❌SOLD❌ Fender P-Bass Refinish, 1963

This Fender P-Bass has been around! Dating to 1963 and refinished during the 1980’s at the original Twelfth Fret location at 920 Kingston Road, the faux-tortoise pickguard has also been modified into two sections. The other components are original and it feels and sounds like an L-Series Precision bass.

The Fender P-Bass, formally known as the Precision Bass, was Leo Fender’s second major product, introduced in October of 1951. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that it has proven to be one of the most influential musical instrument designs in history.

The Fender Precision delivered three key advantages, the first being mentioned in the name. To this point, basses were fretless, acoustic, and physically large. Fender’s idea to add frets to the neck meant that bassists could produce pitches with precision. The solid body meant that the bass section could be just as loud as every other part of the band without uncontrollable feedback (and without that, how could we have had Lemmy?). Finally, the Fender bass is compact and lightweight compared to the upright bass alternative. It took less than a decade to convert almost all bassists to these new instruments.

Fender necks were originally a single piece of Maple with a channel routed in the rear for the truss rod, filled with a Walnut strip. In 1959 in an attempt to attract Jazz players (and Gibson customers), Fender began offering a Rosewood fingerboard. At first these were flat-bottomed ‘Slab’ boards, but by 1962 they had worked out how to use a thinner Rosewood veneer on a curved Maple neck blank.

Here we’re looking at a Pre-CBS 1963 Fender P-Bass, with a Rosewood fingerboard neck date reading 5JUN63D and pot codes indicating 1963 manufacture. The body is Alder. It may have been refretted, given its age, but the fingerboard is in very good shape. Due to the refinish and pickguard modification, it’s not entirely original, but this sort of modification was common during the late 1970’s and well into the 1980’s. The next popular modification would have been the addition of a Leo Quan Badass or Badass II bridge to provide significantly more sustain, but that wasn’t done to this bass. This example plays well and has the sound that made the P-Bass the most recorded bass ever, used on countless stages and recordings.

Sold with a later molded hard shell case.