Artist

Steve Harris Precision Bass

Part Number 025-2602-350

Description

MSRP $1,750.00

NEW! Maple Fretboard, Royal Blue Metallic, Chrome 717669760182 Pickguard
350 (Royal Blue Metallic)
Prices and specifications subject to change without notice. Fender Electric Basses

www.fender.com

Steve Harris Precision Bass: For more than three decades, Steve Harriss galloping fleet-fingered basslines have turbocharged U.K. metal titans Iron Maiden and have made him the most influential metal bassist alive. Harris has stayed true to his battle-hardened Fender Precision Bass guitar over the years, and Fender now honors him with the Artist Signature Series Steve Harris Precision Bass. This bass features a regally cool Royal Blue Metallic sparkle finish, with a chromed mirror pickguard, alder body, vintage-tint one-piece maple neck and fingerboard with 20 medium-jumbo frets, a Badass II bridge, Seymour Duncan Basslines SPB-1 splitcoil Precision Bass pickup, chrome hardware, Steve Harris signature Rotosound custom flat-wound strings and Harriss signature on the back of the headstock. Deluxe gig bag included,
2008 FMIC. Fender Precision Bass P Bass and the distinctive headstock and body designs of this guitar are trademarks of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. All rights reserved.

Colors:

(50) Royal Blue Metallic
Specifications: Body Finish Neck Fingerboard Frets Scale Length Nut Hardware Tuning Keys Bridge Pickguard Pickups Alder Gloss Polyurethane 1-Piece Maple Maple 7.25 Radius 20, Medium Jumbo 34 (863.6 mm) Width: 1.750 (44.5 mm) Chrome Vintage Style Leo Quann Badass II Chrome 1 Seymour Duncan Basslines Quarter Pound Split-Coil Precision Bass Pickup Volume, Tone Rotosound Steve Harris Signature Custom Flat-Wound Strings (Gauges.045,.065,.080,.100) Case: Deluxe Gig Bag Custom Royal Blue Metallic Finish, Chrome Pickguard, Badass II Bridge, Steve Harris Signature on Back of Headstock
35040 (Royal Blue Metallic)
Prices and specifications subject to change without notice.

Controls Strings

Incl. Accessories Unique Features

Fender Electric Basses

John Zinder

Spring 09

Physics 1204 Term Paper
How the Sound of the Fender Precision Bass Came to be an Signature Element of Modern Rock Music
Ive played the bass for 10 years, and I feel pretty confident in saying Ive a good ear for the instrument. I love its sound; whether in hip-hop or punk rock, the electric bass helps to make the music move you. While working as a studio musician recording rock and funk music, I noticed that some artists were unsatisfied the thick, modern tone of my fancy custom 5 stringed electric bass that is my main instrument. With one client, I decided on a whim to bring my old Fender Precision Bass (P-Bass), an instrument that casts about 1/5 of what my 5-string does, to the session. The result was surprising. The client immediately loved every sound I was making, even without any tweaking by the engineer. The P-Bass has that quintessential bass guitar sound that many have been conditioned to look for in modern rock music, and this is largely a result of it being the most used bass in the industry (Roberts, 5). The goal of this paper is to examine the reasons for the massive success of the Fender Precision Bass and why, when the technology was available, an electric bass of its sort took so long to attain widespread use. In the end it should be apparent how all the more technical aspects relate to what was happening with popular music at the time, and that the Leo Fenders P-Bass was at once a brilliant invention and one made at the right time. Notable precursors to the instrument include the Mandobass, the Regal Bassoguitar, and the Audiovox Model 736 Electronic Bass. The Mandobass was used in the early 1920s as a low-end instrument in mandolin orchestras (Roberts, 21). Although it was still about as big as an upright and not electric, it was a relevant precursor to the Fender Bass because it was the first known instance of a fretted bass instrument being played horizontally. Horizontal playability is a notable advance in the instrument because, as will be shown later, a large portion of the P-Basss market were guitarists, who were accustomed to playing horizontally. Frets were also an important step forward because, again, they would allow an easier switch for guitarists. The Regal Bassoguitar
was a fretted upright bass with an electric pickup, designed and marketed in the early 1930s (Roberts, 22). This instrument was still played like upright and was about the same size, but it incorporated magnetic pickups and frets. Pickups were a very significant advance because, as will be discussed later, they allowed for very isolated sound in even the loudest environments. In 1935 Paul Tutmarc introduced the Audiovox Model 736 (figure 1), an instrument very similar to the P-Bass, but to little commercial success. This bass had the same basic design as the P-Bass, but with a slightly smaller length. It was played horizontally, had a magnetic single coil pickup and was a compact and lightweight like the P-Bass. In the end, it was well before its time and had little distribution. The Model 736 was discontinued after 100 instruments were made (Roberts, 29). On to 1951, the year the P-bass was invented. Its inventor, Leo Fender, had originally intended for the instrument to be nothing more than a more portable, louder version of its upright counterpart (Roberts 31). Indeed, when luthier and bass player Rich Lasner played an original Fender Precision bass through the amp it was sold with (an amp now coveted by guitarists) he said that it was the loudest upright bass you [sic] ever heard (Roberts 34). Fender, being an inventor and not a player, could never have anticipated the things that contemporary bassists would do with it: slap it, thump it, rip out its frets and cover the neck with epoxy, mute it, and pick it among other things (Smith, 45). Around the early 50s, many guitarists were in need of work, and were looking towards bass

