Roger - also with his Ric - was on an eternal quest to clean his sound (see the interview snippets below). He wanted undistorted lows and a clean treble with little mids because he felt that the mids department was already sufficiently covered by Blackmore's and Lord's instruments feuding for sonic leadership. Hence the preference for Vigier active basses and their more hif'sh sound today. It works within the context of DP's sound, a darker, more mid'ish sound wouldn't fit. When I saw Nick Fyffe (Jamiroquai, The Temperance Movement) deputize for Roger who was having knee surgery at one gig, the lack of Roger's clean but propulsive sound made DP sound quite different.
You've been seen with a few basses in your time. Can you remember them?
After the Fender, I went on to a Rickenbacker 4001 stereo. Mind you,
before I had the Precision I used to have a Fender Mustang...
I had one of those too; I thought they were super little basses. Did you
like the one you had?
I liked it in the studio, but I found that when it came to using it on
stage it wasn't big enough - both in sound and in neck lenght - so I moved to
the Precision, then to the Rickenbacker. Mind you, all my life I think I've
been searching for a sound that probably doesn't exist, and I've come to the
realisation that the sound I'm looking for is more in my fingers than in the
instrument, although I'm sure that anything you feel good about playing
helps you to play better.
Listening to you, and watching you play that Rickenbacker through that
huge stack of Marshall's with Deep Purple in the late '60s was one of my
influences - that thundering, loose strung Ricky bass 'clank' was a force to
be reckoned with ...
To me, it was always too distorted. It was a typical case of the grass
being greener. I'd heard various American recordings on which Ricky basses
were! used, loved the sound and thought I'd try that. But it was always
'clank, clank, distort, distort' - just too distorted really. I always had a
feeling that I wasn't underneath the band the way that a bass player should
be, and that I was competing with Jon and Ritchie in the mid range, and
generally muddying up the overall sound.