The Guitar Player Repair Guide - 3rd by Dan Erlewine

Author:Dan Erlewine [Erlewine, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation - A
Published: 2007-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Four basic bass neck shapes

A bass neck’s profile is as important as good fretwork in determining whether or not a bass feels good, plays well and suits your playing style. To better understand Fender bass shapes, I called John Page at Fender’s Custom Shop, and he directed me to the neck specialists on his staff: senior R&D engineer George Blanda and Custom Shop master builders Jay Black, Mark Kendrick, Fred Stuart and Yasuhiko Iwanade

Yasuhiko, in turn, introduced me to his friend and “bass mentor,” Albert Molinaro of Guitars R Us in Hollywood. Among the seven of them, there’s not much about the Fender bass that isn’t known!

Fender recently specified four basic neck shapes for bass, based on specs from the ‘50s and ’60s. Any Fender neck, whether it’s vintage, production or custom-made, relates somehow to these shapes. Jay Black reminded me that “the four shapes didn’t exist during the vintage years, but we realized that the neck builders in both production and the Custom Shop needed to be speaking the same language. And since the Custom Shop will make almost any neck you want, it was even more important to set shape standards for communicating with our customers. So we selected the four most popular neck shapes, ones that would cover everything from the ‘50s through the ’60s—the necks made later were simply variations. The satisfaction of our bass-playing customers proves that we chose the right shapes.”

Yasuhiko lwanade (Yas) handbuilt the ’51 Precision re-issues made by the Custom Shop in 1991, a short “production” run of 82 instruments. He even hand-wound each pickup! Word is that it couldn’t have been done better by anyone, and that Yas is an acknowledged expert on Fender history—basses in particular.

Yas got to know Leo Fender himself before Leo’s death in 1991, and he told me what the company’s founder explained to him about the early days. “Even though the same cutters were used to shape both guitar and bass necks, the shape of guitar necks and bass necks made even on the same day in 1954 would be quite different from one another,” Yas notes. “This is because P-Bass necks are wider than guitar necks, and the machine’s cutter couldn’t reach as far toward the center of the back of a bass neck. Therefore it carved them differently.

“Of the four generic profiles” continues Yas, “the neck shapes that most Fender bass players talk about are the round or U-shape, the soft V and the oval. I’ve seen only a few hard-V bass necks, but you should ask Albert Molinaro about them.”

Albert has a collection of 75 vintage Fender basses, so I checked in with him next. “Fender set the standards for neck shapes that bass guitar manufacturers worldwide would follow,” notes Albert. “As they went through the ’50s, the necks evolved from big, round and chunky to flat, wide and smooth—possibly to accommodate the changes in music. There definitely were hard-V necks on basses, although I haven’t seen many. I have two of them, both made in 1957.

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