I tried one of these at a shop when they first came out, and it was the best fretted neck I'd ever held. I still think about that neck 20 years later. This week, I'm gonna go to a local shop that has a used one for sale and see if it's as good as I remember. Fender never made many basses with the 1-5/8" nut width AND those tiny 50s/60s frets. Which may be why I've had a hard time finding something with quite the same feel.

@pkennethk yeah, when it came out a friend of mine got one immediately and I wss head over heels for it... fast forward a decade and I got one at a good price but the single turned me off. Rather than change pickups I sold it for a profit. If played bass on a regular basis I would have modded it and kept it forever. With the prices always hovering around $1500 I decided I could go with a less valuable instrument with more practical stock electronics. I sometimes regret not getting someone to wonder me a him cancelling version of that pickup.

If I end up liking the neck as much as I remember, I'll probably just hand a detailed spec sheet of all the measurements to Musikraft or similar and let them make me one with a nice rubbed oil or nitro finish, and the more appealing (to me) '57-onward P-Bass headstock. Maybe I'll even have a slap rosewood fretboard on there, who knows?

OK: just got back from Guitar Center. I played pretty much every Fender bass in there, and then I played the Sting bass -- the neck is just as perfect as I remember. No contest. I need to go find those exact specs...

@pkennethk yeah, thanks... now I want my sting bass back. It was perfect from a playing standpoint. I wonder if I can buy a spare sting neck from stratosphere and stick it on my candy apple red J

Sting neck is: - 7.25" radius - 1.625" nut width - .84" thick at 1st fret, .97" thick at 12 fret - super short and skinny vintage frets (somewhere in between actual frets and fret markers for a fretless neck)

The Stratosphere and similar rarely have parts from instruments that have been out of production for a decade. And if anyone offers one, you're bidding against me and probably 100 other sickos in the same spot.

I'm going to try and find out if any of the P-Basses Fender Japan was producing around the same time have the same neck specs. That might be by best bet to score one for under a grand.

@pkennethk well, there are some sting models on reverb for 1200... bet you could make an offer for a grand and score one. The single could actually sounds good, it's just a giant cell phone antenna.

True, Sting basses sell for roughly the same price as all the good Japanese Precision basses, from the 80s Japanese Squiers to the 2 decades of PB62 production... but yeah, don't know if I wanna deal with that single coil, and I don't know if a stacked or split-coil replacement pickup will make me happy either-- it's a huge question mark. If I can get the same neck on a post-'57 P-Bass body, for the same price, I'd probably lean that direction.

@pkennethk I'm not sure about stacked, but split coils tend to sound pretty good for guitar... my fear would be the form factor though... will you miss the overlap of could like a split single in a humbucker form factor where the polepieces don't overlap but the coils do... as I said in the forum thread, you may want to look at Lakeland. Mij and cij fender isn't sold in the USA (or wasn't, maybe it is now) so your options to try before you buy are going to be hella limited.

I had a friend who owned one of these. What a player. But yeah, the single tele-ish bass pickup is really primitive sounding, even if you replace the stock one with an antiquity... If you're not going for that ultra vintage bass tone I have heard these sound really good modified with a badass bridge and a stacked humbucker. If you get the right stacked model you can wire it to coil tap off a push pull pot so you have access to a good approximation of the original single-coil P-bass tone.

Honestly, I like the original sound, this is the sound I'm ooooing from this bass, that's why I choose antiquity. For more powerful sound, currently relying on my cheap Stingray copy. I'm planning to buy a Rick honestly

the ric bass sound is so badass

Yep, that's why I want it so bad