playing to find it (Roberts, 31). There are several difficult adjustments that need to be made to switch from guitar to upright, but one saving grace is that the tuning of the two instruments is very similar. The open strings of the bass are tuned to the exact same notes as the lowest four strings of a guitar, only an octave lower. As a result, much of the underlying theory of the instrument including scales and chords remains the same. However, the transition between the two instruments is very difficult for two main reasons. First of all, the upright requires a different right hand technique to play (figure 2), because it is played vertically (hence the name upright) whereas the electric guitar is played horizontally. Secondly, guitarists had to memorize the left hand positions on the neck because the instrument is unfretted (Smith, 30). Fender sought to solve these problems by creating an instrument that required minimal adaptation on the guitarists part to play. Both hands would remain in a familiar guitar-like playing positions and the neck of the instrument would be fretted. In solving these problems the P-Bass was born, and this emerging market was addressed. In order to better understand some of the differences in sound, method of playing and general structure between the instruments, one must examine their basic features. The full upright bass is an instrument that stands nearly 6 feet tall, has a 42 scale neck and is made out of a variety of different woods. It is amplified acoustically: resonant modes of the plates of wood that comprise the body of the instrument the air cavity contained within are tuned by the instrument maker to amplify the range of notes that are usually played by the instrument. This tuning is accomplished by making the plates thicker or thinner in different places in order to achieve resonant frequencies in the neighborhood of the notes being played. The resonances of the plates can be tested and tuned in a laboratory to ensure that
the instrument has been made correctly. The air cavity is tuned by modeling it as a Helmholtz resonator, with resonance frequency proportional to the square root of the area of the f-holes divided by the square root of the volume of the instrument. As mentioned before, the upright is played vertically, and the strings are plucked primarily with the pointer and middle fingers of the right hand or played with a bow. By contrast, the first Fender Precision Bass (precision because it was fretted, and thus notes could be hit more accurately), was a relatively light and portable instrument roughly 4 feet in length and consisted of a maple neck at 34 scale length bolted onto a solid ash body (figure 3) (Roberts 32-33). It should be noted that the same scale length is used in 4-string basses constructed today, and Fender spent a great deal of time arriving at that 34 by working with players and listening to their feedback on issues such as string tension and awkwardness of fingering (longer scale lengths meant wider spacing of notes). Since the decrease in scale length results in decrease in string tension (with constant mass per unit length) by formula 1, Fender had to make the strings out of a denser material to make sure that they could be responsive enough for fast playing without being overly thick. He accomplished this by making them out of a steel core surrounded by tightly wound nickel wire. Another notable change in the instrument was the use of frets, which guitarists use to make chording easier. Frets are a set of parallel metal bars that are driven into the neck. Pressing the string down just behind them shortens the effective length of the plucked string, thus increasing the notes frequency by formula 1. These frets are placed at a ratio of ~1:1.06 away from each other relative to the bridge, making each successive fret on a given string a frequency increase of an equal tempered half step. This fretting of

