Longwheelbass

Home-bake from 2012. BODY: Very very old piece of barn demolition oregon from outside Seattle. Rosewood/maple 30" neck. 1978 JM pickups. 1960 JM pickguard.Special aluminum 1" bridge milled in Costa Rica. 1970 JM trem. 250k pots. 0.05 ceramic dime cap. Wired series/parallel.

This is incredible.

I don't think they would have sold as bass players were coming off of having to rent a van to get their DB's to and from shows, so all excess weight was a no-no! But you're probably right, we are a cantankerous sub-group of the music world, and there would have been endless fights in malt shops, backstage at sock hops and dive bars over the very same subject, Nancy. Apparently "it plays like butter" was often heatedly derided and defended in equal measures shortly after the arrival of the first P Bass in stores. All because some upright jazz player in the dairy belt of Wisconsin swore his playing got faster after treating the fretboard with the dairy-based spread. As for Rickenbacker purchasers who were often complaining loudly about the fact THEIR bridge weighed almost half of the gross weight of the bass...

Yeah right I didn't know Nates model has QP's...which are pretty bitey huh? The 68 P was my fave too having had a few of them...the natural late 70's sounded pretty beefy too.

I’m an absolute Fender snob/junkie and have been since walking past the pawn shop next to Chasers disco in Prahran, Melbourne in 1984 and spotted a stripped and relacquered 1969 Jazz Bass hanging on the wall. I busted the shop owner down from 500 bucks to 450, and it was the happiest day of my life. It replaced my mutilated 76 Mustang and it was with me for almost 1000 shows and multiple recordings with multiple dubious outfits. It was all original except for the paint, and studio engineers loved it. And the 80’s was muso marketing scam season - with the magic word being SUSTAIN. Ears and eyes are personal things, and everyone’s perceptions differ, but the high mass bridge hysteria that began with aftermarket parts advertising departments doing a hatchet job on Fender Bass tone all to liberate 100 bucks out of hard working (or dole bludging) bass players was one of the best scams in bass playin’ history. Science and physics aside, if you wanted your old Fender bass to get heavier, look fugly and maybe give you a few micro-seconds of tinnier sounding “sustain” then a high mass bridge was for you. Being a fool, I never managed to hang onto the Jazz Bass, nor the literal dozens of pre-73 P Basses I’ve owned for short or long periods - but if they came with a BadAss/Kickass/dumbass/fatass/heavyass bridge the first thing I did was bin it and scrounge up an old Fender bridge. Nowadays, I sell those aftermarket bridges in order to go towards paying the outrageous sums asked for by vintage parts sellers for vintage Fender bridges. I miss the 90’s when my favourite tech at my favourite music shop always had at least 6 old Fender bridges in a box and he’d extort 20 bucks from me every time I walked through the door with an unfamiliar to him case in my hand. There’s a great vid on YouTube called P Bass shootout and the dude starts with a 68 P and runs through about 7 different models of P including a Nate and a couple of reissues etc, but he does London Calling seamlessly on all the P’s - which is of course Paul Simenon’s masterclass in fat vintage Fender tone. You do notice the Nate P is noticeably brighter, probably brought on by that huge hideous thing bolted to the body - but for the cost of a high mass bridge, I’d rather keep the money and just turn up the treble knob on the amp. It’s a funny old bass world, there’s people jamming foam under their strings to kill the bright, there’s people wrapping what look like Andy Murray’s discarded wrist-worn sweatbands around the nut to kill the bright (is that still a thing??), and there’s the guys pushing the pot metal more sustain hi mass line still, all these years later… Meanwhile, the Great Satan of Bass Aftermarket Machinations, Leo Quan (who is actually a genetic fusion of two dudes, Leo Malliaris and Glen Quan which occurred during the alchemy phase of these two Californian guitar repair guys mixing metals in their mom’s garage in the 70’s to come up with what was going to originally be called the Bass Weightgainizer, but eventually got changed to BadAss, for obvious marketing reasons) - sits atop of a pile of gold so tall in the backyard of his/their Laurel Canyon mansion that the reflection of the sun’s rays off of all the gold is slowly being recognised by leading US climatologists as one the emerging drivers of global climate change. The takeaway from all this drivel? Well might you ask! Spend your money wisely, and remember, Fender basses from 1955 to the late 70’s got played millions- nay billions of times, sat beautifully in mixes on vinyl and sounded fabulous onstage, fat and proud through crappy car stereos and still do to this day. But you are still free as a bass player to choose to mod or not to mod, but it’s not always an UPGRADE…and you may well be contributing to Climate Change! Footnote: there is NO WAY I could ever fault any of Nate’s tones on any Foo Fighter recording ever either…in fact there’s a rumour Dave said to Nate when he showed up with his BadAss equipped 70’s P: “Nice tone dude, just don’t point that thing at me!”

