie Ball took over in 1984, they measured an average set of values for the pickup, based on multiple Stingrays produced between 1976, and 1984 - and switched from hand winding, to consistent / standardised machine winding.

But that's just the pickup - the preamp itself never changed (other than the aforementioned), as it wasn't prone to the deviations that the pickup was.

There are tons of EBMM 2 band EQ Stingrays out there, so you're bound to encounter more of them, to get more data.

The Stingray Classic is currently in production, and has the exact same EB preamp - and seeing as it also includes the black epoxy coating, you can measure if superstition has any quantifiable effect on sound quality.




Really nice work in the video, by the way.

 

Ha ha. That's great. I wonder if these have carbon comp resistors and tantalum caps etc etc, or if they just put goop on a modern circuit...

Cheers mate. Thanks for the kind words.

 

It's the regular preamp, with added goop.

I actually can't remember if the "Old Smoothie" (original, or production model) had any variation on the preamp - as far as I recall, the point was that they'd nailed the preamp design by that stage of the prototypes : it was the fact that the pole pieces straddled the strings (like a Jazz bass), that smoothed out the tone - in a way that ultimately wasn't what Leo was going for.

Can't remember if the "Old Smoothie" production model also comes with black epoxy, but like the "Stingray Classic" it's just an affection.


No worries, keep up the good work.

 

There's a ton to unpack in this thread and I might be missing the answer if it was previously posted...

Has anybody done a good comparison of all the AlNiCo pickups with the stock Stingray unit as the baseline? I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at with all the different offerings, especially since I see things like the Duncan being described as dark by one person, bright and honky by somebody else, and totally even by yet another person, but those are in isolation and not compared to the stocker.

 

I'm looking for an Alnico 5 pickup for a 5 string and I see its hard to find. Are there any quality pickups besides Nordstrand and Aguilar? I want each coil wound no more than 4K

 

Nordstrand will do custom winding, just so you know. They are very good with customization.

 

So, I'm gone through the thread some more and if the answer is there I'm just missing it. I'd start another thread about this but every time somebody else does something like that they always just get linked to this thread.

 

I'm very interested in this. I have two Stingrays:

5H and 5HH. I'd like the 5H to become fatter and the 5HH maybe a bit more detailed (hard to say). I guess they both have Alnicos in them. Would these two basses benefit from the BigBladeMan?
When their sound gets torn into a direction where distortion sounds better, then the better

 

OK, so I recorded my SBMM Ray4's pickup swap four ways. This is straight into the interface with no modeling, effects, or post-EQ.

1. Factory stock (ceramic pickup into 500K volume pot into preamp which connected directly to output jack)
2. Stock pickup with (ceramic pickup into preamp into 25K volume pot)
3. Seymour Duncan SMB-4A at the same height as the stock ceramic pickup
4. SMB-4A raised up a bit

Sorry for the garbage playing. I tried to bang this out quickly while my 9 year old needed lunch and my 3.5 year old thought she was the Tasmanian Devil.

 

There is a lot of fret clacking. Is the action real low? I keep the action off the frets on Stingray type basses to get rid of the clacking. The preamp amplifies the clacks

 

Yeah, the action is good and low, and I was playing kinda heavy. I'm still working on my fingerstyle playing technique.