Another 1978 P-Bass

[PunkRockBassist]

http://cgi.ebay.com/1978-Fender-Precisi ... 5827082872

[fivebass52]

Looks good, and even the "buy it now" price seems fair.... what do the Fender pros think?

[PunkRockBassist]

is it just me or did fender go maple fretboard and natrual body color crazy in the 70's ?

[Matt R.]

The G string barely lines up over the finger board.

[cangaroo]

i'm very far from being a fender expert, but i guess that the proliferation of late 70s (or early 80s) p-basses with natural / maple configuration has to do with the need of fender (expecially in early 80s) to quickly run out of the old S8 S9 serials stock.

this could be confirmed by the relatively poor construction quality of that basses : a lot of them suffer from really bad neck / body join, with the neck pocket too large for the neck, resulting in the neck rotating freely into the neck pocket as string tension start to win over neck resistence. My 78/80 suffered from the same thing : you started with the strings centered in the neck axis and after a month i've found myself playing with the E string almost over the neck edge ...

[Malfunct8]

I heard somewhere that Fender produced more instruments in 77 - 79 than all previous years combined, not sure how truthful it is but it seems true of lefties....

[pjmuck]

I heard somewhere that Fender produced more instruments in 77 - 79 than all previous years combined, not sure how truthful it is but it seems true of lefties....

Makes perfect sense to me. Of all the vintage lefty Fenders I've seen over the years, '78 is easily the most prevalent. I wonder what dictated the demand at the time? Or did they simply overproduce?

[FOM]

Sorry guys slow night on TV.

I suspect that Fender's bass & guitar sales followed recorded music sales in the 60's and 70's. Recorded music sales (vinyl LPs in the day) peaked in 1977 and fell off significantly until it started a rebound in the mid 1980's with the introduciton of CDs. Inflation adjusted sales didn't match the 1977 peak until nearly 20 years later in 1996. Nobody ever catches the top of the sales immediately and I strongly suspect Fender didn't turn down production for a year or two making 1978 a banner high production year for basses. A couple of years later video killed the radio and music sales took a huge dump. The attached URL has a great analysis of historical recorded music sales for anyone with nothing to do tonight.

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-ch ... try-2011-2

[Agent00Soul]

That article is fantastic! Thanks for the URL.

[FOM]

If anyone has aspirations of making a living by selling their recorded music, the article's facts and analysis are very sobering.