Welcome to the 200th episode of the “I’m In Love With That Song” Podcast. To mark the occasion, we’re celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Fender Precision Bass: the bass guitar that would revolutionize the role of the bass in all forms of popular music– Rock, Jazz, R&B, Country and beyond.
On this episode, I’m joined by Joe Branton (host of the “Guitar Nerds” podcast) to delve into the rich history of the electric bass, particularly the Fender Precision, which would have a profound impact on all the music we love.
Join us for this special milestone episode as we celebrate the legacy of the electric bass guitar and the vibrant community of bass players who continue to push the boundaries of music. Whether you’re a seasoned musician or a casual listener, this episode offers insights and stories that will resonate with anyone who appreciates the art of music.
WATCH THE VIDEO EPISODE HERE:
TRANSCRIPT:
Brad Page: Welcome once again to the I’m in Love with That Song podcast. I’m your host, Brad Page. We’re here on the Pantheon Podcast Network to bring you the 200th episode of this show. That’s right, this is our 200th edition of the I’m in Love with That Song podcast. So, of course, I thought we should do something a little different, something a little special for this auspicious occasion.
2026 also happens to be the 75th anniversary of the Fender Precision Bass guitar. That’s the instrument that would revolutionize the performance and the role of the bass in popular music. So, I thought we could celebrate our 200th episode with a salute to the bass guitar.
And if we’re going to feature the bass guitar, then we should have an expert join us on the show. And I can think of no one better to talk bass with than the marvelous Mr. Joe Branton. Joe is the bass player for the band Polymath, a fascinating prog-rock band from the UK, and he’s also the host of the Guitar Nerds podcast—an absolutely fantastic podcast that I am a huge fan of. Joe is well-versed in the history of the Fender Precision Bass and bass guitar in general, so he was the perfect guest for this show.
And to make this 200th episode even more special, I’m doing a video version of this show. It’s the first time ever. I will admit, Joe and I do get a little more geeky than I usually do on this podcast, but if you watch the video, you can see pictures and examples of what we’re talking about. So, anyone can follow along with this conversation; you don’t need to be a musician.
So, turn up the bottom end, and let’s rediscover the history of the bass guitar.
Brad Page: All right, Joe Branton, thank you so much for joining me here on the I’m in Love with That Song podcast to talk about the history of the Fender Precision Bass and electric bass in general.
Joe Branton: Well, thank you very much for having me, Brad. It’s an honor to be on your podcast, on the 200th episode, no less.
Brad Page: Yeah, well, thanks for coming on. So, the electric bass kind of had a lot of false starts. It really—the whole reason for its existence, really back in the day, was volume, right? Because it was an instrument that was very difficult to hear over drums and horns and all that stuff on the classic big band stage. Prior to that, we had what we called the double bass, right? Which most people would be familiar with. That’s the stand-up bass, an acoustic bass.
Joe Branton: Upright bass, yeah.
Brad Page: Right, upright bass. That was developed around the 1500s, I think. And it wasn’t until the 50s that we had a successful electric bass. But to get us there, Gibson had experimented with an electric upright bass in the 1920s. 1930s, Rickenbacker sold electric basses. There were a couple of other companies, but they just—they were not successful.
Joe Branton: Did you ever see the “Foot Bass”?
Brad Page: The Foot Bass? No, tell me about the Foot Bass.
Joe Branton: Imagine the body of an upright bass—so just that oversized cello, upright bass—sitting upright. Attached to it, maybe 10 or 15 foot pedals, all with strings attached to it. The idea was—it was invented in, I think, the late 40s, early 50s by a fellow who was in a one-man band. And the idea was to bring some of that, like a halfway house. I just remember that being at the time… and I know that’s not the electric bass, but those early 50s… they hadn’t decided yet how bands were going to work out, and that’s why it’s so amazing what ended up happening with the electric bass.
Brad Page: Right. And just all of this stuff—guitars and amplifiers—this was really the kind of the “Wild West” in terms of innovation and discovery and a lot of crazy inventions and a lot of failures to get us to the successes that we’re all super familiar with now.
One of the ones that fascinated me was a guy named Everett Hull, who invented a microphone that you would mount inside the stand-up bass on the peg. You know, you have the peg that sticks out of the bottom…
Joe Branton: Yeah, yeah.
Brad Page: …and that extends inside the instrument. And he created a microphone that would mount on that. And that was called the “Ampeg.” And that’s where we get the name of a brand that still exists today, Ampeg. But that’s how it literally started—with an “amp on a peg.”
Joe Branton: Oh, I love that story. I did not know that! That’s fantastic. That makes so much more sense now, and I love it.
Brad Page: Yeah, it’s great!
But none of these things were particularly successful until Fender—Leo Fender—comes out with the bass that he calls the Fender Precision in, I believe, October of 1951. Does that sound right?