Sometimes gambles pay off. It looked good in the seller pics, and it was lightweight. I prefer the pre-1970 pickup spacing, but I never use the bridge pickup on a Jazz anyway... At 8.5 lbs it's a dream to play, and the guys in the shop nailed the set up on it. With a quick change to a 0.1 ceramic disk capacitor, it's dark but still really bitey with the new roundwounds they put on it. I had a 1000 show 69 Jazz Bass which I stupidly sold in the early 2000's and have not had a factory Jazz since. Some pics of it indoors and outdoors!

John and Uma! Great piece of decoration bro! Looks awesome, sounds tasty, so glad it has ended up in good hands.

The one pickup Ricks are the best! Walked into a shop in Bondi in 1989 and there was one very similar for AU$550 in there. It sounded amazing - I was touring and not getting paid a lot, so I left it on the wall...

Thank you Rich Tone. A 77. With the addition from the never-to-be-sold parts drawer of a pickup from a 66 P Bass and a set of old oval tuners, this one's ready for the next round of bar fights. Pleasantly light from this era of boat anchors too at only 9.25 lbs.

So the bass is on its way to a member on Basschat. Here’s the story - I bought it off a guy in LA - the body neck and bridge were clearly all related. The bridge does not have fibre saddles, they have just sweat-rusted to a burnished brown. I tried a cleaner 1968 bridge on the bass for a while and the cleaner saddles actually made a difference to the tone of the bass! I thought the dirty rusty bridge sounded better, so it went back on. Unfortunately, the seller forgot to mention the crack in the headstock that emanated from the E borehole out to the edge where the cigarette burn usually goes, if you get what I mean. I repaired that crack and placed the neck on another 68 T Bass I own, and fitted the undamaged neck from that Bass to the woodgrain body. The two necks were a month apart in production. The buyer has now got a pretty awesome bass, with a massive sounding 1971 untouched pickup and a really lovely neck - a neck I am going to miss terribly, but the repaired neck is fine. It’s been Titebonded and permanently clamped with a light gauge countersunk 30mm brass screw and the crack in the timber that was just visible in the headstock face has had diluted Titebond massaged into it then wiped away before it cured on the lacquer. The paddle tuners were very common on the 68’s but by 1969, stocks must have been running low, and some accountant would have been downsizing the hardware range and at the stroke of a pen deleted the paddle tuner option from their next bulk order. So they just came with the standard elephant ear style from 1969 on. I’ve had three 68 T Basses and all came with paddles. I’ve had several 68 P Basses with the paddle tuners too. And of course the paddle tuners were originally just meant for the late 65/66 Jazz Basses, but knowing Fender’s hectic approach to assembly in the first few years of the CBS takeover, there would have been days where paddle tuners were the closest to the guy/girl adding the neck hardware - or the clover leaf tuner shelf was empty - so it got pretty random which model ended up with them. If any of you are interested I added sound files from recent recordings of the bass. It really does sound divine. I never thought I would say this, but I prefer the single coil over the split coil of the P Basses these days. And I don’t understand why so many players dumped the original pickup for various other iterations - the “Split P Single Coil” option that Fralin and others do just turn your nice old Tele Bass into a common- sounding P Bass. And so many say the single coil generates intolerable 60 cycle hum...which is perplexing - I’ve never had a hum problem with these, the most basic and pure sounding of the bass pickup world.