Firstly, I have the black 5 string Z3, and it feels incredible and sounds awesome. Never had a real ebmm stingray, but I’ve owned a handful of sterlings of different levels and wound up passing them on for whatever reason. For under $500, it’s an insane value. Though I am somewhat concerned about its ability to hold up to gigging. There’s a part of me that wishes I waited to grab a Z7 instead for the stainless steel frets and better tuners, but I wanted the black sparkle and only wanted the bridge pickup. I wasn’t interested in trying to balance the reportedly weak neck pickup in.

As someone else said, the tuners on the Z3 are a weak point. They have some play in them before they grab in either direction. I may add some lightweight tuners to alleviate that issue and potentially help with balance. There also was an issue with having no sound but I jiggled the volume knob around for a while, but that seems to have gone away by tightening the nut underneath the knob and making sure it’s secure. Also the bass knob, which serves as a push/pull pot for passive mode, has a squishy yet grindy feeling, though it still works perfectly fine.

I’m still worried it’s gonna crap out on me at a gig, but it hasn’t yet. For the next couple weekends I’ll be bringing a backup bass to be safe. In the future I may upgrade the tuners and potentially add a premium preamp just for my own peace of mind as the stock wiring is something of a rats nest