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White pickups on a P Bass?

R

rdcowan

Aug 13, 2009
121
19
Central Texas
#1
A friend of mine just picked up what is supposed to be an early 60's Fender P bass. The neck is definitely Fender, but the pickups are white/ivory with adjustable pole pieces. Anyone ever see or hear of such a thing. That is what troubles me about it. Serial number on the neck plate seems to be 60's, but the pickup looks weird to me. The neck is maple with the stripe down the back. Body is natural ash, but the bass has been refinished. You can see brush marks on the head where they have applied the clear coat. The frets are worn and the neck has definitely been played.
Any ideas?
 
#4
The white adjustable pole pickups are DiMarzios which were a popular mod back in the day..
Fender came out with white pickups in the early 80's but were not adjustable.
By your description of the ash body with maple board neck and skunk stripe, I'm betting it's actually an early 70's bass. Got any pictures we can see?
 
#7
The DiMarzio pickups are cream colored, the same shade as the cream bobbins on Gibson humbuckers, and most DiMarzio guitar 'buckers. A maple neck with a skunk stripe isn't an early '60s and they stopped using one-piece maple necks around '59. They didn't reappear until after 1970. The only maple fingerboards in the '60s were a maple board glued to a maple neck, so they didn't have the skunk stripe (the truss rod is installed through fingerboard side of the neck, so the fingerboard covered the routing and they didn't need to install it from the back).

John
 
#8
rdcowan said:
A friend of mine just picked up what is supposed to be an early 60's Fender P bass. The neck is definitely Fender, but the pickups are white/ivory with adjustable pole pieces. Anyone ever see or hear of such a thing. That is what troubles me about it. Serial number on the neck plate seems to be 60's, but the pickup looks weird to me. The neck is maple with the stripe down the back. Body is natural ash, but the bass has been refinished. You can see brush marks on the head where they have applied the clear coat. The frets are worn and the neck has definitely been played.
Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Somebody retrofitted Dimarzio's in the 70s would be my guess.
 
#9
Here are some pics.
 

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#20
That looks like my old bass! I had an identical '76 Precision and I replaced the original pickups with Dimarzios. Cream colored and the poles were adjustable. I used to raise the D and G poles to get more even response between all 4 strings.

I have always regretted selling that bass.
 

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