“The Precision Bass sparked a revolution," continues Terry. "It changed everything. Suddenly, a bass player could be much nimbler. It was the same thing with the Telecaster: suddenly, guitarists had easy and full access to all the notes. It wasn’t like it was before where you needed to be a genius bass player to play a complicated bass line. The tools change the rules of the game.
Before the P-Bass arrived, a lot of bass players more or less played tuba lines, but that changed over time and you see a natural evolution in music from 1951, when the tool became available, to the way Paul McCartney played bass in The Beatles. And you don’t have Paul without James Jamerson, right?”
Amen. So true. I had an enlightening discussion at a recent rehearsal. Our keyboarder played for years/decades in a band dedicated to reproducing early 50ies rock'n'roll and rhythm & blues (they did it well). To get the original sound, they had a double bass player for a while. I asked him: "It was probably hard to mike and get itself heard in a live setting, right?" And he said: "Naw, that wasn't the issue, the pickups got better and the amping too. But it was limited in what it could convincingly play. You really couldn't cover electric bass lines with it, it just didn't sound right, tone emission just wasn't steady enough if something needed throbbing eighths, the notes would be breathing too much and die off too soon. You could get an electric bass to approximate the sound of a double bass, but not the other way around. Cool as it looked, we gave up on it."
And I remember a Neil Diamond concert where the - skillful - bassist played double bass for the first half of the gig and then switched to electric bass. The difference was night and day. The double bass was clearly audible (you heard that there was something going on), but when he dragged out the electric bass, the musical notes popped out and were all of the sudden there.