Musicman StingRay Special 5 HH Burnt Ends (pre-owned)

StingRay Special 5 HH — Burnt Ends, 2023

The StingRay is the bass that put active electronics in working musicians’ hands, and the Special is the version where Ernie Ball went back and rebuilt the whole thing from the inside out. Lighter body contours, a five-bolt sculpted neck joint you can actually play past, stainless frets, a roasted maple neck finished in oil and wax instead of gloss, and neodymium-loaded pickups running on 18 volts. Everything that made a StingRay a StingRay, with the parts that used to be a compromise quietly fixed.

This is the HH — the two-pickup version, with a second humbucker up in the neck position and a five-way blade selector instead of the three-way toggle. That one change turns the StingRay from a one-voice specialist into a bass that will cover a whole set: the classic bridge bark, a fat neck-pickup voice that lands somewhere between a Precision and a good Jazz neck, and the two of them together for the biggest, widest sound in the range.

This one left the factory in San Luis Obispo in December 2023. Burnt Ends is a deep two-tone burst that runs from near-black at the edges to bare amber ash through the middle, with a tortoise shell pickguard and chrome hardware — the finish that makes a Special look like an instrument rather than a paint chip. Rosewood board, 98% mint, and it comes in the original Mono gigbag.

Body, Neck & Woods

The body is ash, and on a StingRay that isn’t a spec-sheet detail — it’s the source of the sound. Ash gives you the fast attack, the hard low-mid bark and the tight, focused note that lets a StingRay cut through a loud band without any help from the amp. Burnt Ends is a translucent finish, so you can see exactly what you’re getting: open, straight grain running the length of the body with the burst pulled in just far enough to frame it. The Special’s rounded body contours also make a real difference against your ribs and forearm compared to the older, squarer StingRay body.

The neck is roasted maple, finished in gunstock oil and hand-rubbed wax rather than gloss. Roasting drives the moisture out of the wood, which makes the neck more stable through temperature and humidity swings and gives it a drier, more immediate response. The oil-and-wax finish is the part you notice first: it feels like bare wood, your hand doesn’t stick to it under stage lights, and it never develops the tacky drag a glossed neck gets. The rosewood fingerboard takes a little of the glassiness off the top end and adds warmth without slowing the attack down — worth having on an HH in particular, where the neck pickup is already doing a lot of the heavy lifting down low.

Twenty-two stainless steel frets sit on an 11-inch radius board — flatter than a vintage Fender, so bends and fast lines don’t choke out, and stainless means they won’t wear the way nickel-silver does. The nut is graphite, which keeps the open strings from binding when you tune. It’s a 34-inch scale with a 44.5 mm nut widening to 69.9 mm at the last fret, so string spacing and setup are entirely standard, and the low B still comes back tight — helped by the five-bolt sculpted joint clamping the neck into the body and letting you get up over the heel without fighting it.

Condition

98% mint. This bass has barely been out of its bag — no fret wear, no buckle rash, no finish checking, and the roasted maple neck still has its factory oil-and-wax feel. Everything on it is original, which matters on a Music Man: both neodymium pickups, the 18-volt preamp, the five-way selector, the bridge and the tuners are all exactly as they left San Luis Obispo.

Electronics all work as they should across the full range of the EQ and in every position of the selector. It comes with the original Mono gigbag, and it’s set up and ready to play. Want closer photos of any detail before you commit? Just ask and we’ll send them over.

Electronics, Sound & Feel

Both pickups are Music Man humbuckers wound around neodymium magnets rather than alnico. Neodymium is a far stronger magnet, so you get more output and a wider frequency response from the same size pickup — the top end opens up, the bottom stays tight, and the whole thing sounds faster and more three-dimensional than a classic StingRay pickup. It’s still unmistakably a StingRay: that hard, nasal midrange bark is right where it’s always been.

The five-way blade is what you’re really buying. Position one is the bridge humbucker on its own — the classic StingRay voice, scooped and punchy, the sound on a thousand records. Position five is the neck humbucker alone, and it’s the revelation for most players coming from a single-pickup Ray: thick, round and centred, close to a Precision with the lid off, and the position where a StingRay finally sits underneath a track instead of on top of it. Position three runs both humbuckers together for the biggest sound in the instrument — huge lows, wide top, the setting for gospel, worship and anything where you need to fill the room. Positions two and four bring in the coil pairings between them, thinner and more vocal, with a touch less output and a clarity that cuts through dense arrangements where a full humbucker would just add mud.

The three-band preamp runs on 18 volts rather than the usual nine, and the extra headroom is audible — you can push the bass and treble a long way before anything gets brittle or farts out on a hard slap. Volume, treble, mid and bass, and the mid control in particular is the one to learn: cut it and you have a slap machine, push it and you’re carving out space in a mix that no amount of amp EQ will find for you. With two pickups feeding it, the EQ has considerably more raw material to work with than on the single-humbucker version.

If you already know you want a StingRay and you want it to be the only bass you carry, the HH is the one to get. You keep the bark, you gain a genuine second instrument in the neck pickup, and the Special’s modern neck, stainless frets and sculpted joint make it far easier to live with than any StingRay 5 that came before it. Buying a mint two-year-old example with the original bag also saves you a serious amount over the same bass new.