BoringPostcards wrote: ↑Wed Jun 13, 2018 6:06 am
Good score!
These are pretty slick. My uncle has one of these as well as a Sabre II. His StingRay doesn't have the active bits working, but it plays and feels pretty good.
I had some pretty cool instrumental stuff recorded with them, but I had them hosted on a CBC page that got shut down and I lost it all.
Whoah, these actually work with the active electronics bypassed? How did that sound?
Larry Mal wrote: ↑Wed Jun 13, 2018 6:29 am
Stingray basses are great, I sold mine, though. I found it not to be such a great bass for recording, although it played just wonderfully. Like heaven. I'd like another one some day.
This Stingray guitar has me thinking I'd like to get one. We were talking about freshness of design and how in this era the guitar makers still thought that there was room with the electric guitar for technological advancement and more importantly they thought that the market would be receptive to new ideas.
Boy, they were wrong about that second one, and when I look at that Tidepool Jaguar bullshit on the other thread you can really see how lame the guitar market has become, just switching out the few accepted parts that the market will tolerate over and over on accepted body shapes but no real vision with any of it. Good or bad, there's just no real design vision to it.
This thing is unique, and Leo sat down and decided to build a better guitar than he had before from the ground up, using what he had learned over the years. Did he succeed? Is it the best guitar in the world? I guess not, but the motherfucker
tried, which is more than you can say for anyone anymore.
Yeah, that's what appealed to me so much about this. It's not just a 50's or 60's Fender outline with 50's and 60's Fender or Gibson pickups and hardware in a mildly novel permutation. It's
differen't, and it sounds
different, from everything I own. I'm still in the "getting to know it" phase, figuring out how the controls interact and what sounds good. It'll frustrate anyone who's hoping for it to sound like a Les Paul, or a Strat, or a whatever. It can do bright, thin tones, and it can do big, thick tones, and warm, dark ones...it just does that without sounding like one of the half-dozen designs everyone tries to categorize things into.
Almost anytime you see a new design, you end up thinking, "Ah, so they took Les Paul jr electronics, and but it in a Fender-style bolt-on body, but with a Bigsby!"
This thing just makes you think, "So it's vaguely shaped like a strat ate a jaguar, but then you added two more poles per coil to a pair of Stingray pickups, and crammed in an amp's tone stack and bright switch under a giant shielded plate?"
Even now, that would be head-turning. Imagine inventing an entirely new pickup size/shape/design just for a new model of guitar, with a new shape, and a 3-band active EQ. It's 40 years later, and the guitar market would still ask, "
what the fuck is this?"
Even these days, with passive pickups like Joe Bardens, or Wildes (Bill Lawrence), or MFDs from Leo himself - when you get a wide frequency response with extra treble and bass that can easily be subtracted but never truly added into a pickup that lacks them, people just run the tone controls wide open and say, "this is too bright" or "why does this have so much bass?" when things like the PTB circuit Leo designed 4 decades ago can give you full control over them passively and right on your instrument. How would that be undesirable?
I think it probably came down to the boomers first controlling demand (and demanding guitars that sounded like their teenage idols), and then supply (running the companies and producing guitar after guitar that sounded...like their teenage idols).
I've been exploring more and more corners of the pickup world - tri-sonics, Bardens, Wildes, MFDs, sticking Electric XII and 1961 Bass VI pickups on 6-string guitars, this stingray - and finding really cool stuff that sounds
different. It's pretty fun.