A Thought About P Basses in the Studio

[faulknersj]

The biggest advantage of the split P must surely be the ability to raise or lower the poles under each string to produce a more even output. An immediate advantage with its introduction.

Smart point that I hadn't thought of..

 

[retslock]

I find it interesting that we tend to collectively think the p-bass was preferred by engineers et al because it "fits perfectly in the mix". I have a different perspective. The p-bass was the first mass-marketed electric bass. As such, it was the most ubiquitous. Bassists appreciated the portability and started showing up at sessions with them. Studios followed suit. The most obvious new tool for the job. EB-0's, Rics, etc. were not yet on the radar. I rather suspect the actual sequence of events was more along the lines of "here's this new gadget, the engineer has to figure out how to make it fit in the mix". P-basses were ubiquitous (early jazz recordings often list "Fender Bass" on the album credits, in part because when a player joined the local union, that was the way the union distinguished upright bass from electric bass). P-basses vs. other electric basses is like Microsoft vs. Apple. Apple fans insist it's a better system and it may well be, but Windows was first. Far more people know how to navigate it and it therefore continues to dominate. Never was a question of which is better, just which was first to gain widespread acceptance. IMHO>

BBB

VHS versus Betamax. We all know how that turned out for Sony.

 

[Michael Stanley 2112]

(SNIP) I find it interesting that we tend to collectively think the p-bass was preferred by engineers et al because it "fits perfectly in the mix". ... (/SNIP)

I think it may be a bit more simpler than this ... laziness.

I think initially, there was a huge chasm of "new ground" (ya see what I did there? LOL) to be learned and some learned it and some stood their ground.

Once the electric bass became so popular, they realized the train had already left the station and they'd better catch up.

With clenched teeth and white knuckles they did. Then, after years of experience and being able to re-examen their journey, when they taught new people, they emphasized learning learning how to work with the P-Bass.

Then that "generation" got a little lazy and "only" (an exaggeration) learned how to work with the P.

 

[LowendG]

I play Jazz basses 90% of the time fyi.

The thing that made me wonder about this was playing my passive jazz with single cools this morning and hearing all that hum noise (I need to shield this bass).

But lack of shielding noise is one thing--that inherent hum from the single coils not being equal volume is another. Might be something else going on w that bass.
Personally (while I do favor Pbasses, and then J's with everything dimed), I've never been in a situation where an otherwise properly set up sc Jazz was SO noisy that it was a deal breaker, even when fiddling with the pickup volumes.

 

[Pocket Dave]

I often run my 2010 RW '60s Jazz and Squier CV Fretless Jazz at uneven volumes with Fender PV '74 pickups in both.

What gives - They're both super quiet.

 

[nnnnnn]

Anyone who has played a J bass with single coil pickups knows what happens if the blend of the pups isn't even, or if your fingers aren't making contact with the strings and acting as a ground...60 cycle hum.

Touching the strings doesn't make 60 cycle hum go away.

 

[Malak the Mad]

BL in my main band sometimes tells me he prefers my P-bass. I like it too.

But he compliments my playing more when I stick with the J.

Someone must get a Fender Reggie Hamilton or a Blacktop Jazz into your hands!

 

[Deleted member 271037]

I've never had any problems using J-basses for recording. I mean, in a controlled recording environment it should be possible to deal with hum.

I still prefer P-basses for recording though. Because.... wait for it...

They "sit" better in the mix. Yep!

At least with the kind of music I generally play.

It's all about the position of the pickup. The position of the pickup on a traditional P-bass gives me the perfect balance of fat lows, a nice "heft" in the lower mids and a crisp upper mid presence.

With the pickup closer to the bridge it gets too thin/nasal/middy sounding for me.

Blending pickups? Too scooped/clanky/phased out for me.

Pickup closer to the neck? I can work with that, but in a dense mix it often needs a bit of eq.

But a classic P-bass... Pretty much plug'n'play, even if all you've got is a clean DI.

 

[Acoop]

Understanding the evolution of recorded bass needs an equal examination of the changing styles in the music, in the last 60-years, being recorded. ... The P-bass was perfect for R&B and Soul music through the 60's but as the sounds, being recorded say in the early 70's, with the rise of Jazz Rock and Disco, meant the bass needed more point and less low end punch and the P-bass stepped aside for the J-bass and eventually hotter basses like the Stingray and Alembic. ... Then in the 80's with the addition of drum machines and synth keyboards the bass had to be hot to stay in the mix. ... Understanding the evolution in pickups, which has helped the P-bass get back in the race and stay a contender, in the age of digital recording, is important to every bassist because that's where the sound comes from.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

In the United States perhaps, but elsewhere? I wouldn't bet on that. We know John Paul Jones and Herbie Flowers played Js as session musicians in the UK, and that's because they played on music that became well known in North America. Information about what they were playing anyplace else is lacking. And that was the case with session musicians. Bassists in bands played all sorts of stuff, like the Gibson and Epiphone semi hollows that were popular with UK bands circa 1964.

