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Has Fender ever changed the Precision pickup location?

#21
wvbass said:
Since you went to all the trouble to make that picture, I will go to the trouble to point out that the nuts on these basses don't line up. They don't appear to all be pictured at the same scale, so I'm not sure your drawing means much.
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I understand exactly what you are saying. However I have made quite a few pictures like these over the years where I carefully scale the pictures so that the nuts and bridges line up perfectly. Typically when I do that I find that all the intermediate frets fail to line up and when I do that with several basses as in this picture the results are pretty comical since sometimes no two of them agree. How can this be? The answer, near as I can figure out, is distortion in the camera lenses that were used to take the pictures. If you take pictures of two 34 inch basses and scale them so that the nut and bridge line up then every fret should also line up but typically they do not and very often some will line up and others will not! I don't know of anything other than lens distortion that could cause this to happen and one time I used the distortion functions of a photo editor (Gimp) to try to correct the situation with pretty good results but boy was that a lot of trial and error work! So, in this case I just scaled the photos so that the distance from 20th fret to bridge was the same in every case. I believe this is the best one can do without an extreme amount of effort and it should be reasonably accurate since the amount of distortion difference from bridge to 20th fret in the original photos should be smaller than that from bridge to nut and therefore the accuracy of the picture above is likely higher than if I had equalized the distance between nut and bridge. But for the purpose of this discussion it is likely that either approach is accurate enough.

But kudos to you for noticing, no one else ever has!
 
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#23
Fender has experimented with the P bass so much that quite literally, the ONLY thing that actually defines a P bass as a P bass is the fact that it says P bass on the headstock!

Over the years Fender has put a...
solitary single coil in the bass and called it a precision.
a split P and called it a precision.
a split P and a jazz single coil and called it a precision.
a dual set of humbuckers and called it a precision.
a passive tone control and called it a precision.
an active preamp and called it a precision.

The only thing precise about a precision unfortunately is the wording on the headstock.
 
#24
devinp17 said:
Right. I know that a few PJ Fenders have had different pickup placements. For example, the Jazz Bass Special:

Duff-McKagan-duff-mckagan-26038871-750-900.jpg


As you can see (if you look closely), the pickups (well, at least the P pup) are closer to the bridge than the pup in a regular Precision bass.
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My JBS appears to have standard placement, but I don't have a regular P bass to directly compare it to.
Can someone confirm?
 

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#25
MVE said:
My JBS appears to have standard placement, but I don't have a regular P bass to directly compare it to.
Can someone confirm?
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wvbass said:
I don't see that at all. In addition, my Jazz Special has its P pickup in the same place as my Highway 1 Precision: 10.5 inches from the 12th fret.
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I confirmed your assessment in the very next post.

GBassNorth said:
Fender has experimented with the P bass so much that quite literally, the ONLY thing that actually defines a P bass as a P bass is the fact that it says P bass on the headstock!

Over the years Fender has put a...
solitary single coil in the bass and called it a precision.
a split P and called it a precision.
a split P and a jazz single coil and called it a precision.
a dual set of humbuckers and called it a precision.
a passive tone control and called it a precision.
an active preamp and called it a precision.

The only thing precise about a precision unfortunately is the wording on the headstock.
Click to expand...
Agreed, but any time a P bass has had a split pickup, it has always been in the same position. If they move the P pickup, they call it something else. That may be coincidence, but I think it is true.

EDIT: One Precision is different. On the Precision Elite II, there was a P pickup in the correct location AND a P pickup at the bridge. They even changed the shape of the pickup.
 
#27
GBassNorth said:
Fender has experimented with the P bass so much that quite literally, the ONLY thing that actually defines a P bass as a P bass is the fact that it says P bass on the headstock!

Over the years Fender has put a...
solitary single coil in the bass and called it a precision.
a split P and called it a precision.
a split P and a jazz single coil and called it a precision.
a dual set of humbuckers and called it a precision.
a passive tone control and called it a precision.
an active preamp and called it a precision.

