LeftyBassist.com

According to Jay @ NJ Guitar & Bass Center Music Man has discontinued production of lefty USA basses. Anyone else know anything about this?

Damn. As if they weren't pricey enough on the used market already. I had a sliver of hope that they would offer the 2018 Stingray in the lefty, but they really don't care for our business.

Huge selection of basses were on display at NAMM but not a single lefty.

I got curious about this as I plan to get a Stingray at some point in the future:

http://forums.ernieball.com/ernie-ball- ... 018-a.html

According to comments, MM will still offer the Sterling and Bongo in lefty for 2018.

Can the Bongos possibly be selling better than stingrays?!?

That's my thought too, LOL!!

So I completely fail to see how that decision makes sense from any perspective.

Looking at the bright side, the toilet seat cover bass is not extinct as many of us believed...
And the Stingray may be only taking a break this year.
There are plenty of brand new Stingrays in stores for this year too.
But only time will tell!

Used lefty MM's are one of the easier basses to find though, aren't they?

The Bongo, huh? What did we ever do to them?

From http://blog.music-man.com/news/ernie-ba ... -kick-off/



I'm not holding my breath.

It's beyond me why a company would not offer it's most popular and iconic model left handed, yet continue to offer other models they clearly don't sell, like the Bongo. It's as if they're deliberately setting themselves up for failure so that if and when the time comes for a lefty to inquire about lefties, they can say, "Oh well, we did, but they didn't sell (i.e. it's your fault you didn't buy enough of them), so we don't anymore."

I'm guessing MM will still offer their cheaper Ray 34 models left handed.

Another in a long line of decisions that make you wonder what (if any) qualitative research the gatekeepers in sales and marketing at these companies do to determine what lefty bassists want? Anyone from Fender, Gibson, etc. could spend 30 mins. surfing this board and know 10x more than they do now, but it often seems as if no one thinks it's worth the effort to find out, so decisions are based on counterintuitive logic that "whatever we don’t provide, buyers don’t want". Sales data only gets you so far... how can you accurately assess what buyers want if you don't ask or put options on the table?

My guess is this is simpler than it appears; MM didn't make their new preamps in a lefty model so they can't do lefty basses now. That's why the Bongo still exists but the SR is gone.

That's why you can't get a 2 band preamp stock in an EBMM, they didn't make them in a lefty version.

I can well believe that, but why would anyone design the electronics in a handed fashion in the first place?

Because the alternative is the G&L spaghetti nightmare

The alternative is just make the knobs turn the same direction regardless of which handedness it is. I have never for a moment understand why some believe lefty knobs should go in the opposite direction. Makes things needlessly complicated.

Well, it's more than that. I was referring to MM's manner of integrating everything into a subassembly:



From: http://www.musicmanbass.org/mycustompage0019.htm

But it's true that for G&L spaghetti, you can drop the same electronics in a lefty or a right with the only side effect being the backwards action of the pots.

Hmmm... mount the components on the other side of the pcb. Fold the IC pins back 180deg to achieve that - although it's only those components that need height clearance that actually need to be on the other side. Mainly, that's the 3 electrolytic capacitors we can see - and there is room for those to have been arranged to lie flat in the first place.

Well, after a lot of consideration, I just pulled the pin on a 2018 Sterling, which they are making in lefty.
I got the color I wanted and neck I wanted. I'll post a review when it arrives.

pete