I don't believe we have 60 cycle hum in the UK because the frequency of our electricity grid is different - 50 Hz

 

[micguy]

Later Leo F conceded that the reverse P configuration would produce a still more even sound. Lee Sklar is the best example I can suggest.

I gotta call hogwash. If lLeo had thought this, he would have included it in one of his later designs. The G&L stuff is still "non reversed".

 

[micguy]

Is the hum a narrow frequency bandwidth? Perhaps engineers were able to reduce it significantly with eq without detracting from the bass tracks.

Not at all. It occurs at MANY harmonics - typically, the 60 Hz component typically isn't very strong, but the harmonics are. When you get close to a transformer, the magnetic hum field comes out partly because the transformer is built to be "just big enough" - the iron saturates a little bit (it's like a tube amp saturating to some extent), so the harmonics are what emerges the strongest.

There are 2 kinds of hum/buzz sources - magnetic and electrostatic. Shielding addresses the electrostatic portion, but it does nothing to magnetic sources of hum - all the shielding in the world will not make your jazz quiet if you solo a pickup in a magnetic hum field.

There is an opportunity that Leo missed with P bass split pickups. Yes, there was some attempt at shielding, but if you ground the pole pieces, it helps a lot. Also, wiring the pickups in parallel helps - the way they are usually wired, one pickup is grounded on one end, the other is floating - that gives you a bit of an imbalance that results in a bit of buzz. If you address those two things (this takes less than a dollars worth of copper and a bit more wire), you can make a P REALLY quiet.

 

[micguy]

Yup... of course. Wilton Felder (and many others) played those single-coil Ps for decades. But the hum-bucking P bass could also be induced to hum, just not from the same noise source. I wasn't referring to those - I was talking about initial modern split-coil version.

See above post.

 

[MattZilla]

I don't think it was until the 90s that the large majority of producers started to laud the fact that you can EQ a P Bass to fit into most mixes. This is by benefit of the fact that the Ps give you a lot of mids, so no matter what you have to cut to make room from keys, brass, sax, whatever, there was still plenty of mids to sit the bass in the mix wherever you want. I think from there, a lot of us retconned the history to assume that producers in the 60s felt the same way, but I doubt they did.

Rather than spending time to convince a bass player to run their neck pickup solo or just work with them, it's easier to just hand them a bass and say "use this" as a kind of teaching moment. Basically, if your bass, and the way you prefer to run it provides any kind of impediment to a usable tone, it's far faster for them to make you play another bass than to spend any time with you to help you get a tone they need out of YOUR bass.

Related anecdote- a producer/engineer I've worked with a few times who's been professionally active on the international scene since the early 80s began swearing by Rhode Island Guild acoustic guitars in the early 00s after realising that the easiest/least bad sounding AG recordings they'd done were with Guilds. As of 2015 he said he would only let guitarists do a few takes with their guitars and then have them redo them with his Guilds, and would always at their request scrap the Their Guitar takes.

I imagine most of the Studio Wants A P posters of the past quarter century of TB dealt with producers and engineers who'd already by the 90s suffered through over a decade of amazing Alembics, Wals, Steinbergers, Pedullas, Modulus, Zons, Spectors, etc all owned by players whose ear for whole-band tone was far less developed than they thought… and suffered through re-listening to their work and were embarrassed by the playback of all their 80s work except the few they did fast & loose with a cheap 10-20 year old totally out of fashion round edged low tech surfer/R&B/punk bass.

———

I find the pushback against the P amusing. A slotted screw needs to be turned, but so many of us went and got ourselves all riled up for advanced modern Torx & Robertson drivers and bought those while refusing to buy a flathead screwdriver and resolve to buy every other tool you'd need to make a Torx fit a plain slot.

Been there. Did the dynamics processing and three or more stages of EQ thing.

Regardless of the chicken-egg thing of P-Hit Recordings- after several decades we know that salt melts snow & slush, we know that water hydrates, we know that some people are scared of clowns, and we know that the east way to professionally record amateur musicians' bass parts is with their bassist using a P with minimal/no effects.

 

[bassdude51]

I don't think that 60 cycle hum has anything to do with why the P Bass was the #1 bass of choice for the studio back in the 60s and 70s.

Back then, no one cared about the hum. I mean, Strats, Teles and other single coil guitars were also used for recordings and they hummed.