Joe Branton: That’s right.
Brad Page: Let’s talk about why they called it the “Precision” in the first place.
Joe Branton: Well, it’s the first time that a bass had been fretted. Bass was not a fretted instrument prior to Leo Fender in 1951. I think it’s amazing. The electric guitar is something other people were really messing with; it kind of already existed by the time Leo Fender’s doing the Telecaster or the Broadcaster. All of those things are already there. He just made a really cool one, and then a load of really cool ones for various companies. But for bass, he actually invented a new type of instrument that changed how music was recorded. Bass was not fretted until October of 1951.
Brad Page: Yeah, that’s so important. A.) the fact that it’s the first fretted bass, and B.) the fact that it’s a bass that you played like a guitar. Because a lot of those earlier inventions that we just kind of talked through, those were primarily based on the stand-up model versus a bass that you would play like a guitar. And that was pretty revolutionary and fairly controversial at the time, too, because there were a lot of detractors who felt that it wasn’t, quote-unquote, a “real” bass because you didn’t play it standing up and it had frets and all of those things. So there was initial resistance to that.
Joe Branton: Yeah, it was an established instrument. Upright bass was established. That’s what the bass players did. So people who were trained upright bass players didn’t want to play electric bass. It didn’t work out so well; you only play with three fingers on an upright, so moving to a guitar style was tricky. And other companies didn’t buy into it. You mentioned Ampeg—Ampeg were still making upright basses until the early 70s. And you think of Ampeg… they were making basses that could be used as both. 1953, two years after Fender released the Precision Bass, Gibson is still there going, “I don’t think this is going to work,” and they released the EB-1, one of my favorite basses. The EB-1, a solid-body violin bass—looks like a Hofner bass, dear listener, but it’s actually solid. It can be played in this quirky modern way like a guitar, or it comes with a telescopic tailpiece so you can play it like an upright, meaning you get the precision of the frets, which they liked the idea of, but they’re like, “But bass players, you don’t want to relearn. Why not play upright?”
Brad Page: Right, exactly. So it was a really innovative move for Fender to come out with the Precision in 1951, and it took a little while to catch on. The original Fender Precision looked a little different than the one people may be familiar with today. It was actually based on the Telecaster design, but it was a double-cut, ash body, 20-fret maple neck, single-coil pickup, a 34-inch scale length—which was something that I understand took some development. I believe they tried 30, 32, 36-inch before they settled on the 34-inch. And if I remember correctly, it retailed for around $199 US dollars, which was still a lot of money back then. I think that equates to about $1,800 in today’s money.
Joe Branton: Really? Wow.
Brad Page: Yeah, so not an inexpensive proposition.
Joe Branton: The 34-inch scale that Fender went for is extra interesting as well, because, whilst today that is the industry standard—99% of electric basses are going to be a 34-inch scale—at the time, no one went with this. Not one company went with this for years. Everyone messed around with a 30-inch scale, like Burns were doing it right into the 60s, Gibson… what you call the “short scale” bass. That was the scale that the competition almost universally went with. Fender were the only ones going 34, and at that time for the bulk of the 50s… not really until that 1957 body switch for Fender where it became the Precision Bass we know today, not until then did other companies start catching on and mimicking the 34-inch scale. It was a complete anomaly.
Brad Page: It’s amazing that so many of the things that Fender settled on became the industry standard. He just got it right the first time.
Some of the early pioneers of playing the electric bass… there was a guy named Joel Price, who was a country player. Bob Manners, who played with Liberace, believe it or not, who had a TV show at the time in the U.S. So people would see the Fender bass on TV; that was good exposure for it.
Lionel Hampton, the jazz player, had a couple of key bass players in his band: Roy Johnson initially and then Monk Montgomery, who was the brother of legendary jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery. Monk Montgomery is one of the first pioneers of playing the electric bass under Lionel Hampton’s guidance or influence.
One of the first rock records to feature the electric bass was a band called The Treniers—a guy named Shifty Henry.
Joe Branton: Such a good name. That is pure 50s right there.
Brad Page: Played on a song called “Rock-a-Beatin’ Boogie” from 1953.
One of the, I think, forgotten pioneers of the electric bass was actually a woman named Joan Anderson, who played with a country band called Bill Peer and his Melody Boys and Girls, which also featured Patsy Cline before she went solo. It’s interesting; there were a couple of women playing electric bass very early on, written out of history unfortunately, as these things tend to happen.
You mentioned the Gibson EB-1, that’s their first stab at the electric bass, right, 1953?
Joe Branton: That’s right, yeah.
Brad Page: The Hofner bass comes out in 1956.
