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What is it about Fender?

#81
I played for about 20 years and never owned a Fender (well, I owned one fretless by accident, but that's a long story). Gigged and recorded with Ibanez, Rickenbacker, Yamaha, Steinberger, etc. To me, Fenders were what the over the hill hillbillies in the saloons played. Not respectable for a young rocker like myself.

I took ten years off.

Recently (very recently) I got the bug again for whatever reason and have been accumulating gear like a very bad, expensive habit. As I began phase two I listened to some of my old recordings. Far an away the best sound I ever got was on a crappy, ugly, brown (painted brown - yuk!) old P-bass that was sitting in the corner of some studio. Hell, it didn't even have knobs on the pot stems.

No question that I was going to take a look at Fender as my first new bass. Got a Geddy Lee Jazz and after a few months of shaking out the rust I can honestly say I have better tone(s) than I ever did before. And now the sounds are plural, instead of the one sound I had that was whatever I could make passable across my herd of all the "dogs and cats" for basses I had owned before.

Sounds great. Plays great. Looks great. And I agree with JimmyM that I really don't care about reliving the past or who did what first. It's all about how much do I enjoy playing and hearing it. While there are probably a few other basses I will put into the must-have category, I'm not in a hurry to buy more basses at the moment. Just rounding out the recording gear and getting ready to buy the infinite amount of everything else that a one-man show needs to make music in the home office.
 
#82
As a person who has worked in a computer/electronic device repair and sales store I can honestly say that Mac's are over-priced, over-hyped and useless garbage; you can get 10 times the computer for 1 tenth the price. The iPod is the only Apple product that is worth buying and even then they're over priced. It's like a sports car that is pretty fast and expensive but can't even hold a small purse let alone your weekly shopping.
 
#84
DenisKrestsov said:
As a person who has worked in a computer/electronic device repair and sales store I can honestly say that Mac's are over-priced, over-hyped and useless garbage; you can get 10 times the computer for 1 tenth the price. The iPod is the only Apple product that is worth buying and even then they're over priced. It's like a sports car that is pretty fast and expensive but can't even hold a small purse let alone your weekly shopping.
Click to expand...

This relates to the thread how???
 
#86
DenisKrestsov said:
As a person who has worked in a computer/electronic device repair and sales store I can honestly say that Mac's are over-priced, over-hyped and useless garbage; you can get 10 times the computer for 1 tenth the price. The iPod is the only Apple product that is worth buying and even then they're over priced. It's like a sports car that is pretty fast and expensive but can't even hold a small purse let alone your weekly shopping.
Click to expand...
Really guys, I didn't subscribe to this thread to read about Apple vs PC! I could care less....
Can you please start your own thread on that topic?
 
#88
Fender is just the sound we all hear in our heads. Its decades of recordings with Fenders. The most recorded bass guitar in history.

I played warwicks before fenders. Those were great sounding basses, but they were just so unique in tone, which can be good, but it just wasnt the sound in my head. i got my first fender american dlx jbass, and now i play them exclusively. sold all of my waricks.
 
#92
I find my '75 P-Bass to be, well, forgiving... this is not going to apply to everyone here, but I'm a bit of a hack bass player. I play what I FEEL and don't really have much formal training on the instrument (I played trombone growing up so THANK GOSH I can read bass clef...)

I have an Alembic Mark King and it's the BEST bass I've ever played. In pretty much ALL ways. Except it requires me to concentrate more on the PLAYING and not on the FEELING. Or something. What an awesome bass that is.

But the Precision... well, it fits like a glove. It is there for me. At a gig, when I've had a few too many. It forgives me for flubbing a note. It forgives me for dropping it or knocking it over on the very rare occasion. Two knobs, but really the only two knobs I need on most gigs. It is the very definition of "bass." Hard-wired into our DNA (or at least those people born in the second half of last century).

But the Alembic, well, it's a work of art.
 
#93
The mids. Many old basses were all about muddy low end, with short scales and pickups too close to the neck. Fender basses with the long scale and pickups more centered to the body produced a more defined punchy tone.
 
#99
I agree with mostly everything said here but I think most are actually talking about Ps and Js instead of Fender only. By this I mean that everyone keeps talking about how Fender's sit in the mix and give the sound that they want and all the stuff but I am going to argue that it is just that P and J design that provide that (which if course Fender came up with). IMO a P or J made by a number of companies can sit in the mix just as well as a Fender because they are all basically the same in design (if they are passive Ps and Js) and will bring a pretty similar sound.
I have owned 3 Fenders, which is not a lot by TB standards but certainly enough to get a feel for them. I have also owned Ps and Js by other companies and I think those have pretty much got that Fender sound.

Still, Fender has the iconic name, it is the original, it symbolizes quality, and it's what we know. In many ways, nothing beats a quality Fender. I can't believe I let my MIJ fretless jazz slip through my fingers....arrrrgh!
 

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