Studio Gear: Fender Precision Bass Through A Hartke Amplifier

Bill Watson plays the Fender Precision Bass through a Hartke amp 7-15-13

If you like the Fender P bass sound, we have one available at all times in the Nashville Trax studio for your project. You are more than welcome to play it yourself, or a session quality player can be provided.

The actual percentage of hit song recordings that have been played using a Precision is unknown but surely no other bass has been used on as many. It’s not as much the “go to” bass as it once was, but it’s still popular.

Most of the Motown hit’s bass lines, some of the greatest, grooviest and most memorable bass lines in history, were played on The Funk Machine, a 1962 Fender Precision Bass (Google Bob Babbitt or James Jamerson sometime) and certain players from every era and every style of music swore by one. Today, you can find a player in about any genre who uses a Precision to record.

Typically when this bass is used on a client recording we run the Precision direct into our Avalon U5 or the Avalon 737 setup for bass guitar and on into the board. Sometimes to provide options at mix we’ll also run a microphone on one of the two Hartke speaker cabinets, or run a second line through a processor.

Country, rock, funk out slappy poppy stuff, it’s all good on a P-bass.-b.e.

https://twitter.com/StevenrJeffery/status/374299709164122112