All my bass are belong to me

Maybe it's the tendency for Geminis to always think in terms of closely paired items. Maybe it's my over-developed sense of symmetry. For whatever reason, I do like to have a yin to every yang. This pair of mid 70s Precisions basses (we'll call them Strange and Charm) has some history to them...

Several years ago, my younger brother (who also plays bass) decided that he wanted a bass similar to my '71 'P' and asked me to look around here for him. This being a thinly populated area, I didn't hold out much hope, but you just never know. I saw an ad for a Fender Precision, drove out to the owner's place, and saw that it was a badly (natural-)refinished alder body with a maple fretboard in fairly good shape. It may have originally been sunburst or black: there's still a bit of the finish at the neck pocket. The neck had a great feel to it, deeper front-to-back, and the pickups have strong output. It even had the original hardshell case. Score!!

I brought it to Paul at our next family reunion, but told him that I wanted the right-of-first-refusal should he ever want to sell it. He agreed. A couple of years later, just before our next reunion, I called him and asked if he was getting any use out of it. He admitted that it had mostly sat in its case all this time, and that he'd gladly bring it with him and sell it back to me. I told him that I would put it to work a lot more than he would.

Meanwhile, over on eBay, I was looking for a fretless Precision maple neck with the intent that I would graft it onto the body of this one, and store the fretted one. I would also put a tortoise-shell pickguard on it, as well as a chrome bridge cover. Finally, a fretless neck showed up that looked to be in decent shape, with tuners, and that didn't go for an outrageous price. When it arrived, it came with those vintage-style reverse tuners which where replaced with a more period-correct set. (For the story line on that see: The Great Tuner Swap.)

I patched up the dings, divots and scratches and exchanged the fretted neck with the newly acquired fretless. I strung it with rounds, and found that it was easy to play and so much fun!! I felt like Sting with the Police, or John Paul Jones doing "In My Time of Dying" from Physical Graffiti when I played it. I loosened the truss rod just a touch on the fretted neck and stored in away in my cedar chest.







My build projects are usually done in the summer, and I had decided that for this particular go-round, I wasn't going to try to finish the body (or in this case bodies) myself. I once more contacted USA Custom Guitars and ordered a 'P' and a 'J' body, both done as two-colour sunbursts. I guess I forgot to mention that also sitting in the cedar chest was the neck from the black fretless MIJ Jazz. I had found a Fender MIJ Jazz neck - rosewood fretboard with mother-of-pearl block fret markers - and put that on the black MIJ fretless body. So I intended to put the fretted 'P' neck on the 'P' body, and the MOP/rosewood 'J' neck on the 'J' body.

The bodies arrived and there was a flurry of activity as I took the black MIJ bass apart and restored it to fretless and attached the "blocks" 'J' neck to the sunburst Jazz body. (The complete story for that will be told later.) The usual hardware went into the assembly for the 'P', except for one little anomaly, and one hiccup. I had bought a set of 'P' pickups that were advertised as, and looked very much like, DiMarzio's, but when I went to connect them up, the wire colours were not right. I searched, and the nearest I could find as a match was Schaller, but I wasn't too worried as long as I wired it up properly. When I finally fired it up, I found that the output was a lot hotter than all my other 'P' basses.

The "hiccup" was this: I had specifically asked that the pickup routing be "form-fitting" since I like the pickguard-free look. Somehow that specification was overlooked, and when I brought it to their attention, they asked me how it could be resolved. I didn't want to be a hard-nose about it, and I also didn't want to wait for a replacement body, so I asked if they would be willing to spring for a tortoise-shell pickguard. They were agreeable, and my favorite 'Guard Guy (Tony at Pickguardian) did one up in beautiful "old school" style. I wasn't too upset; after all, to my mind, sunburst and tortoise go together like nothing else.

I debuted both the 'P' and 'J' sunburst basses at a Saturday night gig soon after. Actually, it was my birthday, and these were my presents to myself. I was very happy to play my two latest additions that night...