Sterling Ball
| Private | |
| Industry | Musical instruments |
| Founded | Fullerton, California, United States (1974) |
| Headquarters | San Luis Obispo, California, United States |
|
Area served
|
Global |
|
Key people
|
CEO Sterling Ball Dudley Gimpel (lead designer) |
| Products |
Electric guitars Bass guitars Guitar amplifiers |
| Subsidiaries | Sterling by Music Man |
| Website | music-man.com |
Music Man is an American guitar and bass guitar manufacturer. It is a division of the Ernie Ball corporation.
The Music Man story began in 1971 when Forrest White and Tom Walker formed a company they would call Tri-Sonix, Inc (often incorrectly referred to as "Tri-Sonic"). Tom Walker approached Leo Fender about financial help in forming Tri-Sonix. White had worked with Leo in the very early days of Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing Company as the plant manager and stayed on after the company was sold to the CBS Corporation, but had grown unhappy with their management. Tom Walker worked as a sales rep at Fender. Because of a 10-year non-compete clause in the 1965 contract that sold the Fender companies to CBS, Leo Fender was a silent partner.
The name of this partnership was changed to Musitek, Inc. by 1973 and in January 1974 the final name, Music Man, appeared. Leo Fender did not like the name Tri-Sonix, so the name evolved under Leo Fender's suggestion to call the new company Music Man. In 1974, the company started producing its first product, an amplifier designed by Leo Fender and Tom Walker called the "Sixty Five". It was a hybrid of tube and solid state technology. The preamps used the then burgeoning solid state "op-amp" integrated circuits embodying traditional Fender preamp time constants and architecture, while the power amps typically featured a Cathode Driven Tube power amp stage, much as were used in the radio broadcast industry in AM Transmitters. There were a few models with a tube phase splitter in them, but for the most part Music Man amplifiers used the faster responding common Grid, Cathode Coupled drive from a solid state front end that players characterized as "loud as hell". The number of designs rapidly increased. 15 of the 28 pages from 1976 catalogue were dedicated to amplification. In 1975, Fender's legal restriction had expired and after a vote of the board he was named the president of Music Man.
However, this wasn't Fender's sole enterprise. He also owned and ran a consulting firm called CLF Research (Clarence Leo Fender) in Fullerton, California. By 1976, it had built a manufacturing facility for musical instruments and was contracted to make Music Man products. In June 1976, production started on guitars and in August basses followed. The 1976 catalogue shows the first offerings; A two pickup guitar called the "StingRay 1" and the StingRay Bass. Both instruments featured bolt on neck designs; the basses featured a distinctive 3+1 tuner arrangement that should help eliminate "dead spots" while the guitars came with a traditional, Fender-style 6-on-a-side tuner array. The StingRay Bass featured a single large hum-bucking pickup (located somewhat toward but not adjacent to the bridge) with a two-band fixed-frequency EQ. A row of string mutes sat on the bridge. Basses were produced in fretted and fretless versions.
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Wikipedia