Joe Branton: Yeah, and again, another bass with a 30-inch scale. See, no one is going with Fender’s 34-inch scale at this point in time. It’s wild to think that it didn’t catch on, not really until the dawn of the 60s did people start copying it.
Brad Page: There was a British trade embargo against a lot of U.S. products from 1951 to 1959 that cut off your access to a lot of American brands, including the electric bass. So that was kind of Hofner’s “in,” I think, to the British market. They really didn’t have competition from Fender.
Joe Branton: Yeah, Hofner and Framus… Burns, for the UK companies, these were the things that we were playing. Rapier as a smaller brand that were existing over here. But yeah, those were the things people were playing. The P-Bass definitely took its time over here. I don’t think British music was especially exposed to it, really, until the 60s when you saw those trade embargos go away. But then you also saw the birth of soul, so you had like Stax and Motown Records. And then you’ve got Donald “Duck” Dunn, you’ve got James Jamerson… those two guys alone, they are like the P-Bass players. They’re the people that bring it to this whole new level. They essentially defined an entire genre by the sound of a Precision Bass with flat-wound strings. And I think at that point, probably more universally, it became accepted as the industry standard.
Brad Page: Right, right. And we’ll talk more about those guys as we get further along. I believe the first recorded electric bass solo was by a British band, The Shadows. Jet Harris, a song called “Nivram.”
Joe Branton: But he’d have been playing a Burns, one of his famous signature Shadows basses.
Brad Page: Right, that would have been 1961. Jet Harris was voted the NME Readers’ Poll number one solo instrumentalist in 1962, which is interesting for a bass player, right?
Joe Branton: Wow, that’s impressive.
Brad Page: Of course, around that time you started to have some of the things like what they would call the “Tic-Tac” bass that you’d hear on Duane Eddy songs like “Rebel Rouser.”
Joe Branton: The Bass VI, so you know, that sort of early 60s… of course, Gretsch had already introduced their version of the Bass VI by then, but the Fender Bass VI turned up in the 60s. Leo was always trying to work out where the bass would sit.
Brad Page: Yeah, let’s step back a little bit and talk a little bit more about the Precision Bass. In ’54, they introduced the contoured body, a little bit of a design change. I think that’s when the sunburst came out and the white pickup. And then in ’57… ’57, I believe, is when really the definitive look of what we think of when we think of a Precision today with that very distinctive pickup, the bridge, a different pickguard, larger headstock—all of that came about in ’57, I believe.
Joe Branton: That’s right. ’57 is when we got that. We didn’t get rosewood boards, though, until a little later, so we’re still on maple boards at that point. ’59, I think, for rosewood. So sort of ’57… that’s really quintessential: two-tone sunburst (not three-tone yet), gold anodized plate, great big baseball bat maple neck, and the new headstock. And that, of course, is, I guess, what we think of as a Precision Bass today. They moved away from that single-coil pickup towards the split-humbucking pickup.
Brad Page: Right. And then in March of 1960, they introduced the Jazz Bass, which I know you’re a big fan of the Jazz Bass. Why don’t you maybe explain to people what the difference is between a Precision and a Jazz Bass?
Joe Branton: Yeah, I guess they do look kind of similar from a layman’s perspective. The Jazz Bass was great because it was the first time Leo Fender really listened to people and listened to what people wanted from an instrument. The necks on P-Basses were obviously big and fat, so he decided to make a Jazz Bass neck very slender. It has a really aggressive taper, so the strings are very close together at the nut. The idea was making it more comfortable to play, faster to play. And instead of just having one pickup bang in the middle of the body—that’s what the P-Bass has, that split humbucker—you’ve got two single coils: one in the middle of the body (so you can still make a Jazz Bass sound like a P-Bass), but then you’ve got one wedged closer to the bridge. Two volume controls, so you can blend between them, and that’s when we really got those kind of honkier sounds coming out of bass. And certainly, I would say the 80s is defined by bridge pickups on Jazz Basses and that sort of thing. The body was different; it was offset to mimic the other instruments coming out at the time, the Jazzmaster, the Jaguar. Fender were going through their “offset Beach Boys” phase.
Brad Page: Yeah, define “offset” for the folks at home.
Joe Branton: Oh, of course. So, probably a slightly angled body. Rather than it being straight as you look at it standing up, think of it as being slightly off-kilter and extended in the lower bout and the upper horn.
Brad Page: Now you play both a P-Bass and a Jazz Bass. I know you’ve owned many basses over the years. What’s your personal preference?
Joe Branton: Oh… it’s… I have a Jazz Bass that, you know, I definitely end up using probably more than any other instrument. It’s probably been on more records I’ve ever recorded and done a few more tours than anything else. I love the versatility of a Jazz Bass; having those two pickups is fantastic. But I would never, ever choose it as my favorite. My favorite thing is a very, very simple Precision Bass with flat-wounds. If you just want to sound fantastic, then a P-Bass is the answer. And there is no world where I would ever choose a Jazz Bass over a P-Bass. If you asked me what was the best bass, it’s obviously a Precision Bass. Everything about a P-Bass seems to be spot on. He just got it right. That was the thing; he just got it right.
