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. Bryan Sutton C Lick Guitar Lesson - Acoustic Bluegrass Soloing

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