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who invented the P/J configuration?

O

overdrivethree

Nov 1, 2008
314
7
Western PA
#1
i was just wondering who/when the whole P/J thing came to pass. i imagine it was someone, of course, modding a P with a J near the bridge as an experiment or whatever. so who was known for doing that? and when did they do it?

also, what manufacturers made the first P/J configured basses? i know Kramer, Charvel and Schecter were doing it in the late 70's/early 80's. but did anyone else have a breakthrough product with it before other companies?
 
#2
I'd say those fusion guys in the '70s, like Jeff Andrews and Jeff Berlin started it. They probably were used to playing P-Bass, but needed the definition of a bridge pickup, and Jaco also was making that bridge-pickup sound popular.
 
#3
Yep, it was a very popular modification back in the day before hi-fi rigs and good PA systems.

Here's My '75;
100_0071.jpg


Funny thing is that I use only the P pickup 99% of the time!
 
#10
I would reckon the early yamaha's BB 2000 would be a good early production model pj model, very expensive back then. Think its the fusion or studio guys who I first saw with that kind of configuration. Neil Stubenhaus?He had a pj in the early days. Will Bascomb... think its a pj on Jeff beck's 'wired'. I remember Bogert had a p/p configuration at some point in early 70's.
 
#14
#15
The Yamaha BB2000 was a beautiful bass. I worked at a retail store in the L.A. area from '80-'86, and we were an authorized Yamaha dealer. I was able to buy the bass directly from the Yamaha Rep, with the blessing of the owner of the store I worked for. It was one of the first BB2000's in the country, as at the time the only people who had them were endorsees. The bass was gorgeous, but unfortunately, had very little personality - no real resonance, even with all that wood. I sold it after about a year. Oddly enough, it appeared on Craigslist within this past year, still in mint condition.
The BB2000 may have been the first neck thru body PJ production bass, but it came a few years after the Ibanez Roadster, which was a bolt-on.
 
#17
overdrivethree said:
i was just wondering who/when the whole P/J thing came to pass. i imagine it was someone, of course, modding a P with a J near the bridge as an experiment or whatever. so who was known for doing that? and when did they do it?

also, what manufacturers made the first P/J configured basses? i know Kramer, Charvel and Schecter were doing it in the late 70's/early 80's. but did anyone else have a breakthrough product with it before other companies?
Click to expand...


Taken from wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fender_Precision_Bass

Precision Bass

The Fender Precision Bass (often shorted to "P Bass") is an electric bass guitar and the first to be made widely-available. It was designed by Leo Fender and brought to market in 1951. It was a revolutionary instrument for the time and has made an immeasurable impact on the sound of popular music of the last 50 years.

Jazz Bass

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fender_Jazz_Bass

The original intention was to encourage upright-bass players to switch to electric bass guitar. The original Jazz Bass had two stacked knob pots with volume and tone control for each pickup. Original instruments with this stacked configuration are highly valued in today's vintage guitar market. Around 1961 it received three control knobs: two controlling the volume of each pickup and one the overall tone. Despite this new feature, many stack knob models were made until about 1962.

First introduced in 1960 as the "Deluxe Model", it was marketed as a stablemate to the Jazzmaster guitar which was also marketed as a "Deluxe Model" in its own right; however, it was renamed the Jazz Bass as Fender felt that its redesigned neck - narrower and more rounded than that of the Precision Bass - would appeal more to jazz musicians. The Jazz Bass has two single coil pickups with two pole pieces per string. This gave the bass a stronger midrange sound to compete with the Rickenbacker bass, which had been introduced in 1957 and which was famously "bright." As well as having a slightly different, less symmetrical and more contoured body shape (known in Fender advertising as the "Offset Waist Contour" body), the Jazz Bass neck is noticeably narrower at the nut than that of the Fender Precision Bass. While the Precision Bass was originally styled similarly to the Telecaster guitar (and, after 1957, the Stratocaster), the Jazz Bass' styling was inspired more by the Jazzmaster guitar, with which the Jazz shared its offset body and sculpted edges that differentiate it from other slab-style guitar bodies.
 
#20
Way before the late '70s.
Jack Casady in 1966 had Larry Craig of Prune Music in San Francisco add a P bass pickup to his Jazz Bass. In the 1967 film Monterey Pop Festival, Jack is captured on film playing this bass. In 1968 t the PBass pickup on a Jazz Bass was available as a special option directly from Fender. A year later the option was discontinued out of fear it would effect sales of the Pbass.

G
 

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