PREMIER GUITAR SEPTEMBER 2009 115
FEATURE 1962 Precision Bass. Photo courtesy of Rick Gould.
Club Band. McCartney was given a left-handed Rickenbacker 4001S in 1965,
and when Sgt. Pepper was recorded, the
Rick had become his primary bass. By
then, his playing had progressed to the
point where he felt confident enough
to try some radical experiments. “I was
thinking maybe I could even run a little
tune through the chords that doesn’t
exist anywhere else. Maybe I can have an
independent melody? Sgt. Pepper ended
up being my strongest thing on bass—
the independent melodies. On ‘Lucy in
the Sky with Diamonds,’ for example,
you could easily have had root notes,
whereas I was running an independent
melody through it and that became my
thing. It’s really only a way of getting
from C to F or whatever, but you get
there in an interesting way.”
How The Fender Bass Changed The World
By Jim Roberts
(HL#330737, $27.95)
musicdispatch.com
Copyright © 2001 by BACKBEAT BOOKS
International Copyright Secured.
All Rights Reserved.
Paul’s great playing on Sgt. Pepper
was highlighted by production that put
the sound of his instrument front and
center. As Abbey Road engineer Geoff
Emerick explained to Howard Massey,
the bass on Sgt. Pepper was isolated on
its own track and recorded by miking
the amp rather than using a direct input
(DI) or a mix of amp plus DI. “With the
studio empty, you could actually hear a
little bit of the room ambience around
the bass, which seemed to help,” said
Emerick. “The other thing I used to
do when I was mixing—and [previous
Beatles’ engineer] Norman Smith taught
me this—was that the last instrument
you bring in is the bass. So, at least
through Pepper, everything was mixed
without hearing the bass. I used to bring
everything to – 2 on the VU meter and
then bring the bass in and make it go to
0, so it meant the bass was 2dB louder
than anything [else]; it was way out in
front, the loudest thing on the record.”
Paul McCartney’s musical brilliance,
highlighted by sympathetic production,
gave his bass the dominant role on
what was probably the most important
rock recording of the 1960s. Sixteen
years after Leo Fender had decided he
wanted to free bass players from “the
big doghouse,” his new instrument had
transformed popular music and opened
up a world of creative expression for the
musicians who would follow.
