There is Always Room to Improve – Ned Steinberger of NS Design

Having first made waves with the iconic Spector NS-1 bass (a collaboration with Stuart Spector) in the mid-70s and then introducing his revolutionary “headless” (no traditional headstock), graphite Steinberger electric guitars and basses in the late ‘70s, Ned Steinberger has remained a restless innovator who has continued to come up with groundbreaking design concepts.

At the helm of NS Design since 1990 (Gibson purchased Steinberger Sound in 1987 and retain the rights to the “Steinberger” brand name), he has introduced a number of high-end electric double basses, cellos, violas, and violins in the ensuing years. A couple years back, though, NS Design launched the Radius line of bass guitars with a head-spinning array of unique features: a maple di-radial body (the back and top have two different arches); the new Fusion neck (a carbon-fiber core embedded in a one-piece, bolt-on maple neck with adjustable trussrod; and a self-clamping tuning mechanism that allows the player to use any long-scale bass string.

With a hefty (though well deserved) price tag of just under $3,000, though, the original CR Radius basses are certainly not in line with everyone’s budget. The launch of the new WAV Series aims to address this, with price points closer to $1,000.

We recently sat down with Ned Steinberger to talk about developing the Radius instruments, as well as other goings-on at NS Design…

The initial focus of NS Design was on bowed instruments. The introduction of the Radius bass guitars a while back sort of signaled a return to more mainstream combo instruments. Can you talk about the Radius basses and what was the catalyst behind designing and releasing these instruments.

Ned Steinberger: Well, this, it is kind of an interesting, slightly convoluted history in that about 20 years or so ago, I started to get serious about developing a tuner for a headless instrument that did not require any tools and did not require double ball end strings – so, essentially a self-clamping mechanism. I did finally develop that, originally for six-string guitar.

Anyway, I realized at a certain point that this tuner that I had developed for the guitar was going to be perfect for the violin because you know a violin is very sensitive to the amount of weight that it carries and the way it is carried. And so when I started to get really serious about electric violins I realized that with the guitars that I had done before, the only way to really get the balance I wanted was to have those tuning machines back on the body. And I surely didn’t want to get into making double ball end violin stings because there are all kinds of different strings out there for violin. I knew I needed to be self-clamping and so this tuner that I originally conceived for the guitar, was modified and we patented the mechanism and for many, many years now that’s just the fundamental part of our violins and violas.

But what I came to realize is that this same mechanism would work extremely well for a bass guitar. The benefit of headless bass guitar runs deep because you got the long neck and heavy tuning machines on the end of it headstock. I originally came up with the headless [guitar] idea to make an instrument that would really balance beautifully instead of being heavy on the shoulder.

With the Radius, my idea was to take this great headless system and package it into something that is more comfortable for bass players today who’ve got certain expectation about the body size and a scale of a bass. So I really worked to bring the Radius bass into a form that would be more comfortable for a player to adjust to, both physically in terms of the way it plays and how it feels against the body. And visually how it looks and how it projects itself.

It has the body curved on the back to match the form of [a player’s] midsection and it has that wedge shape to it ,so it is thicker at the bottom than at the top – when it is held horizontally the body is thinner near a player’s shoulders and thicker down towards you know a person’s waist, so it tilts up a little bit allowing you can see the frets a bit. All those kinds of details where worked on very hard to make this bass as comfortable as a bass can be. And I do believe we been very successful in creating product that is beautifully balanced and just very comfortable to play.

We worked with Rob Turner at EMG to develop a really sweet sounding but powerful magnetic package for the instrument and we combine that with our own Polar Piezo System that I developed originally for the double bass.

How have the Radius basses been received thus far?

Well I think we have had a very good response to it. We are you know kind of again new to this game and so we still have a lot of work to do to get the product out there, but the response we get from people who have contact with the instrument is extremely positive. What we are doing right now is getting instruments that are more affordable, so we have the WAV Series Radius Instruments which you can get for $1,200 bucks or something like that – much more affordable than the CR models that we started with. I think that is going to really be able to help us throw our net in a much wider area.

Are there any other new products introductions on the horizon that you would like to discuss?

Well there are some exciting things that I am working on that I can’t really discuss, but in terms of things that are just about to break nothing really comes to mind. I mean these projects are never over – there is always room to improve upon a design.