Bongo Information Page Update: March 2006
Since the first appearance of this page, I've happily become smarter about the Bongo and owned about seven or eight myself. I've also had access to Sterling Ball, Dudley Gimpel, Scott Ball and others who worked on the Bongo, so I figure it's time to add some information that I didn't have oh so long ago when I first fell under the evil spell of the Ernie Ball MusicMan Bongo........


 
"...if you subscribe to the theory that the last good guitar or bass was designed in 1953, then go ahead, continue to repackage and re-introduce colors. If you are dumb enough like me and figure that these instruments can evolve - and if you do your job right and have enough conviction to see it though - even if you encounter resistance like we did with the Silhouette and most recently the Bongo, then you can
take a little pride in the fact that you helped bring some new tools to the musical toolbox. You put
another spice in the spice rack."

-Sterling Ball

Speaking of Sterling, who better to gossip about the origins of the Bongo?

"I am a car nut. I collect them and love them. When the new Mini was released, there was a story in the LA Times about BMW's California design team, BMW DESIGN WORKS; they did much of the work on that car. Deep into the article, they mentioned that when BMW bought them, BMW inserted a clause that they had to derive 50% of their revenue from outside the automotive business. They wanted the California studio to avoid tunnel vision - and to not just design cars. They designed the best selling Nokia cell phones, some Hewlett Packard printers...hundreds of other products."

"I called, asked for an account manager and said, "Are you interested in designing an electric bass?" They jumped
on it. Several of the designers were guitarists and a few of them were fans of EBMM. They had contacted
Gibson and Fender and were turned down."

"My initial goal was to find a renewal material that we could use instead of wood. I wanted the material to enable
us to have the ability to control the resonance and sustain. I already have a world-class design team., so this
wasn't a slight to anyone in our organization. I just wanted to see what might happen. I didn't tell anyone that I
was going. When I came back, I told Dudley (Gimpel) about it and he was excited, very secure and ready to get involved. Looking back, it was really fun going to them with Dudley."

"At about the same time, Dudley was experimenting with neodymium magnets and we were excited with the
results. The new super pickups really needed a different preamp and when we put that together with input
from our staff, Cliff Hugo and Dave Larue, we knew that we needed to package these differently."

"I've been asked about the tremendous risk the Bongo must have been. It was no risk at all. With the existing
product line, excluding the Bongo, we had a three month back-order. The Bongo is about trying to move
forward. It was about shaking things up. It was about doing justice to Dudley's new electronics."

"The initial drawings looked cool but weren't ergonomically sound. The design was fabulous, but we still
needed to integrate our practical design nuances. We modeled this on the computer, tweaked it up and then
made wooden parts. I would make changes with a Sharpie and then they would make another part and I
would mark it up even more."

"None of the (non-wood) materials panned out, but it's still my dream to find new ways to tune the resonance of an instrument. I also met with Callaway Golf to explore titanium but that didn't work out. We tried ash and basswood - I think we tried alder, too - and the basswood was the most balanced wood. It just clicked."

"Bongo" was the code name that the BMW guys had for the project. I decided to keep the name.
I have had many eggs thrown at me for it, but I like it.""


Here's some miscellaneous information I collected in early 2004. Special
thanks to Hans and to Derek and Jon at Ernie Ball Musicman in San Luis Obispo.

1. Basswood was used for the body because it sounded good. The method of operation at Music Man has always been quality first. Prototypes were built using ash, poplar and alder, but basswood was the choice. One reason the basswood worked out well is because the electronics package on the Bongo is fairly heavy, and basswood is lighter. The fact that basswood is cheaper was not a factor in the decision.

2. BMW's Design Group did indeed formulate the Bongo's overall look. The Design Group has a mandate to design a certain number of non-automotive products in order to keep them fresh and on their toes, with the hope that this will be reflected in their car designs. Bongo was designed from two pages of sketches and a handful of rough concepts.

3. The intonated nut should affect the intonation most at the first through fifth frets. One of the engineers who worked on the Bongo said, "..the nut shouldn't make that much difference to the average player. It was originally designed for guitar, where it makes a difference when playing chords. Since most bass players don't play a lot of chords, especially near the nut, it's probably not much of an issue."

5. The 4 band preamp was designed by Dudley Gimpel, with a lot of input from Cliff Hugo and other Musicman artists to help dial in the tone and the functionality. Dudley built a preamp with sweepable mids to find the best center frequencies, and then let the bassists play around with it to find the best points. Phil Chenn brought in the Precision bass that he played on Jeff Beck's "Blow by Blow", which still had the original strings, and used that as a reference.