the neck makes it easier to hit notes accurately, but locks the player into using an equal tempered chromatic scale. The result of this is that the player can no longer use more consonant intervals involving small number frequency ratios such as perfect thirds (Rossing, 161). Fenders original intention was for the instrument to be played by resting ones fingers on the pickup guard and plucking the strings with the thumb. Players quickly realized that they could play much faster and more comfortably by resting their thumb on the neck or the pickup and plucking the string with their index and middle fingers (figure 4) (Smith, 71). Whereas the uprights means of amplification was acoustic resonance, the Fender Bass was amplified by a magnetic coil pickup. The vibration of the strings creates an electrical signal in the pickup that could be amplified by an amplifier. The P-Basss design had a variety of implications in both its sound and its versatility in sound recordings. In order to appreciate these implications, I will need to depart from the discussion of the instruments and briefly tackle some of the general fundamentals of sound and sound engineering. What we interpret as sound is waves of higher and lower air pressure (relative to ambient pressure) as shown by figure 5. A vastly complex system of bones, membranes and specialized cells in our ears carefully measure these pressure waves and send signals to our brains that interpret them as sound (Rossing, 81). A simple sound wave, one that is composed of a single sine
curve, is what is known as a pure tone. Most sounds that we hear around us are much more complex, but they can be decomposed by fourier analysis into a weighted sum of several simple waves (figure 6). For instance, the pure tone of middle C is 261Hz (this means that the wave goes from high air pressure to low and then back to high 261 times in a second), but when a piano plays middle C it sounds different than a pure tone. It does, in fact, produce the pure tone, but it also produces a complex series of overtones and undertones along with it. This aggregation of frequencies is unique to each specific instrument and is part of what is referred to as its timbre (Rossing, 135). Computer software can be used to decompose recorded sounds into their pure tone components. One can use this information to quantitatively discover a tremendous amount of information about the timbre, a fairly abstract concept, of that particular recorded sound. Figure 7 on the following page shows a comparison between the sonic spectrum of an upright bass playing its lowest C (65.4Hz) and my 2003 Fender P-Bass playing the same note. The first thing to notice about each of the spectra is that the highest peaks correspond to the fundamental frequency and its full harmonic series. The harmonic series of the notes is its fundamental frequency and peaks corresponding to integer multiples of it. For example, the series 100, 200, 300 Hz represents a harmonic series. The spectrum of the acoustic bass shows a high presence of the fundamental frequency and the harmonics near to it (what we perceive as low frequency notes). For this reason, the acoustic bass is perceived as being much more powerful in the low range than a P-Bass. The spectrum of the P-Bass shows very different characteristics. The P Bass actually has significant contributions of higher harmonics up to around 500Hz, or

the low-mid range as it is commonly known. Its richness in low-mid character allows the P-Bass to cut through a mix stronger than an upright because it has more clarity. This increased clarity results from the sensitivity of our ears hear in that frequency range (Rigden, 48-53) (Rossing, 107). In sound engineering, the sounds one hears must have some way to be captured electronically in order to be mass-produced. One way to do this is with a microphone; a device invented in the 1920s that uses a small magnetic capsule that gets pushed and pulled by the molecules of air in a pressure wave, and thus creates a wave of electric current that oscillates at that same frequency (Daniels, 21). This wave of voltage is processed by sound engineering equipment and can eventually be made into full recordings. The microphone is generally used to capture the sounds of acoustic instruments such as drums, horns, woodwinds, upright basses and vocals. Another way sound can be captured is through the use of magnetic pickups. These pickups consist of a collection of several magnets placed under the strings and tightly wound with wire, which are employed on the electric and bass guitar among other instruments. The magnetic field of the pickup creates a corresponding magnetic polarization of the strings (figure 8). When the string vibrates it disturbs the pickups magnetic field in a way that creates an electric current in the wire wrapped around the magnet. Just as with the microphone, that electric current will be at the same frequency as the strings vibration, and it can be interpreted and reproduced by recording equipment. This difference in recording mechanism is not without its consequences. The first and most notable consequence is that the electric signal of a magnetic pickup is freer of contaminants than that produced by a microphone in a recording or live environment. A
well-placed microphone will pick up mostly air pressure waves from the desired instrument, but it will also pick up the waves from anything else that happens to be making noise nearby. In many cases, ambient noise is not loud enough to be heard over the sound of a miked instrument, but problems arise when the recording is done live in the same room (Daniels, 102). In the case of rock and roll music, airwaves from the drums, horns, guitars and anything else will contaminate the microphones signal and disrupt the sound of the upright bass. Magnetic coil pickups do not have this same problem. Airwaves have essentially no capability to distort magnetic fields (Halliday et al, 798), and so sound from other instruments has no effect on the electrical signal of a magnetic pickup. Because of this, recordings of these instruments can be totally isolated from other sounds in the room. In live situations, they can be mixed to sound more present and audible without worry of muddying up the mix with microphone bleed through from other instruments. This is significant because in the 50s studio multitracking had not yet been made practical (Daniel, 42), so most sessions were done live. Another consequence of these different mechanisms in capturing sound is that the way the instrument is picked up affects its timbre, its distinct sound. Pickups for the acoustic bass were available at the time of the Fender Basss invention and still are, but the instrument was designed with acoustic resonance in mind rather than amplification via magnetic coil pickups. Because of this, much of the instruments desirable timbre is lost when using them (Rigden, 138-141). It should be noted that in modern live recordings (I know from personal experience) uprights can be captured quite gorgeously and without significant bleed through. Accomplishing this, however, is highly contingent on the use of modern microphones, mixing and acoustic isolation technology. It should also be pointed out that the P-Basss use did not spread like a craze. In fact, it was confusing and troubling to many people when they first saw it in the early 50s. Jazz players would generally mock its use, and audience members would be confused as to where the bass sound was coming from if the band seemed to have no bass