Brad Page: In ’61, Gibson introduced the EB-3, which is kind of now… was that short scale or long scale? I forget.
Joe Branton: Short scale. They did, at this time, for the first time ever, introduce a Fender-scale bass, so they introduced the EB-3L as well, but not initially. You can get very few 60s EB-3Ls; they more commonly appeared in the 70s. But of course, the EB-3, dear listener, was on an SG-type body shape—so a really small body—so the problem was when they started using 34-inch scale necks, the neck dive was horrendous. You would snap that bass in half as soon as you let go of it.
Brad Page: Yeah, neck-heavy, so once you let go of the neck, it would immediately drop to the ground. The Gibson Thunderbird comes out in ’63, and that’s a long scale, full scale, however you want to refer to it.
Joe Branton: Yeah, that’s right. Fantastic, fantastic bass.
Brad Page: Yeah, oh, I love them. And they just look super cool.
Joe Branton: They do. I can’t pull them off. You can’t wear them up high because they’re so wide. So, difficult for me, but I do love them objectively.
Brad Page: In ’65, Fender is purchased by CBS, which kind of changes things, and eventually, the CBS-era Fenders kind of have a bad rap, right?
Joe Branton: Yeah, yeah, they do. They weren’t the same. But I mean, they’re still fantastic instruments. It’s one of those things I think there’s more in the rumor than there is in the fact.
Brad Page: I would agree. I’ve owned a few 70s Fenders and Gibsons, and I think they’re perfectly great guitars.
In 1966, Ampeg released the AUB-1, which I believe was the first electric fretless.
Joe Branton: Yeah, I didn’t know that. First electric fretless… it is such a great, great bass.
Brad Page: Now, do you play fretless much?
Joe Branton: I do, yeah. Probably about a quarter of the time. I love it. I play upright as well; I’m trying to play upright more this year—I started lessons on that. I’d really like to play upright more. But I do have a couple of fretlesses. I always record bits and pieces on records. I love it as a more expressive instrument than a fretted bass. It’s just… you’ve got to find the right track where it’s applicable, I guess. The AUB-1 bass was incredible. The fact that it was… if you’ve never seen one, dear listener, it’s a solid bass with f-holes, like you get on a cello or an upright bass, but they go the whole way through the body. Which just looks amazing. They’re incredibly cool-looking, hard to come by, and expensive.
Brad Page: Yeah. Once we get into the 70s, then we start to see an explosion of kind of more… I don’t know if I would necessarily call them “boutiquey,” but more kind of customized, custom-type basses. Alembic in 1971… what were some of your favorite oddball 70s basses?
Joe Branton: Well, the 70s is a wonderful time because Japan steps into the ring in the 70s and kind of takes a little bit of that American dominance of the music instrument manufacturers. Sure, they take the bulk of the 70s to really get it right—the 80s is where Japan comes alive—but throughout the 70s you start to see kind of more things: Ibanez becomes a pretty big player; certainly towards the late 70s you get the Roadster, the Roadstar, the Musician. These are all fantastic basses, most of which offered fretted or fretless. They also started exploring things like ebony wood for fretboards, as well as using maple, which is great on fretless instruments. Stuff like that was fantastic. I think also a brand that we didn’t mention in the 60s, you had Silvertone, Danelectro, making fantastic Sears catalog guitars. Affordable but incredible in their own right, and they were doing their own thing on the bass front as well. But yeah, in the 70s, what would be my favorite sort of type of bass? It’s still so dominated by Fender at this point. The Fender Precision Bass is still absolutely king.
Brad Page: It’s the one to beat, right?
Joe Branton: Yeah, exactly. The problem is towards the late 70s, active circuitry arrives. And this will come into play more in the 80s, but people kind of fall out of love towards the end of the 70s with that classic Fender bass tone. They want something more aggressive, more sparkly, more clear, more clinical. And so they start cutting huge holes in the back of their, by today’s standards, very expensive vintage Fender basses, putting batteries and active preamps in them, and throwing away their, sort of now sought-after, original Fender pickups.
Brad Page: Right. And you’ve got, like we mentioned, Alembic. You look at some of those basses and they have six knobs and five switches and all kinds of extra stuff on there.
Joe Branton: This is it. This is it. And it becomes standard in the 80s. We start seeing active circuitry, so having a preamp where you’d have bass, middle, and treble controlled on the bass itself becomes kind of a standard. By this point, the Precision Bass and the Jazz Bass are sort of “old hat.” It’s why people were modifying them so much. They didn’t have—that time period didn’t look as lovingly back at the 50s and 60s as we do now. Bass gear was “old tech” to be discarded or modified.