 

 SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA (March 21, 2003) -- After several years of development, Music Man proudly introduced its Bongo bass guitar line at the recent Winter NAMM Show in Anaheim. Response to its revolutionary design and solid performance features made the Bongo a highlight of the entire show.

Music Man president Sterling Ball designed the guitar, along with the Music Man R&D department, and BMW's award winning Designworks team.

Features include an evolved artistic shape, advanced electronics, color coordination and a patented compensated nut that greatly improves intonation. Several Music Man artists including Tony Levin, Dave LaRue, Cliff Hugo and Phil Chen provided input and testing during the two-year long project.

After a test-drive of a Bongo 5-string with two humbucking pickups and 4-band equalization at a January Dixie Dregs concert in San Juan Capistrano, CA, LaRue said, "The next generation of Music Man basses has arrived. It played well and sounded great. It's not for the faint of heart. I've hardly scratched the surface of what is possible with the Bongo, and I'm looking forward to digging into it."

 

An article about the design group:

 Designing for Sustainability

by Sarah Rosenbach and Soren Petersen, BMW Group Designworks/USA

How can a brand reflect social and environmental consciousness? How do you motivate an organization to do the same? This was the challenge DesignworksUSA faced after our parent company, BMW Group, asked us to explore the idea of balancing positive environmental and social impact with profitability.

As the first design firm to have a Sustainable Management System (SMS) and to be certified ISO 14001, we felt we were in a good position to address the three-pronged (social, environment and fiscal) business model. Our first step was to incorporate SMS inside our own company; the next would be to translate the model to our external clients.

Intuitively, we knew we needed to build a better culture of awareness in the organization. This meant rallying everyone from Engineering to Color and Materials, from Design to Accounting. We gathered a core team of representatives from every department and then set out to implement our plan.

Steps taken to adopt a Sustainable Management System were:

1. Map SMS project scope and goals (Proactively exceed legal minimum requirements, seek cost savings, identify marketing opportunities, etc.)

2. Define attributes of SMS and a successful SMS organization

3. Benchmark case studies of environmental and social successes in product and transit design organizations

4. Investigate technology, energy, architectural/structural, process and materials, assembly and disassembly opportunities

5. Integrate SMS into our product development process including life cycle analysis

6. Follow-up with vendors, manufacturers and clients to measure success and update with improvements

Interestingly, the fiscal side of SMS was an eye opener. Sustainability cannot be embraced by an organization for purely philanthropic reasons; you need to be profitable to survive. However, when employees feel they have a positive social environment, they are more productive. When being socially responsible is closely incorporated into the workflow, it can save money or provide alternative solutions. The cost benefits are many if responsibility is incorporated thoughtfully into the work environment.

As with all of our projects, we launched cross-disciplined brainstorming sessions to integrate SMS into our existing product development process. By adding tools and criteria to each step in our process, it was possible to create a SMS toolkit. However, when it came to implementing SMS into our products and those of our clients we realized that we had to do some soul searching -- the answers were not obvious.

Questions like, "Does SMS need to be reflected in the actual designs?" made us stop and think. Do we have to use materials that show their SMS properties (recycled, handmade and natural) in an obvious way? Given the sophistication and high level of quality BMW stands for, this seemed like a poor direction, unless environmentally responsible materials can be made sophisticated. Perhaps we should create a special logo to add to the products to make people aware of the inherent SMS qualities? This would not work either since we would be building another brand which would need additional support for it to be accepted in the marketplace.

We finally decided that it is more important to commit to SMS behind the scenes and know that whatever we produce or advise others to produce will be in the most responsible way possible. By improving our process and knowledge across the company, we would gradually and inherently change our brand and brand perception to that of an SMS leader. We realized that being responsible does not mean using a magic wand at the end of the design process (e.g. in materials alone). Being responsible means moving awareness upstream and promoting SMS thinking throughout the entire design process!

So how does this translate into real product solutions? On a project with Ernie Ball MusicMan, a well-known producer of guitars, we were asked to come up with new material driven concepts for a bass guitar. The project was approached from five different directions:

- Material and process selection

- Architecture -- component configuration

- Ergonomics -- usability

- Functionality

- Aesthetics

When investigating materials and processes we came up with four promising directions. From there, we looked at configurations that best capitalized on the different materials. Next the concepts were filtered by ergonomic and functional considerations giving birth to new hybrid solutions. Then the aesthetics were refined. The final solution is a bass guitar, dubbed BoNgo that was just introduced to the market at the NAMM show. The first generation is made of wood; however, our hope is that it evolves into an even more sustainable material specified in our research.