FBO - For Bass Players Only - The "F" Word

I subscribe to a number of groups on Facebook, and many (read:most) are somehow either musical or bass in nature (in the case of slap videos, those terms are mutually exclusive most of the time - ahem) and there's a topic on the bass related ones that crops up from time to time.  I should add that it is a topic that is near and dear to my heart:

"Is a Fender bass worth it as an instrument to own?"

Which, somehow invariably morphs into this:

"Are Fender basses the best basses?"

As a session player, I do have a somewhat different take on this topic.  When I started my career (in the late 70's) there were 3 things that were important:

1. Show up on time.  Early is better.
2. Make sure your gear works.
3. Make sure that you have at least one Fender with you.

I know that sounds trite, but it's 100% true.  If you didn't have a Fender with you, you were gonna have a bad day.  And, it really didn't matter if it was a Precision or a Jazz- it just had to have the name "Fender" on it somewhere, and it needed to sound like a Fender.  Period.

Now, why do you suppose that is?  Well, it might not seem terribly obvious to you, but there really was a reason, and it all boiled down to two things: the gear being used and the people using it.

In 1951, Leo Fender turned the recording industry on it's ear by introducing the electric bass guitar.  It wasn't for the reasons you might be thinking, either- it's because, up until this time, bass playing was being done by bass players playing upright basses.  Playing the upright was (and still is) a pretty demanding thing and is really only taken on by people that want to do it.  The chief problem wasn't the size of the instrument, but rather the fact that uprights don't have frets, which meant that unless you knew what you were doing, everything would sound really, really bad.  When Leo released his first production instruments, he did so to attract guitar players to be able to play bass and play it in tune, hence the name "Precision" bass.  This little marketing ruse actually worked, too- all the session guitarists of the day suddenly found themselves with the ability to double effectively, and that also meant more money for them if they could do it.  Every single bass player in studio bands like The Section, The Wrecking Crew and Muscle Shoals started out life as a guitarist, and migrated to this new instrument.  My old teacher, Carol Kaye, who is known as the ultimate session bassist is, in fact, an absolute terror on the guitar, too.

And, since Leo had "standardized" the idea of the bass guitar, he also inadvertently standardized the parts that went into them, too.  Most notable here was the signal chain that would be needed for a bass guitar to sound as good as an upright bass did.

This meant that pre-amplifier manufacturers were forced to redesign a lot of their wares for this new instrument.  In 1951, recording a bass guitar direct wasn't done, so it really mattered what the miked up amp sounded like.  That meant creating circuitry to accommodate much different voltages than guitar pickups- guitar pickups are generally much higher in output voltage ("hotter") than bass pickups are, and the other problem is that a hotter signal means more distortion, and more distortion means less usable low end- all of which are problems for a bass guitar.

And, since Fender was the only real bass company, all these manufacturers used for designing these circuits was- you guessed it- a Fender bass, and only the Precisions at that.

So, back in 1951, the expense of running a recording studio was enormous, and generally, studio owners and engineers could only afford a few preamps, let alone the idea of something that was of special use, like a bass amplifier.  But they bought them- and when some bass player came in with something like a Gibson EB0 or EB-2, nothing quite worked the way they were used to hearing things.

This problem continued as time went on, because from 1951 to about 1976, Fender virtually ruled the bass world.  Every piece of studio gear out there was based on the voltages and impedance of the Fender bass- a passive, low impedance signal that had to be shaped by either the desk (for a DI) or by the preamp that the mike was plugged into.

All of that changed in 1976-77 when Leo Fender released the new Musicman Stingray on the world.  The Stingray was the very first production model bass guitar to have an active preamp in it.  (Yes, Alembic was doing it in the early 70's, but Alembics were not common, and still aren't)  hat Leo did with the Stringray was pretty ingenious- while the output was hotter and had treble and bass control to it, the impedance to the preamps was largely unaffected and all that Fender based gear still worked pretty well with the active electronics.  Manufacturers did some small tweaking to their input stages (like adding buffers to the input) but all bass amplifier manufacturers pretty much kept on with the Fender based spec.  

To this day, pretty much every bass guitar amplifier out there is still loosely based around the Fender architecture.  People today who have bass heroes all want to sound like those heroes, and all of them are using amplification systems that are still based on the input characteristics of the old Fenders.  

These are just inescapable facts.  But it doesn't answer the question- but to do that, I have to add my personal experience here.

My '62 Precision and my Regenerate Pro 5 -
there's a '65 Reissue Jazz back there, too

I like to think of my Fenders (I currently own 5) as "equalizers".  With the exception of my '62 Precision, none of them is terribly special, but they are absolute war-horses.  You can't kill them, and they sound good no matter what amp, DI, preamp or filter I put them thru.  I know what they're going to do every, single time I plug one in, and it's for that reason that I never put preamps in them and I always have one with me on a gig or session date.  They just work.  

I can and do play other things- my mainstay these days is a Regenerate Guitar Works Regenerate Pro 5 string with Honey Badger Heavy Hitters and a Noll 3-way active preamp- and I absolutely LOVE IT.  It works for about 90% of what I do - but every now and then, it doesn't and that's where the Fender comes in.

There is absolutely no such thing as the perfect bass- a single instrument that can just do it all - that's a myth and I don't care which manufacturer tells you that they have it.  They don't.  But, the bottom line in my mind is that if you do have only a single instrument in your arsenal, it probably ought to be one of the "F" word basses- because no matter how hard you try, you just won't go wrong.  

To sum it up- yeah, I'm a Leo fan.  I think he got it right, and by and large the rest of the bass world - whether they know it or not - actually agrees with me.  Are Fenders perfect? No.  Are they able to bridge every single kind of musical genre out there- absolutely not.  But they do work, and their work can be heard on 90% of everything you've ever listened to, and that is something that just can't be ignored.