Brad Page: It’s interesting how, you know, the closer we are to something, we tend to undervalue it as opposed to once something gets to be 20 years old, and that’s constantly rolling, right? Like now instruments and amps and stuff from the 90s are now, quote-unquote, “vintage.”
Joe Branton: The other big brand, I guess, that came into play, who really brought in an instrument that was a frontrunner along with Gibson, along with Fender, is Yamaha with the Broad Bass, or BB as they’re more commonly known. That occurred at this time, which was very much a Fender-style instrument. This used the same pickups—it was a PJ split, so you got a Jazz pickup and a Precision Bass pickup in the bulk of them. So it did a bit of both. The body shape is very similar, although original in its own right, and it’s a 34-inch scale, similar headstock tuners in the same place. This was Yamaha stepping in and offering something that was along the same lines as a Precision and a Jazz, but with that incredible Japanese build quality that was occurring around the 70s and 80s.
Brad Page: Yeah, a lot of those brands started out making exact copies that sort of got them in some legal trouble, right? But that was kind of their… they were doing knock-offs and then eventually evolved into coming up with their own designs and innovations, and some of those are some of the best instruments you can get from the time and still to this day, in a lot of ways, I think undervalued or underappreciated.
Joe Branton: Yeah, there are still a few things that I think you can… less and less… older things that maybe have… that you can pick up for a reasonable price that people haven’t quite caught on to the fact that they’re really good. What happens is that you get priced out of the 60s stuff. And so then those CBS-era Fenders that you poo-pooed 10 years ago, now suddenly they become desirable just because the sheer fact that nobody can afford those 60s models. Everything goes up in price and you find yourself priced out, and so you start to look at things like Ibanez and Yamaha and stuff that really people weren’t so attracted to. Now those things have value, too.
You look at one of the best brands for high-quality Fender copies—and this, dear listener, is if you’re not aware of them, this is a brand to look out for: Tokai. And what Tokai were turning out throughout the 80s was absolutely incredible, in both guitar and basses, in both Gibson copies and Fender copies. But their “Jazz Sound” bass was their Jazz Bass and their “Hard Puncher” was their Precision Bass, and they are every bit the quality that Fender were putting out at that time. But until recently, you could pick up a good old Tokai for the best part of probably about 500 quid over here, probably about $700 over your way. But now we’re seeing them go for 1,100 pounds, so that’s $1,500, $1,600 U.S. I assume it’s probably maybe a bit cheaper for you just because of proximity to Japan, but still, they’re no longer the cheap way in, so to speak. They’ll cost you real money now, too.
Brad Page: I used to play a few Fernandes guitars back in the 80s that, again, were great Fender knock-offs that in many cases played as good, if not better.
Joe Branton: Well, you know, look at Green Day. Billie Joe Armstrong, the guitarist from Green Day, his guitar that made their first few records is a Fernandes Strat copy. That speaks volumes for that brand. They were great.
Brad Page: Yeah. We also see the first five-strings in the 70s. So, innovation continues.
Joe Branton: That’s interesting. Five-string, I guess, started to become people wanting a low B. I’ve always favored a high C on a five-string. I like it that way around, but low B, I guess, became very popular. Certainly that worked moving forward because heavier genres, metal bands, they wanted those lower tunings. Five-string is perfect for that. It was also great for soul and anything like that that just needed that sort of low register.
Brad Page: As we get into the 80s, we see on one hand, a company like Steinberger who kind of reinvents the bass…
Joe Branton: I love him. Ned Steinberger—what an absolute hero. Few people can claim to have offered more original, working ideas and design to the electric guitar and bass. I think the man is an absolute genius. I’ve loved everything he’s ever done.
Brad Page: I mean, you can go to the NAMM show every year and find all kinds of crazy inventions, but so few of them catch on. But what he did actually, multiple times, has stuck around. They were innovations that were valuable and influential. And of course, the headless bass is probably the thing that most people identify with him.
Joe Branton: Small rectangular body, headless bass. He was exploring carbon fiber as a material. That in itself was revolutionary at the time. Two-way truss rods, I think he was the first for that. But the guy was an absolute genius; all the stuff was fantastic. Of course, Steinberger later got bought by Gibson, and the instruments became a little cheaper, made out of wood. They still had the essence, but he went on to found NS Design instead, which is his company to today.
Brad Page: And on kind of the other side of that, Fender launches the Squier brand in 1982, which is kind of their budget or entry, beginner, however you want to say it. But that made a true Fender-style guitar available at a price point for beginners, which… we always need people coming into the business and picking up guitar for the first time.
