Light said:
Yeah, they made some like that. They are kind of like a cross between the original Precision basses (the so called "Tele" basses), which had pickguards kind of like that(Sting usually plays one these days), and the later Precision basses.
Well, actually, no they (Fender) DIDN'T make a bass like this. The more I look at the picture, the more I'm convinced that louloomis is correct. It's a Hamer, or some other cheap, quasi-Fender knockoff, with a Fender neck attached.
As I mentioned before, the Fender model that it is closest to is the current Zone Bass. However, I notice that the body shape isn't
exactly like the one used on the Zone basses. And I don't remember the Zone basses - even the early ones that had two stacked controls - using a pickguard like that one. The current ones, in fact, have no pickguard at all. And I believe that they were always like that. Notice that the pickguard on this bass looks sorta, kinda like the pickguard on the Tele bass, but not exactly (partially because the body style isn't exactly like the one used on Precision/Telecaster basses).
While it's true that Fender does make reissues of
the Fender Telecaster Bass, they have never, to my knowledge, made one that has some characteristics of a Tele bass, and other characteristics of a more modern design. And there has never been a Telecaster bass with two pickups, either replica or otherwise. The current Telecaster reissue basses are designed to be exact replicas of the Tele basses, except that they don't call 'em "Telecaster basses" anymore. They will say "Precision Bass" on the headstock. Two examples are the Sting model and the so-called '51 Precision. I don't really understand why Fender is currently pretending that they only had TWO series of basses in the old days (the Precision and Jazz Basses), instead of three (the Precision, the Jazz, and the Telecaster Basses). The Tele basses used the same
body as the Precision basses, but they had different electronics and a different headstock design and, thus, were really an entirely different bass. And, just to be perfectly clear, the Telecaster basses were NOT merely a transitional model that eventually evolved into the Precision bass. It is NOT a situation such as the "No-caster" and "Broadcaster" models, which eventually became the Telecaster guitar. The Telecaster basses were made well into the late 1970s, and
coexisted for decades right along side the Precision and Jazz models. But one thing that I am sure of is that the particular bass in question is NOT a recent replica of the Telecaster bass.