This Used 2012 Music Man Bongo 4 Bass Guitar in Eclipse Sparkle is here on trade. The neck is straight, the frets are still crowned and the truss rod functions properly. The bass is in good, clean cosmetic shape and comes with the original hardshell case. A great used bass for the Music Man lover!
If you remember when the Music Man Bongo first appeared, you probably remember thinking, “Well... that's certainly different.” And it was! Designed in collaboration with BMW Designworks, the Bongo took the traditional electric bass and threw the rulebook right out the window. Nearly two decades later, it's still one of the most distinctive basses Music Man has ever produced—and this 2012 Bongo 4 HH in Eclipse Sparkle is a particularly cool example. It's in clean cosmetic shape, weighs a very manageable 8 lbs 12 oz, and comes with its original hardshell case.
The Bongo wasn't designed to look like a slightly updated version of something from the 1950s. Music Man wanted to build a modern bass from the ground up, and they succeeded. The deeply contoured basswood body is comfortable against the player, the double cutaway gives you unrestricted access to all 24 frets, and the overall design is remarkably ergonomic considering how unconventional it looks. The Bongo was one of the first production basses to really embrace the idea that a professional instrument didn't have to look like a Precision or Jazz Bass to be a serious piece of gear.
And then there's the neck. Music Man gave the Bongo a fast-playing maple neck with a rosewood fingerboard and a full 24-fret range, making those upper registers considerably more accessible than on most traditional four-string basses. The 34" scale feels familiar, but the extra octave of fretboard real estate opens up a lot of territory for players who actually use it. The neck on this bass is straight, the frets are still crowned, and the truss rod is functioning properly.
This particular Bongo is equipped with two Music Man humbucking pickups, and this is where the bass gets seriously versatile. Rather than simply giving you a pair of pickups and a volume knob, Music Man paired the HH configuration with an 18-volt active preamp and four-band EQ. You've got dedicated low, high, low-mid, and high-mid controls, plus a pickup blend control that lets you move seamlessly between the two humbuckers. That's an enormous amount of tonal control in a bass that remains surprisingly straightforward to operate.
The 18V preamp is a big part of the Bongo's personality. There's plenty of headroom available, and the four-band EQ lets you really shape the instrument rather than simply adding a little bass or treble. Want enormous lows? You've got them. Need some upper-mid cut to make your lines jump out of a dense mix? Easy. Want to scoop things out and let the bass sit underneath everything? You can do that, too. The Bongo has always had a reputation as a tonal Swiss Army knife, and the HH version earns it.
And then we have the finish. Eclipse Sparkle looks fantastic on a Bongo, particularly with the matching headstock. It's flashy without being cartoonish, and the sparkle really comes alive under stage lighting. The Bongo's unusual shape already guarantees that you're not going to blend into the background, so you might as well give it a finish that leans into the whole thing.
The Bongo may have been unconventional when Music Man introduced it, but there's nothing unconventional about how well these basses work. They're comfortable, powerful, extremely versatile, and built with the kind of precision you'd expect from Ernie Ball Music Man. If you've always been intrigued by the Bongo but never pulled the trigger, this clean 2012 HH is a particularly cool opportunity to get into one of the more interesting modern bass designs Music Man has produced.