Joe Branton: Yeah, it was great. That was a real change for Fender because obviously Squier were introduced to combat Japan’s sort of lawsuit-era instruments coming from Tokai and Fernandez and people like that. Squier was made in Japan at the time initially, and the idea was that they would have those entry-level instruments to kind of have a company owned by Fender so Fender can make the money from the knock-offs rather than not making the money from them. But Squier’s still out there today and actually making some great instruments today. I would recommend a Squier Strat or Tele or P-Bass or whatever to anyone who’s looking to get started. They’re fantastic.
Brad Page: As time goes on, there’s sort of less and less new ground to explore, but there are still people doing some innovative things. What are some of your favorite things that you’ve seen in the last couple of decades?
Joe Branton: Well, one of the things that I thought was kind of the, I guess, a movement that I think was one of the most innovative was, in many ways, the least innovative because it was looking back. For the first time over the last 20 years or so, we’ve started to get the concept of reissues, which is fantastic for someone like me who loves traditional stuff and I’m not really into sort of modern concepts, fan frets, vaulted, whatnots. Like Ned Steinberger is as far as I go. Everything that happened after that… it’s too modern for me. But past this point, we got all these brands releasing stuff that looked like the old things, but maybe took away some of those weirder quirks, so they’d have working truss rods, the pickups wouldn’t be microphonic, maybe they’ve refined the neck a little bit so it’s actually comfortable to play—lots of little things like that.
And it was great seeing… I love brands like… we talked about the Ampeg bass earlier. Eastwood– fantastic brand for making affordable guitars inspired by old instruments. They do a version of the Ampeg bass. You couldn’t pick up an AUB-1 probably for less than maybe 8,000 pounds at the moment, certainly not over here. But you can, for about 600 quid, get the Eastwood copy. And I think that’s wonderful that people have access to that. And you had other brands like Vintage doing a similar thing. Squier introduced their “Classic Vibe” range, which meant that they were doing things not 100% accurate to specific years of Fender’s past, but general copies of stuff that sort of existed back then.
Brad Page: Just capturing the feel and, as they say, the “vibe” of those vintage instruments.
Joe Branton: Exactly, exactly. So for me, I love that that’s become a thing. More than lots of people have looked forward; there are lots of brands doing really creative modern stuff. There’s a brand called Meta Basses—unfortunately named just before Facebook rebranded, so difficult to search for them now. But they’re a little French company and they make instruments out of carbon fiber. Their shapes are so elegant and interesting and the build quality is so extremely high. I love things like that; I think they’re really interesting.
Brad Page: Let’s talk—and you touched on it earlier—but let’s talk about some of the important ambassadors of the bass over the years. Of course, James Jamerson, Motown legend, hugely influential across almost all genres in that his technique and style really influenced so many people that it influences people today who don’t even know that they’re influenced by James Jamerson, right? So many great bass parts. “For Once in My Life” is one of my favorites from James Jamerson.
Joe Branton: Yeah, absolutely. And I think you can’t speak about Jamerson without talking about Duck Dunn. In many ways, they were… I often think of them only probably in my head, but like as these two nemeses of Stax versus Motown. Like early soul and R&B, they were just so different, but so similar in the same at the same time. I love Booker T. and the M.G.’s; I love everything they’ve ever done. And hearing the Stax records that Dunn played on and the Motown records that Jamerson played on, they just brought this vibe, this ability to groove but also solo on the bass, which was so uncommon at the time. They brought like a mojo, just a coolness to the bass guitar that probably hadn’t existed before those two men.
Brad Page: Duck Dunn is very much a groove player. Not fancy, not a lot of fills and things like that, but just the groove is what he was all about. Just always in the pocket. Jamerson had all of that, but he also had the flourish, you know? He was a little bit more fancy, if you will. And then you have guys like Bob Babbitt, who was kind of the number two chair at Motown, who played on a lot of those records too. Jamerson gets so much of the credit—well deserved—but you also had Bob Babbitt playing as well. And at Stax, originally you had a guy named Louis Steinberg, who was there before Duck Dunn, who played on a lot of that early stuff as well. And then you’ve got players like Carol Kaye in the Wrecking Crew out in LA. That’s hugely influential.
Joe Branton: Absolutely. Yeah, that time period really we started seeing the first “bass heroes,” I guess.
Brad Page: Yeah, in all using the electric bass still at a time when I think studios in particular were more inclined to go to the upright bass. The electric bass I think was adopted quicker for live performance just because it was so much easier to cart around and more sturdy and more reliable, right? Like a travel instrument at that time rather than it being a serious one. Right, I think that’s how a lot of particularly studio guys looked at it like, “Okay, you can play your electric bass live, but when we’re in the studio, we’ll do a stand-up bass.” But Carol Kaye, Jamerson, Duck Dunn—people like that really brought… and there is a very distinct sound and feel to an electric bass that you don’t get from the stand-up that became the defining sound of particularly soul music, but rock as well. And then you’ve got Paul McCartney, who’s hugely influenced by James Jamerson, but kind of develops his own sound that becomes incredibly influential and is my personal favorite bass player. I love McCartney’s stuff.
