By Chris Swope
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The Fender Bass. That’s what you called it back in the fifties and early sixties. Leo’s Precision bass was so revolutionary that when it first began being used on recordings, the bass player would be identified in the liner notes as playing not the bass, but the Fender bass! That presence is still very real today. If you show up for a session, the producer will expect you to have a Fender bass in tow!
We recently got this relic 61 P-bass in so I had to call in one of our local heroes, bass player extraordinaire Quentin Schmidt, to show it off.
This Fender Custom Shop relic ’61 Precision looks like it has been laying down the butter for the nearly 50 years since it rolled out of Fullerton! It possesses all of the desirable traits of this classic model; a slab rosewood fingerboard on a full C-shaped maple neck with a 1& ¾” nut width, lovely sunburst finish on an alder body with tortoise pickguard and a wonderful warm resonance even unplugged!
What does Quentin think of this Precision? “This is my dream bass! This is the bass that built Motown!”
Q plays in 5 bands right now but his main gig is with The Good Foot, which he refers to as his “Motown band.” Quentin can be seen 2 to 3 nights a week humpin’ and a pumpin’ with The Good Foot on his ’51 P-bass reissue, holding down the bottom end on Soul hits from the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Check out Q and his mates in action:
If you want to pull off the sound of Motown's killer house band, reverently known as "The Funk Brothers," you've got to have a rhythm section with a drummer who can shuffle and a bassist who can lock up with him. They've got to be tight as hell and be able to play behind the beat. Yeah, and the bass player needs a P-bass!
More words from Q:
"When you take a step back and look at American music, Motown bridged the gap between funk, blues, jazz, rock and pop. For that era, at that time, to be doing what they were doing, the parties involved in the Detroit Motown (Funk Bros) and even the Memphis Soul (Stax records) were WAY ahead of their game. They paved the way for modern music. Listening to any of the literally hundreds of recordings from that era shows you how we got to where we got in modern music. From 1961 to 1971 Motown records had 110 top ten hits…
Have you ever heard the expression it’s all been done before? That is when it happened – from 1960 to 1972 – in Detroit – with a ’61 P Bass.”