Reel to reel was used for recording and there was "tape hiss".

Music play back was on Lps and it ticked and popped.

The P was the bass of choice simply because it sounded good.

IMHO

 

[azureblue]

I've done sessions with all 3 Fenders - single coil P, split coil P, and Jazz. It's MY OPINION the Split lays in the background better, giving better support, and still is definable. The Jazz (with both pickups on) IMO, blends better. The single coil had punch for days, and was sort of in between the P and the J. But it had hum problems, aggravated by the use of light dimmers in the studio room. And anything else that offended it. IMO again, I didn't think it worked well in the mix. Live, though, it punched like Ali..

 

[azureblue]

Related anecdote- a producer/engineer I've worked with a few times who's been professionally active on the international scene since the early 80s began swearing by Rhode Island Guild acoustic guitars in the early 00s after realising that the easiest/least bad sounding AG recordings they'd done were with Guilds. As of 2015 he said he would only let guitarists do a few takes with their guitars and then have them redo them with his Guilds, and would always at their request scrap the Their Guitar takes.

I imagine most of the Studio Wants A P posters of the past quarter century of TB dealt with producers and engineers who'd already by the 90s suffered through over a decade of amazing Alembics, Wals, Steinbergers, Pedullas, Modulus, Zons, Spectors, etc all owned by players whose ear for whole-band tone was far less developed than they thought… and suffered through re-listening to their work and were embarrassed by the playback of all their 80s work except the few they did fast & loose with a cheap 10-20 year old totally out of fashion round edged low tech surfer/R&B/punk bass.

———

I find the pushback against the P amusing. A slotted screw needs to be turned, but so many of us went and got ourselves all riled up for advanced modern Torx & Robertson drivers and bought those while refusing to buy a flathead screwdriver and resolve to buy every other tool you'd need to make a Torx fit a plain slot.

Been there. Did the dynamics processing and three or more stages of EQ thing.

Regardless of the chicken-egg thing of P-Hit Recordings- after several decades we know that salt melts snow & slush, we know that water hydrates, we know that some people are scared of clowns, and we know that the east way to professionally record amateur musicians' bass parts is with their bassist using a P with minimal/no effects.

Most of the sessions I did with my P (Yamaha BB5000) were direct in - sitting in the control room. Which made me want a pair of Westlake 2 /15's with JBL horns, as a bass amp..

 

[micguy]

I find it interesting that we tend to collectively think the p-bass was preferred by engineers et al because it "fits perfectly in the mix". I have a different perspective. The p-bass was the first mass-marketed electric bass. As such, it was the most ubiquitous.

You've got part of that right.

P basses were not "better" than other basses of the time, but there were more of them. If you understand the tools Engineers had at that time, they had microphones and microphone placement. That was it. There was no EQ in the desk. There was no multitrack recording - you mixed a few (not many really) mics and made a recording.

So, to get a good sound out of a P bass, they had one amp, and they miked it at a particular spot - they had spent a lot of TIME figuring out where that spot was, and they locked that all in as their "formula" for a good bass sound. In that era, studios were few and far between - studio time was a luxury that noone had - they had to load in a band, get levels on everything, and hit record - they did several songs in a day, one after the other - they didn not have the time to experiment, and variables that they could not control would cause them to spend a lot of time adjusting things, so....bring a P bass, plug in here....

All of this changes once studio time became "cheap" - at least compared to increasing record sales, and EQ became common. What was once a necessity due to circumstances quickly became a historical footnote. Any engineer today that insists on a P bass is not someone you want to work with - I'd be OK with someone suggesting that (though I've never encountered that in 47 years of playing), but after a short discussion about how I'd play the part without one of my strings, I'm pretty sure he'd relent.

The point is: The P bass was not chosen in the studio because it was better or somehow magical in any way - it was chosen because it was simple, reliable, and they had already figured out how to make it sound good. Having only one pickup also meant the player couldn't dial in too many different tones, and that was a help - less variables meant faster sessions.

 

[jnewmark]

I've used both in the studio, and never had a problem with noise when I use my Jazz; maybe its shielded heavily, never looked. I have had engineers ask me to bring a P often, some even asked if I had a mute ( I use the Fender bridge mute under the bridge cover). The last few years, my bass and my cab have been recorded, then mixed by the engineer/producer. If not specifically asked to bring something, I bring the Jazz and my own DI, an Ampeg SVT DI.

 

[dbsfgyd1]

BL in my main band sometimes tells me he prefers my P-bass. I like it too.

But he compliments my playing more when I stick with the J.

That just about sums up what I think might be happening here.

Interesting. My style never changes regardless of which bass I'm playing. Preferred notes and passages are always the same regardless of the instrument.