Bass guitar (Precision) | Fender | 1960
Bass guitar (Precision) | Fender | 1960
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The Fender Precision Bass was the first modern full-scale fretted solid-body electric bass guitar when it was launched in 1951. It was held sideways like a guitar unlike upright basses, it was fretted and crucially, it could be amplified.
The Precision bass was based on the Telecaster and Esquire that had come before, with a flat blonde-finish ash body and a long neck screwed in place, except for the addition of a second cutaway. The second cutaway was to remove weight from the centre to help support the longer heavier neck and larger tuners. As well as it had a fretted fingerboard for precision playing.
The bass was made in response to the need for better portability than a double bass for small dance band musicians in the USA, to be able to match the volume of the new electric guitars and to be able to play more precisely than the acoustic guitar. The second cutaway not only helped make the guitar more balanced but meant the guitar could be strapped over the shoulders, which allowed bass players for the first time to properly move around the stage, to dance and sing.
The P-Bass, as it was known colloquially, had little revisions to its design in the 1960s compared to the 1950s. However most notably, in 1960, the original design was revised to add an extra strap hold on the back of the headstock which was then removed again towards the end of the decade. And in 1964, the clay dots on the fretboard were changed to faux pearl dots.
The Fender Precision Bass has many different styles of playing but most commonly is played with the first two fingers of the right hand to pluck the strings. Musicians who had previously played the six-string electric guitar at the time however often used plectrums to play the Precision.
It was described as “perhaps the most revolutionary contribution to 20th-century music” as both the Fender electric and bass guitars could now hold significant volume against the drums within a band. The Precision bass inspired the creation of the 1954 Stratocaster guitar, one of the big three guitar models that are the basis for all modern electric guitars.
By the late 1950s the Precision Bass guitar was so well established that anyone who played an electric bass was known simply as a Fender bass player regardless of the actual brand of electric bass they played.
It was by the late 1960s that the Fender Precision Bass made its way to the UK, though at first, they were far and few between and hard to get a hold of. Jet Harris, bassist of the Shadows, was the first well-known bassist in the UK to have a Precision Bass. He was given a Precision Bass by a London importer as a replacement for his Framus bass guitar after it was accidentally destroyed. Most famously John Entwistle (The Who) as a teenager made his own homemade version of the instrument due to the scarcity of the bass at the outset which bandmate Roger Daltry made him sell as he accused the homemade bass of consistently blowing up speakers.
Whilst at the first the Precision bass was mostly used by Country and Western musicians, like the first Fender electric guitars, it found its way into other genres such as Pop, Rock, Jazz and Blues.