Leland Sklar has played on roughly 2,000 albums, and by his own count a single bass carried about 85 percent of them. That instrument, the one under James Taylor’s early records, Jackson Browne’s touring band, Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required and a stack of Toto sessions, was never a catalog Fender. It was a parts assembly built in a Los Angeles shop in 1973. Now Fender has recreated it as an official signature, and the list price is $3,499.99.
The Lee Sklar Precision Bass arrived in September 2026 as part of the Fender Stories Collection, the same limited series that has honored players like Eric Johnson and Michael Landau. On paper it reads like a P-Bass. Look closer and the interesting thing becomes obvious: Fender has spent real effort reproducing a bass that spent its whole life fighting to stop being a stock P-Bass.
The bass Fender is copying was barely a Fender to begin with
Sklar’s number one was built in 1973 by luthier John Carruthers at Westwood Music in Los Angeles, and Sklar nicknamed it “Frankenstein” for good reason (Wikipedia). The neck started as a 1962 Fender Precision neck, then got reshaped down to Jazz Bass dimensions and refretted with mandolin fret wire, about the smallest gauge you can buy. The body, by most accounts, was a Charvel alder blank rather than a Fender one. The electronics were two first-generation EMG active Precision pickups, mounted in reverse and routed into Jazz Bass positions. The bridge was a Badass II. The detuner was an early Hipshot prototype.
Add it up and almost nothing on that bass came out of a Fender factory except the original neck, and even that got shaved and refretted past recognition. The tone that a couple of generations of listeners think of as a clean, punchy “P-Bass sound” was actually the sound of aftermarket active pickups, a replacement bridge, a hot-rodded neck and a detuner. Sklar’s instrument is a monument to everything working session players did to their Fenders in the 1970s because the stock parts would not do what the studio demanded.
That is what makes this signature more honest than most. Fender is not pretending Sklar played a vintage-correct 1962. It is reproducing the modifications.
What the signature actually reproduces
The specs track the Frankenstein closely rather than rounding it off into a normal production bass (No Treble):
- Alder body, 34-inch scale
- Maple neck carved to a slim 1962 Jazz Bass “C” profile, 1.59-inch nut width
- Round-laminated rosewood fingerboard, 7.25-inch radius, 20 mandolin-sized frets, clay dot inlays
- Two EMG Active Lee Sklar P pickups
- Controls: Volume, Volume, Tone
- BadAss II bridge
- Gotoh reversed open-gear tuners with a Hipshot BT3 Bass Xtender detuner
- Satin Heirloom nitrocellulose lacquer in an aged natural color, with a vintage-style tweed case
The details that matter are the ones a normal Precision would never carry. Two pickups with independent volume controls is Jazz Bass wiring, not P-Bass wiring, and it lets Sklar dial a blend that a single split-coil simply cannot produce. The mandolin frets and the shaved neck are why his playing feels so fast and fluid under the fingers. The BT3 detuner drops the E string on demand, a session-era trick for handling a key change without a second instrument. Fender kept all of it.
The active-pickup decision is the real news
Here is the part gear people should not skim past: Fender put a competitor’s active pickups in one of its own signature basses, and named the pickups after the artist rather than after itself. EMG has made the Sklar-voiced P pickup for decades, and Fender chose to fit it at the factory rather than substitute an in-house passive design and call it close enough.
That is unusual, and it is the whole point. A passive split-coil P-Bass has one voice, a fat mid-forward thump. Sklar’s tone is cleaner, wider and more even than that, with output that sits in a dense mix without needing much fader help (Bass Magazine). Two active pickups feeding two volume knobs is how he gets there. Swap in a passive pickup and the bass stops being a Sklar signature and starts being a nice P-Bass with a famous name on the headstock. Fender clearly understood the difference.
$3,499, and the narrow player it makes sense for
The price is the conversation. In the United States the Lee Sklar Precision lists at $3,499.99, with Sweetwater and Andertons taking pre-orders ahead of an October arrival; UK pricing lands around £3,249 (Andertons). That is well above an American Professional II Precision and pushing toward Custom Shop money.
Judge it as a general-purpose P-Bass and it looks expensive. Judge it as the only place you can buy this exact combination, and the math changes. There is no off-the-shelf bass with a shaved 1962 Jazz-profile neck, mandolin frets, dual reversed EMG actives, a Badass II and a factory detuner. A luthier could assemble one, at real cost and with no guarantee it nails the voicing. For a player who specifically wants Sklar’s fast, clean, session-ready tone, paying once for the finished recipe is coherent. For a player who just wants “a Fender bass,” this is the wrong and overpriced door.
It is worth setting this signature next to Fender’s James Jamerson 1962 Precision Bass, because the two tributes chase opposite ideas. Jamerson’s honors a vintage-correct passive instrument and the flatwound thump of Motown. Sklar’s honors a modified, active, forward-looking session tool. Both are called Precision Basses. They could hardly sound more different, which tells you how much room the platform actually has once you stop treating the stock spec as sacred. The Charvel body on the original even quietly links Sklar’s number one to the California hot-rod scene that gave us guitars like the Charvel San Dimas, and the Heirloom nitro finish here uses the same aging approach Fender has leaned on across relic’d pieces like the Road Worn Stratocaster.
The most recorded bassist most people can’t name
Sklar is famous the way session players are famous, which is to say almost not at all. The giant white beard is more recognizable than the name, and his second act as a genial YouTube presence and as bassist for The Immediate Family, the band reuniting his old Section bandmates Danny Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel and Russ Kunkel, has done more for his public profile than 2,000 album credits ever did (Guitar World).
A signature bass is Fender formally admitting that this quiet, endlessly hired player, and the strange homemade instrument he brought to every session, shaped the low end of American popular music for fifty years. At $3,499.99 it is not a bass most people will buy. As a document of how a real working tone actually gets built, part by unglamorous part, it might be the most honest signature Fender has shipped in a while.