Sep 13 2007
Fender Precision Bass (Made in Japan)
When I joined Blue Dot it was made clear to me that my fretless instruments weren’t welcome. Although I borrowed a fretted instrument for a while, I decided to commit to playing one and purchased a pewter sparkle Fender P-Bass Lyte, which had active P/J pick-ups, a wonderful fast neck, and a lightweight body. It sounded great. Unfortunately, it got stolen out of my car after a gig so I was forced to play my Gibson Victory, which was back-breakingly heavy. After one gig with the Victory, I was hitting the recycler and found this very inexpensive, and somewhat thrashed, Japanese P-Bass.
After reading an article by Rick Turner (A co-founder of Alembic, and owner of Renaissance Guitars) I replaced the existing p/u with a Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder, and had it wired directly to the output jack, bypassing both the volume and tone controls. This produces a wonderful, bright, clean sound with lots of low fundamentals.
This was my primary gigging bass for quite some time.
You’ve got an E- serial MIJ. If I were you, I’ll keep it. It’s the 3rd generation Fender Japan after the JV and SQ series. I also did that “bypassing the controls method” on my old Precision but I used a DPDT switch so I can easily select when to bypass or not. I got the schematics from Rick’s tech column at Bass Player magazine almost 10 years ago. Cheers!