player but two guitarists (Roberts, 37). It was Lionel Hamptons bass player Monk Montgomery (and to a lesser extent his predecessor Roy Johnson), who played a P-Bass on the bands 1952 tour, who would bring a great deal of attention to the instrument (Roberts, 36). Its first use in a popular music recording was in Elvis Presleys 1957 #3 pop song Jailhouse Rock, and as legend has it, Elviss upright bass player Bill Black became so frustrated at playing the new instrument in the studio that he walked out and Elvis himself played the line (Roberts 46-47). The P-Basss upright-like role as the backdrop for Jailhouse Rock was common in its early days (Smith, 74), but hardly realized the instruments full potential. In these recordings, the Fender is more audible than recordings of uprights in rock music made around the same time (Roberts, 67), but it would be James Jamerson and Motown records Studio A that would finally bring it to the front of the mix (Slutsky, 29-31). The instruments midrange-rich timbre and ease of isolation in the studio resulted in a dramatic change in its ability to cut through in recordings. To make this point clear, one need only examine differences between the Miracles 1960 single Way Over There and Marvin Gayes 1963 single Pride and Joy. Both recordings were produced by the same studio and played by many of the same musicians, including Jamerson on the bass. A huge difference in the sound comes from Jamersons use of an upright on the Miracles recording and a Fender on Gayes. The result is that Way Over There is waft-y and meandering while Pride and Joy is driving and punchy. The P-Bass was able to drive Gayes song forward, whereas the upright gets lost amongst the strings and harmonies in Way Over there. In light of this its no wonder why it took over the upright in Rock n Roll music I would never say that the upright bass is an antiquated or somehow inferior instrument to the bass guitar, but I seek to point out the significance of the Fender P-bass and its necessity in allowing music to take on the changes that it did in the 50s and early 60s. Its ease of play for guitarists, its clear timbre and its ability for isolation in
recording situations all made P-Bass ready for the Rock n Roll revolution. The Audiovox, as Jim Roberts put it, was well ahead of its time (29): before Rock n Roll, musicians were not playing loud enough for it to be necessary. The music was both necessary for the Fender Basss success and the Fender Bass was necessary for the musics success. The instrument and its playing has been taken far beyond the impressive framework provided by inventor Leo Fender and players McCartney, Jamerson, Jaco, and its other architects. Today the bass guitar enjoys near ubiquity in western popular music (Roberts, 150), and plays an essential role in the sounds of hip-hop, alternative rock, and even modern Jazz.

Sources

Daniel, Eric D. Magnetic Recording, the First 100 Years. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-IEEE, 1998.
Halliday, D., Resnick, R., Walker, J. Fundamentals of Physics Volume 2. Seventh Ed. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2005.
Rigden, John S. Physics and the Sound of Music. Second ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 1985
Rossing, T.D., Moore, F.R., Wheeler, P.A. The Science of Sound. Third ed. San Francisco, CA: Addison Wesley 2002.
Roberts, Jim. How the Fender Bass Changed the World. San Francisco, CA: Backbeat Books 2001.
Slutsky, Allen. Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard publishing corporation, 1989.
Smith, Richard R. Fender, the Sound Heard Round the World. Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2003