Z-Guitar Stand - The Best Guitar Stand
This is a review about an otherwise mundane item. Let’s start with some meta-info and click through for the rest of the review:
- I paid for this.
- Nobody is paying me to do this review. I contacted the maker and he did offer me a discount (at my request) as I explained that I was writing this review regardless of his response. I will be losing money on this review… read to the end ;)
- This is my favorite single guitar stand.
- It’s the product of a small business making smart decisions to provide a high quality product.
Contents
Video
The video this week is under 3 minutes. It contains basically all of the information here except the part about me stubbing my toe, but in graphical form.
K & M
Let’s start with some history. This stand is essentially a K&M 17540. It is wholly made in Germany by one of the most respected manufacturers of music accessories in the world.
The K&M 17540 is a great stand. Nearly everything in this review applies (except forward) to the original 17540. I originally purchased this stand because it’s the only quality stand that will properly hold my MTD 534-24 Headless bass.
The Z-Guitar Stand has a trick up its sleeve, and if you’re perceptive then you’ve figured it out by now. I can say that I would buy the Z-Guitar stand over the original K&M without a thought.
Data
- Weight - 67oz, 4lb 3oz, ~1900g
- Dimensions
- Height - 16.325in, 41.5cm
- Depth - 11.5in, 29.25cm
- Width
- Maximum Viable - 13.625in, 34.5cm
- Minimum Viable - 8.25in, 21cm
- Maximum Instrument Thickness - 2.25in, 7.75cm
- Typical Instrument Angle - 14°
- Cost - ~$60usd with shipping.
Problems
Back
Impeding rearward motion is the one thing that most every guitar stand can handle.
The Z-Guitar stand does not impede rearward motion better than most stands, but it does do it more predictably than tripod based stands.
Watch the video above: knock the instrument on the tripod and it ends up going to the side (sometimes randomly!), but the Z-Guitar stand predictably goes backwards.
I don’t think this is a “win” for either stand, but I personally prefer that if I bump into something that I can quickly guess where it’s going so I can catch it.
Side
Side influence is where the rubber, somewhat literally, meets the road. We’ve all bumped into a guitar and felt the adrenaline rush as a few paychecks rocket towards the ground.
There are tradeoffs when designing to mitigate the average musicians clumsiness though.
- Make the stand wider - now the instrument’s body sinks between the forks and very likely rests on the ground.
- Make the stand taller and wider - instrument no longer touches the ground, but while the moment of inertia has not decreased; the likelihood that you input force higher on the instrument increases and thereby the torque applied is increased.
- Make the stand “grippy” - must ensure that the product used will not mar the finish or degrade over time.
- Add protection to the side - increases difficulty of use by reducing the number of compatible instruments and making the stand more ‘fiddly’ to use.
- Hold at the neck - increase the catastrophic results of a displacement incident. Does not work with headless instruments or may not with certain headstocks (I’m looking at you telecasters!)
The Z-Guitar Stand and K&M 17540 get this pretty close to perfect. The lateral effort to pull a 10lb/4.5kg bass guitar off the stand with lateral force is about 4lb/1.8kg for the Z-Guitar Stand.
The force required is about 2lb/0.9kg for the most popular, and one of the best reviewed, “quality” A-frame stand on the market.
It takes about 2x as much force to knock an instrument off the Z-Guitar stand!
Forward
Most every guitar stand fails if you knock it forward by the headstock. Crash. Bang. Boom.
This is where the Z-Guitar Stand shines. It has a small hook that protects your instrument from your inattentive gait.
Does it work? Watch the video above. It works
I don’t know about you, but for me this is the biggest win. I have my guitar facing my computer desk, so when I enter the room I see the back of my instrument. That’s where accidents happen. That’s where this guitar stand’s value shines.
Buttons and Side Jacks
If your instrument sits deep in the stand then there’s a chance that the strap button or the bottom of the instrument contacts the floor. Due to how well the instrument is held by the stand, you can reduce the angle of the apex of the A to pull the instrument up off the ground.
The adjustment is easily made with a locking mechanism. Note that you don’t press the locking nub to release it, you press a secondary nub that’s more pronounced and won’t pinch your finger while you move the stand. Brilliant inclusion.
A secondary concern is if you have your jack on the side of the instrument. On nearly every A-style stand I’ve owned the jack gets in the way of one of the legs. The 17540/Z-Guitar stand alleviate this through adjusting the width of the A-frame.
There’s only minimal loss of stability when the A is closed up, and it allows the stand to handle instruments of a much wider variety of shapes than nearly any stand on the market.
If the stand did not hold the instrument firmly then this type of adjustment would be all for naught. Luckily it does.
The bad things
No stand is perfect, however I only have a single complaint about this stand: It really hurts if you stub your toe on it.
I’m not joking. My toe is black and blue from stubbing it on this stand while shooting video. If you like to shuffle your stands around, especially on carpet, you’ll hate this stand. It stays in place.
It’s likely that someone else may find faults with the stand, however it meets my needs without fault. Hopefully I’ve provided sufficient info and demonstration that you can find potential faults that I’ve either overlooked, or that don’t affect me.
Conclusion
Short review. Strange subject. It sounds product placement, but I purchased this stand when I was looking for a normal K&M 17540 on reverb at the suggestion of Michael Tobias.
I absolutely love this stand, and I wanted to share why.
You can order them directly from Zachary Guitars AND if you Join my Discord chat I will be giving one of these stands away free to a Patreon, Discord user or anyone interested in acquiring one. I’m paying for the stand out of my own pocket.
No e-mail necessary, all I need is a way to contact you. Discord, Patreon, leave a comment, contact me on Twitter or just send me an E-mail saying that you’re interested (audiolabs gmail).
I also use Hercules stands, but their footprint is ridiculously large and if you bump into one it’s nearly impossible to recover before the crash. They are nice for display and their retail products are great (you’ve seen the big stands in my videos).
I’ve packed away 4 other single-instrument stands because they are all inferior to the Z-Guitar Stand.
Thanks for reading/watching!
Meta
This post took 15 hours to research, write and edit. The video took approximately 20 hours.