Ned Steinberger (b.

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nin ...

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delawa ...

, 1948) is an American creator of innovative

musical instrument A musical instrument is a device created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. A person who pl ...

s. He is most notable for his design of

guitar The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected string ...

s and

bass Bass or Basses may refer to: Fish * Bass (fish), various saltwater and freshwater species Music * Bass (sound), describing low-frequency sound or one of several instruments in the bass range: ** Bass (instrument), including: ** Acoustic bass gui ...

es without a traditional

headstock A headstock or peghead is part of a guitar or similar stringed instruments such as a lute, mandolin, banjo, ukulele and others of the lute lineage. The main function of a headstock is to house the pegs or mechanism that holds the strings at th ...

, which are called Steinberger instruments. He also has a line of electric basses and string instruments through his company called NS Design and was also the designer of the first ever

Spector Spector is a guitar manufacturing company. It has been based in Woodstock, New York Woodstock is a town in Ulster County, New York, United States, in the northern part of the county, northwest of Kingston, NY. It lies within the borders ...

bass, the NS. In addition, Ned and Emmett Chapman, creator of the Chapman Stick, collaborated on the creation of the NS Stick, a guitar/bass "multi-mode" instrument sold by Stick Enterprises. Ned Steinberger began his design career creating furniture and custom cabinetry. In 1977, while working alongside luthier Stuart Spector, Ned designed his first musical instrument, the Spector NS-1 bass guitar. While attempting to source materials in an industrial area of New York City, he visited Lane Marine, a lifeboat builder, where he met with Bob Young, an engineer with deep knowledge of carbon fiber. Though Young was more than twice Steinberger’s age and had no experience with musical instruments, he joined forces with Steinberger after getting great feedback from his son, a recording engineer, who took to the instrument and understood the appeal of its construction. The Spector NS quickly became Spector’s most popular bass design and remains so to this day. Inspired by that first creation, Steinberger set out to explore the possibilities of bass design. His search led to alternate materials, like carbon fiber and the headless concept. His company, Steinberger Sound, launched in 1980, found immediate success with the L2 bass. Steinberger headless guitars and other bass models followed. After selling Steinberger to the Gibson group of musical instruments, Ned started a second company, NS Design in 1990. NS Design continues Ned Steinberger's boundary-pushing designs with a family of bowed electric instruments as well as headless guitars and basses. Ned is the son of 1988 physics Nobel laureate

Jack Steinberger Jack Steinberger (born Hans Jakob Steinberger; May 25, 1921December 12, 2020) was a German-born American physicist noted for his work with neutrinos, the subatomic particles considered to be elementary constituents of matter. He was a recipient ...

(born May 25, 1921 in Germany – December 12, 2020).

References

External links

Ned Steinberger official siteStick Enterprises NS Stick pageNed Steinberger Biography
by Jim Reilly Inventors of musical instruments 1948 births People from Princeton, New Jersey Living people 20th-century American Jews American people of German-Jewish descent Engineers from New Jersey 21st-century American Jews {{US-inventor-stub