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Life
With A Fender Precision Bass
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I bought my Precision bass in the Seventies after seeing my all time hero Tony Reeves playing a Fender Telecaster with a maple neck. I would have bought a Telecaster bass but I couldn’t find a decent one anywhere. When I bought the P.bass, the body was white with a black scratch plate and the neck was maple with a skunk stripe at the back where the truss rod had been inserted. Just about everyone has owned a Fender at one stage or another so I wont waste time telling you what it looks and sounds like. What I do want to tell you, is what I did to mine and maybe some of you will think twice before you do mods to your bass!!!! I played the Fender for a number of years and although it was made during Fender’s C.B.S. years – a well documented low point in their history – it wasn’t a bad bass at all – at least, it did everything that I demanded of it! I just about stopped playing this bass after I bought my (in my opinion) far superior Gibson Thunderbird. The bass lived in it’s case under my bed for ages and during this time I started thinking about turning it into a fretless instrument. If I was going to do this, it had to be done correctly – I’m not from the Jaco school of thought and ripping the frets out and smearing epoxy all over the neck was totally out of the question! First of all I carefully dismantled the whole instrument and took the body to an automobile spray shop and had them spray it metallic grey – it was as close to silver as you can reasonably expect. I purchased an after market chrome scratch plate made by a spares company called Mighty Mite (just like the one Phil Lynott had on his Black Precision) and took the neck to Andy’s guitar repairs in Denmark Street London. There, the frets were taken out, ebony strips were inserted into the slots and the whole neck was re-varished. I wanted them to put a chrome nut on it to match the scratch plate but the luthier persuaded me to go for an aluminium nut as it would be a lot cheaper and not that much different from a chromed unit so I took his advise and went in that direction. I put the bass together and it looked the business. For some strange reason I always felt more comfortable playing this instrument with those huge chunks of metal over the bridge and pickups (yes I know – I'm a strange lad) and when these were put back on after the chrome scratch plate had been screwed in place, this bass looked a million dollars. Unfortunately, in my endeavors to turn this bass into the best looking P.bass in all the known universe,
I had overlooked one thing. Playing
this bass turned out to be a very disapointing experience – there were
dead spots all over the neck – some parts were so bad that absolutely no
sound came out of the bass at all so I recommend that anyone considering
turning their pride and joy into a fretless instrument to maybe purchase a
fretless neck and keep the fretted one as a spare – just in case you
change your mind again at a later time. |
