Sterling by Music Man S.U.B. Sting Ray 4 RRBS Reviews

Cheap sounding bass.

I purchased this bass after selling my real Stingray. I'm more of a P-bass guy and I hardly ever used my Stingray anymore. It was too much money to just be gathering dust.

But then this Ray4 caught my eye. At this price I figured it could be nice to have something with a Stingray-flavour around the studio, even if I don't use it very often.

What a disappointment. It doesn't sound like a real Stringray at all!

I could probably accept that if the Ray4 at least sounded ok on it's own terms. But it doesn't. The highs are extremely harsh. The lows are boomy and undefined. And the mids... well, there's hardly any mids at all. Just a veiled, distant, muddy mess. Very poor sound!

The active preamp even distorted in a very harsh way when digging in. I had to lower the pickup considerably to get a useable sound.

The preamp is really tiny and I'm not sure the routing for preamp/knobs will be large enough for standard Stingray pickup/preamp upgrades.

The neck wasn't all that great either. I mean, it actually felt really nice but there was fret buzz all over the place. No amount of truss rod or bridge adjustments would get rid of it without raising the action just a little too high for my liking. There were some really rusty frets too. No sharp edges though. The neck isn't horrible but certainly not as good as I've come to expect from similarly priced Squiers.

On the positive side the finish was nice and the hardware worked fine. Big plus for truss rod adjustment wheel!

But I really can't recommend this bass. It fails in the single most important area: the sound. It really is the worst sounding bass I've heard in YEARS!

It's a shame because it really is just a fret job and a preamp/pickup replacement away from being a decent instrument. I probably won't bother though, for two reasons:

1) I really just wanted a CHEAP Stingray'ish instrument for my studio. Investing more money into it seems rather pointless. It will easily reach the point where I could have purchased a better instrument to begin with. I'll probably just sell it cheap.

2) I'm not even sure if the routing for preamp/knobs is big enough for the standard Stingray upgrades. And if not... far too much hassle to make it sound ok.

It was worth a shot at this very low price but sadly it turned out to be a waste of time and money for me.