The only thing precise about a precision unfortunately is the wording on the headstock.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure the body shape has stayed the same, except for the longhorns.
 
#28
devinp17 said:
I think the Power Jazz Bass Special is much different than the Jazz Bass Special. But again, I'm probably wrong about the pickup placement on the JBS.
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Good call. Reverse P in more-or-less traditional position and active electronics, right? I think this qualifies as a "experimenting with the precision pickup location," but they didn't call it a Precision. Even though it was.
 
#30
awilkie84 said:
I'm pretty sure the body shape has stayed the same, except for the longhorns.
Click to expand...
Slab body, contour body, boner body, with pick guard, without pick guard, with Tele style pick guard, with cabronita pic guard, with control plate, without control plate, countless different bridges, maple fretboard, rosewood fretboard, pao fretboard, several different body woods, regular tuners, reverse tuners, 4 string, 5 string, strap button on body, strap button on headstock, one string tree buton, two string tree buttons, ash trays, no ash trays, standard headstock, tele headstock, and many other changes through the years.
I think the only other thing besides the name that might not have changed over the years is the number of frets, which I think has always been 20 but I might be wrong about that.

Edit - I was wrong, the precision bass plus had 22 frets and the precision deluxe had 21 frets. So I guess the only thing that truly defines a precision bass is the name. Everything else has changed at one time or another.
 
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#31
GBassNorth said:
Slab body, contour body, boner body, with pick guard, without pick guard, with Tele style pick guard, with cabronita pic guard, with control plate, without control plate, countless different bridges, maple fretboard, rosewood fretboard, pao fretboard, several different body woods, regular tuners, reverse tuners, 4 string, 5 string, strap button on body, strap button on headstock, one string tree buton, two string tree buttons, ash trays, no ash trays, standard headstock, tele headstock, and many other changes through the years.
I think the only other thing besides the name that might not have changed over the years is the number of frets, which I think has always been 20 but I might be wrong about that.
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I said shape, not aesthetics. lol The slabs & contours are identical, except for the carve outs.
 
#32
awilkie84 said:
I said shape, not aesthetics. lol The slabs & contours are identical, except for the carve outs.
Click to expand...
The Fender P bass plus was a different body style with a significantly longer upper horn for better balance and a deeper cut lower horn which gave access to all 22 frets vs the standard 18 or 19 fret access on the normal 20 fret Precision neck.
 
#33
GBassNorth said:
The Fender P bass plus was a different body style with a significantly longer upper horn for better balance and a deeper cut lower horn which gave access to all 22 frets vs the standard 18 or 19 fret access on the normal 20 fret Precision neck.
Click to expand...
Didn't I already exclude the boners & longhorns? :P

The thing is that a Fender P or J is always recognizable as such. They, as with any other manufacturer, will fine tune or change details but the fundamentals are always the same.
 
#34
awilkie84 said:
Didn't I already exclude the boners & longhorns? :p
.
Click to expand...
Yes, you did choose to ignore the fact that I said virtually every detail of a P bass has been changed at some point in time (except the name). Yes, that includes the body. Yes, that includes the very thing that many of us use to define a P bass, namely the signature sound and look of the split coil pickup.

My point isn't that a P bass is no longer recognizable, but that for some reason Fender chose over the years to change what ever attributes they wanted and yet still call it a P bass and place it right along side other traditional P basses on the showroom floor. A very confusing brand equity plan for one of their bread and butter products.

A quick visit to your local guitar store or the Fender website and you'll find a Fender blacktop Precision (with dual humbuckers listed as a standard precision bass) right next to an American Deluxe Precision (with a P/J layout) right next to a Cabronita Precision Bass (with a single Humbucker) right next to a Mike Dirnt Precision bass (with a split P but a Tele control plate and headstock). The one thing they all have in common is the "Fender Precision Bass" title on the headstock.
 

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