![Sterling By Music Man Joe Dart Collection, ft. the Joe Dart I [left] and the Joe Dart Vision – the bass with no controls](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/T84T8dqzsnoPcjxdf6JAdJ-1920-80.jpg.webp)
Try to think of something new in bass guitar design and it’s hard. It’s all been done. Active circuits, passive circuits, concentric stacked knobs, extra switches, you name it. But Joe Dart had an idea – and he and Sterling By Music Man have really come up with something new.
It wasn’t just Dart, to be fair. The bassist credits his Vulfpeck bandleader, Jack Stratton, with this too. They got to talking about bass design. They had a “vision”. What if someone just pared the bass guitar down to its very essence, just four strings and the truth. “Nothing extra, not even a volume knob,” says Dart.
Sterling By Music Man Made it happen. It is the first bass Dart knows off to do away with these controls, to run the pickups full, with nothing in between them and the output jack.
Article continues below“We call this bass The Vision,” says Dart. “It strikes the perfect balance of punch and warmth that I’m always chasing, and it sits in the pocket like it was built for it.”
The Joe Dart headlines SBMM’s Dart signature pairing for 2026. The other big news is that the Joe Dart I is back.
“That bass has history,” says Dart “It belongs in people’s hands. I’m thrilled to share both of these with the world.”
But there is a catch; you’ve got to be quick. These are not limited edition instruments per se, but this is a timed release; they are built to order, and once the deadline passes, Sterling By Music Man will stop making them.
It’s probably a better idea than the limited run instrument. Those who wanted one, get one. Die-hard fans are less likely to be scalped on the second-hand market. Everybody wins.
Also, these basses are a good deal. The returning Joe Dart I is priced £409/$549 (in a sign of the times, it was just £325/$399 when it first launched in 2024), and that’s pretty minimalistic, too (the Vision, in fact, was the original idea but they never went through with it at the time). The Dart I has a single ceramic humbucker and one toaster-style volume knob, the lightweight maple body build left in a natural finish.
The Joe Dart Vision, meanwhile, arrives in an Olympic White finish, it has the same soft maple body, a gold egg-shaped pickguard, and ceramic humbucker, and the vital statistics (34” scale, 9.5” radius maple fingerboard, 22 frets) remain the same. Only this time there are no knobs. It’s priced £447/$599.
You have until the end of the May 2026 to order these, and you can do so right now by heading over to Sterling By Music Man. Instruments ship from September.