Joe Branton: Yeah, he’s incredible. His melody work’s amazing. If you ever look at… I studied The Beatles at college when I was studying bass there, and it’s so funny seeing any of Paul McCartney’s basslines. The guitarist would get their music and it would be a couple of pages because, you know, it’s a verse and a chorus looped. But Paul McCartney just played a different thing the whole way through. There were no repeats; they are full compositions. He’s not playing the same thing every chorus or every verse; he’s walking with the melodies. Everything about it was just a unique way of looking at the bass as an instrument.
But I think we talk about it versus the double bass. Early Precision Bass was designed—early bass and the Precision Bass—they wanted it to emulate the upright. Flat-wound strings emulated the sound of an upright bass.
Brad Page: You had the mutes, right?
Joe Branton: Exactly. They weren’t even on springs on originals; they were just stuck in the bridge plate of P-Basses. The foam was just in there. The idea was you would only ever want that sound, and that was the sound. And it wasn’t really until 1966 when John Entwistle helped Rotosound develop round-wound strings. Round-wound strings for bass did not exist until then. And so you didn’t get that driven, rock and roll P-Bass tone. And who’d have thought those two things would meld so well together—a Precision Bass and round-wound strings? Before then, it’s kind of been a different sounding instrument. And that one change changed everything. And then the P-Bass became a rock and roll instrument, not a great alternative for a double bass if you’re traveling, but a great rock and roll instrument.
Brad Page: An instrument in and of itself, right? Unique. Exactly. Yeah, and Entwistle, I mean, is another one of my favorite bass players—just a monster player and very influential and his use of like bi-amping and things like that really had of his time with a lot of that stuff.
Joe Branton: Totally, totally. And he had Fender make him a slab-body Precision Bass. So the slab body of the original ’51, but with the appointments of a modern P-Bass, so the split humbucking pickup and the modern headstock. He had Fender make him one of those, which was the bass that he put the first sets of round-wounds on. That was the first instrument that got round-wounds. It was a P-Bass, not anything else, because he’s not especially known for P-Basses—he’s known for lots of weird things—but it was a P-Bass that he designed round-wounds for.
And you mentioned him, I think of Entwistle, Chris Squire, but then around this time you start getting these incredible sort of lead bass players thanks to round-wounds. And for me, the number one who was a P-Bass player with round-wounds who just played into a big stack—it was always driven and he just used the dynamics of his right hand for, you know, to keep things less driven sometimes—was John Wetton, the original bass player of King Crimson. Vocalist and bass player, everything he did was incredible. I think he brought King Crimson alive for me. All his lines are just incredibly interesting. And a lot of the time, Robert Fripp’s actually doing just weird stuff in the background, and so much of early Crimson is John Wetton soloing, doing lead lines, improvising. And so much of that improvisation is kept on the records, whether it’s in time or not, and I love him for that. I think he was brilliant.
Brad Page: It’s funny; he’s mostly, I think, people think of him as the vocalist, right? And he doesn’t get listed among the great bass players as often.
Joe Branton: Just go and listen to “Starless.” If you want to hear an incredible bass solo, go listen to “Starless.” That is John Wetton at his absolute best. And that’s a P-Bass.
Brad Page: Then you have the funk revolution where Larry Graham and the whole pop and slap kind of thing… Bootsy Collins, all of that stuff.
Joe Branton: Jazz Basses definitely become more popular around this time because they suit that style a little more. Still some P’s, totally, but like a lot of those players, you know, Larry Graham, Bootsy Collins, they were on Jazzes.
Brad Page: Who are some of your other favorite bass players? People who you think, particularly maybe ones that don’t get enough recognition, who would you like to call out?
Joe Branton: My favorite bass player is a really obvious one, you know, for anyone who’s ever listened to my podcast, but it is Juan Alderete from The Mars Volta and Racer X as well. But he’s done countless other projects as well; he’s the bass player on most of Omar Rodríguez-López’s solo albums and a lot of his solo bands as well, which I think is where Juan does his best work. He had his own solo project called Vato Negro which you can barely find anywhere to listen to, but I think for interesting tones because he messes around a lot with effects, but also just for great lines, an incredible groove, and an ability to pin down the fundamentals of a band. When you’ve got a guitarist going crazy like Omar, the drummers that they worked with are normally very sort of crazy, chops drummers, and you’ve just got Juan Alderete there absolutely holding down the fundamentals and still keeping it interesting.
