FEATURE
A very early Precision
Bass (Serial Number
0837). Photo courtesy
of Rick Gould.
uncannily good choice. It has proven to be the
most common scale length for four-string electric basses ever since.
produce short, thumping notes that mimicked
the sound of an upright.
Leo Fender in 1973 with a ‘ 58 Precision Bass. Photo © Robb Lawrence, 2009.
Leo chose the name “Precision Bass” largely
because the instrument was fretted and
therefore had more precise intonation than an
upright with its fretless fingerboard. Fender
historian Richard R. Smith says the name also
refers to the “precise” (focused) tone of the
instrument and the accuracy of the Fender
factory’s machines.
The prototype had tuning machines adapted
from an upright and steel-wrapped gut
strings. (For the production instruments,
Fender ordered flatwound steel strings from
the V.C. Squier Company.) Because the
body was so large, Leo gave it double cutaways for better balance, creating a shape
that foreshadowed his 1953 design for the
Stratocaster guitar.
The pickup was a simple single-coil design,
with one polepiece directly below each string.
There were two knurled control knobs: vol-
ume and tone. Anticipating that musicians
would pluck the strings with their thumb,
Leo mounted a finger rest below the
strings on the large black plastic pick-
guard. The bridge had two saddles
made of pressed fiber. Chrome cov-
ers concealed both the pickup and
the bridge. These were not merely
decorative: the pickup cover provided
electronic shielding, and the bridge
cover contained a rubber string mute.
The mute deadened the sound to
The second part of the equation was the
amplifier. Leo quickly determined that his
guitar amps could not handle the low frequencies his new bass generated. So he set to
work creating a new amp, which became the
original Fender Bassman. “Especially designed
for bass reproduction” (as the advertisements said), the original Bassman had a single
Jensen 15” speaker and a 26-watt tube amp
that could produce a reasonable bass sound
at low to medium volumes.
The P-Bass Makes a Run For It
Leo Fender hoped that his new bass would
be used by guitarists in country-western music
(his favorite style), but few country musicians
showed any interest in it. One exception was
Joel Price, who reportedly bought the first
Precision Bass sent to Nashville and played it
at the Grand Ole Opry in 1952. Oddly, one
of the first musicians to adopt the Fender
bass was jazz vibraphonist and bandleader
Lionel Hampton. In early 1952, Hampton got
a Precision Bass from Leo and told his bassist, Roy Johnson, to play it. A few other jazz,
jump, and R&B bassists tried it, but the instrument remained something of a curiosity.
That began to change in 1957, when Elvis
Presley’s bassist, Bill Black, played a Precision
Bass on “Jailhouse Rock,” which rose to No. 3
on the Billboard Pop chart and was probably
the first major hit with an electric bass. Three
years later, Nokie Edwards gave the punchy
sound of the P-Bass a big boost on
