The 1987 MusicMan StingRay: This Bass Is Just Alive

This bass came to me during one of the hardest periods of my life.

It was during the war. Ukraine, 2022. Things were falling apart on every level — not just for the country, but for me personally. Money was tight in a way I hadn’t experienced in years. At some point I had to make a choice: sell my Fender Marcus Miller Jazz Bass or not pay rent. I sold it. That was a bass I loved and had played for a long time, and letting it go hurt.

A friend of mine had three basses sitting in his apartment and wasn’t playing much at that point. He knew what was going on with me. He just said: take the Stingray, use it as long as you need. No conditions. Just take it.

The 1987 MusicMan StingRay.

I’d played Stingrays before but never had one as my main instrument for an extended period. Within the first week I understood why so many of the bassists I grew up listening to built their entire sound around this instrument. It doesn’t fight you. It doesn’t demand anything special from your technique or your rig. You plug it in and it sounds like itself — defined, punchy, alive.

Music Man as a company was started in the early 70s by former associates of Leo Fender. The StingRay debuted in 1976 and was the first mass-production bass with an active onboard preamp. That was a genuine revolution. Before the StingRay, active electronics meant expensive custom work. Suddenly a working musician could have that clarity and output control in a standard production instrument.

The 1987 model sits in a specific window of production that collectors and working players both pay attention to. Ernie Ball had acquired the brand in 1984 and the early years of their stewardship are considered by many to be the peak — the preamp has a slightly different character compared to later versions, the pickup winds are a little different, the neck feel is specific to that era. Whether it’s objectively better than a modern Stingray is debatable. But there is something about the 87 that feels finished. Complete.

I used it for everything during that period. R&B sessions, live gigs, YouTube videos. Slap, fingerstyle, anything the job required. Every time I sat down with it I found the groove faster than I expected. The bass does half the work for you — the midrange sits in the mix without EQ, the attack is immediate, the note definition is clean even at high volume.

Playing it felt like a conversation with players from a different era. When I was working on those Solar Records grooves — The Whispers, Shalamar, the whole catalog I’ve been breaking down on this channel — there was this feeling that this instrument was made for exactly that music. Like one of the session players from those sessions had somehow passed the bass forward through time and it ended up in my hands in a Kyiv apartment during a war.

That’s a strange thing to write. But that’s genuinely what it felt like.

The friend who lent it to me still has it. I gave it back when things stabilized. But those months with the Stingray left a mark on how I think about tone, about groove, about what a bass actually needs to do. I’ve been chasing that feeling in a lot of the music I’ve made since.

If you play R&B or funk and you’ve never had a vintage Stingray in your hands for more than a few minutes — find a way to spend a week with one. Not just to try it. To live with it. It changes your relationship with the instrument.

The Stingray’s active electronics are a big part of why it sits in a mix the way it does. The three-band EQ gives you real surgical control — not the subtle flavoring of passive tone controls, but actual frequency shaping. Cut the low-mid slightly and you get a tighter, more percussive sound. Boost the treble and the slap bark comes forward in a way that cuts through almost anything. Once you understand those three bands and what each one does to the character of the bass, you stop fighting your amp and start working with it.

There is a reason the 1987 production year specifically is talked about by players who know the instrument’s history. Ernie Ball had acquired Music Man in 1984 and spent the following years stabilizing and improving production. By 1987 they had the formula right. The pickups were consistent, the hardware was reliable, the neck construction was stable. That year represents a confident instrument built by people who understood what they were making.