He was selling off a lot of his basses last year. He was actually, he was very sadly in a bike accident a few years ago and he was in a coma for a while. When he came out of that, he’s now cognitively impaired, and he was selling a lot of his bass collection in order to raise money for the continued sort of care that he now needs, which is very sad to have such an incredible bass legend have that occur to. But I managed to buy one of his fretless basses that he’d played on… it was actually, he sold a couple of basses that were on some of my favorite records and I didn’t quite get in quick enough to get some of those, which was a shame, but I did get his fretless Nordstrand Acinonyx, which is something he’d used. It was the first one made because Nordstrand made the fretless version of that bass for Juan because he was largely a fretless player. So it’s the first one of those. So I’m very happy to own… you know, he’s probably my biggest bass hero. So getting to own a bass owned and played by that man… that’s not something a lot of people get to do, so I’m very grateful for that.
Brad Page: Yeah, that’s fantastic.
Summing up sort of the history of bass, where do you think we’re going?
Joe Branton: Well, I think the great thing about bass is it still continues to look back as much as it looks forward. I think we have wonderful new innovations: active circuitry, fan frets, everything else that’s extended range, everything else that’s coming out. And that’s great; I love that modern people can get involved in bass in that regard. But it’s really nice to see there’s still loads of companies making great versions of the originals and those classic 50s and 60s basses that we revere so much. So I am just enjoying the… there seems to be a really good jazz and soul revival at the moment, and I’m seeing so many great melodic bass players playing old P-Basses or short scales with flat-wounds doing just really gorgeous, interesting melody work. So I’m really happy that that’s where bass seems to be going as an ensemble instrument that can offer a little bit more. So I hope that continues to be the case.
Brad Page: And in terms of where you are going in the future, of course, the Guitar Nerds podcast—one of my all-time favorite podcasts—that’s still rolling. Where’s the easiest place for people to find that?
Joe Branton: Well, yes, I mean, you can listen to the Guitar Nerds podcast wherever you get your podcasts, dear listener. So it’s available on all the streaming platforms. Don’t listen on Spotify—listen elsewhere, it’s much better. But you can listen to that wherever you get your podcast. You can check out any of the other stuff we do over on Instagram or Facebook. You can find us on Patreon, and there’s even a Discord if you want to get super nerdy.
Brad Page: And your band Polymath? Do you have new material coming out? I know you’ve got a tour coming up this spring in the UK or Europe?
Joe Branton: Yeah, that’s right. We’re doing—we’ve got about three weeks in Europe and the UK, and we’ve got a new album coming out around then that’s being put out by an American record label called The Lasers Edge, who are this fantastic prog label. We were really happy to get picked up by them, actually. So they’re putting out our new album, Something Deeply Hidden. But yeah, that’s—it’s a great record for interesting instrumental prog that’s largely inspired by like Ethiopian jazz. But heavy-ish.
Brad Page: All right, Joe Branton, it’s a pleasure to talk to you, to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your bass expertise with us.
Joe Branton: It’s been wonderful to be on the podcast. Thanks so much, Brad. It’s been a lot of fun talking about the best bass in the world: the Fender Precision Bass.
Brad Page: Yes, sir. Thank you, Joe. Take care.
Brad Page: There you go. That’s our celebration of the bass guitar and our 200th episode. Thanks to Joe Branton for joining us for this episode. If you’re a guitar player or a bass player and you’ve never listened to the Guitar Nerds podcast, please make sure you do; I highly recommend it.
This podcast will be back in about two weeks with another new episode. You can catch up on all of our previous shows on our website, Lovethatsongpodcast.com, or find us in your favorite podcast app. If you’d like to support the show, the best thing you can do is to tell someone about it. Share it with your friends and family. The word-of-mouth support from people like you is worth more than any advertising or sponsorship, so thank you.
Let’s close out this episode with something from Joe Branton’s band, Polymath. This is the title cut from their current EP; it’s a track called “The Halting Problem.” And I will see you next time.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Fender Precision Bass:
https://www.fender.com
Joe Branton:
https://www.instagram.com/yoseph900
Guitar Nerds Podcast
https://www.guitarnerds.net
Polymath
https://www.poly-math.net
Alembic:
https://www.alembicguitars.com/
Ampeg
https://www.ampeg.com
Gibson:
https://www.gibson.com/collections/shop-all-gibson-bass-guitars
Hofner basses:
https://www.hofner.com/en/
Ibanez
https://www.ibanez.com
Meta Guitars:
https://metaguitars.fr/basses/
Rickenbacker
https://www.rickenbacker.com
Squier bass guitars:
https://www.fender.com/collections/squier-electric-basses
Tokai:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dkai_Gakki
Yamaha:
https://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical_instruments/guitars_basses/index.html
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