I once had a Japanese Fender ’75 reissue Jazz Bass that I bought used. Fender bass serial numbersĮven relying on official Fender serial numbers can be tricky when trying to get an accurate build date. However, they can be really useful in helping pin down the year of an older Fender bass guitar. Pickups were only date stamped from 1964 to about 1979. One exception is that most Fender pots from 1966 to 1969 are dated to 1966. Potentiometer codes are pretty reliable for dating, usually indicating the year, and even the week it was made. Sometimes you see them and sometimes you don’t. After that, they stopped until the 1980s when they started again sporadically to this day. What does Fender date?įender used body stamp dates from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s. We need to use as many different clues as possible, yes like Fender serial numbers, to give us a clear picture of when these instruments were made. We just need to be very careful when doing this research. This isn’t to say that you should just give up and stop researching your beloved Fender Jazz bass that you’re sure is from the late 60s and is worth the price of a small car today. Even relying on Fender bass serial numbers can get dicey in those situations. It’s pretty impossible to tell with 100% accuracy what a Fender bass has gone through over that amount of time. That’s a half century ago! What do you think could have happened to that instrument over the decades? Now, think about a bass that was made in the 70s. Maybe they like the feel of a different neck, or maybe they want different electronics to work with. It’s very common for people these days to get a new bass and immediately swap something out. This may seem obvious, but remember that with older bass guitars it’s very difficult to say with absolute certainty who owned it and what they did to it. After 1981, most Fender neck dates are easy to read and understand however, I’ve still seen a few Fender basses from the 1990s with no neck stamp at all. Several Fender basses from 1969 to 1980 have neck stamp codes that are difficult to decipher and sometimes impossible to read. Some 1959 Precision Basses have no Fender neck dating stamp at all. Some years, in particular, can get really tricky. So, if you have a Fender with a neck date of 1964 and the pots are dated 1965, then you have a 1965 Fender bass guitar. Or, at least its most recently dated part. The general rule of thumb is that a bass guitar is as old as its newest part. They just grabbed whatever part or component was ready and put the instrument together to fill an order as fast as possible. So how do you properly determine the year of production for your Fender bass? The challenge with dating a Fender bassīack in the 1950s and ’60s, no one at Fender had any clue that one day these instruments would be highly sought after collector’s items or coveted vintage tone machines and that people would be highly concerned about when any particular bass was made. There are even bridge stamps and pickguard codes in some cases. There are pickup and potentiometer date codes that you can try to identify. Even using official Fender bass serial numbers isn’t as straightforward as you might think. The problem is that a neck might be made and dated and then sit in the factory for a while until finally being bolted to a body produced and dated months later. Ever since Fender started making basses in 1951, they dated certain parts and components to provide a general idea of when the instrument was produced. This is especially true with a vintage bass. Dating a Fender bass guitar to figure out when it was made is not always as easy as it sounds.
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