The Rickenbacker 4001 is the instrument that gave progressive rock its bass sound before anyone decided the genre needed one. It is bright where a Precision is round, it cuts through a keyboard-heavy mix instead of sitting under it, and it can be plugged into two amplifiers at once. Two players in particular built careers on it, and one of them talked the other into buying his. Here is the instrument, the family it belongs to, and the records.

Where it comes from

Rickenbacker’s first production bass was the single-pickup 4000. The 4001 is the two-pickup deluxe version of it, designed by Roger Rossmeisl, and it ran from 1961 to 1981, when the revised 4003 took over. A stripped-down 4001S, without the body binding and with simpler appointments, was also made. If you see a prog bassist with a Rickenbacker between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, it is almost certainly a 4001 or a 4001S.

What makes it sound like that

Three things, and they are all structural rather than a matter of taste. The neck runs through the whole length of the body rather than being bolted on, which changes how the instrument sustains. The two pickups are not a matched pair – they are different designs doing different jobs, which is why blending them produces a much wider range of voices than the usual two-pickup arrangement. And the instrument has Rick-O-Sound: a stereo output that splits the two pickups onto separate signal paths, so the bass can be sent to two amplifiers and treated as two instruments at once. That last feature is the reason the 4001 turns up so consistently in bands with a lot going on in the midrange.

The practical consequence for a listener is simple. On a Rickenbacker you can usually hear the attack of the pick and the note at the same time. In a band with a Hammond, a Mellotron and two guitars, that is the difference between a bass part you can follow and one you can only feel.

Chris Squire

The player most identified with the instrument is Chris Squire, whose 4001 is behind the Yes bass sound from the first records onward: The Yes Album (1971), Fragile (1971), Close to the Edge (1972) and on through the catalogue. Rickenbacker later produced a 4001CS limited edition in his name, based on his British-market instrument. Squire modified his own bass, and the details of what was done to it and when are covered separately in my piece on Chris Squire’s Rickenbacker.

Geddy Lee

The second great 4001 player got there because of the first. Geddy Lee has said he was drawn to the instrument by Squire’s sound, and the black 4001 he bought remained his main bass from the 1970s into the early 1980s – which covers 2112 (1976), A Farewell to Kings (1977), Hemispheres (1978) and Permanent Waves (1980). From Moving Pictures (1981) he began recording with a Fender Jazz Bass, moved to a Wal through the synthesizer years between 1985 and 1992, and returned to the Jazz almost exclusively from Counterparts (1993). Fender released a Geddy Lee signature Jazz Bass in 1998, based on a 1972 instrument he had bought second-hand in 1978, with a revised American version in 2015. His full setup is in my piece on Geddy Lee’s basses and gear.

The line from Squire to Lee is the clearest example in this genre of an instrument choice travelling between bands, and it is documented by the player himself rather than inferred from photographs – which, in gear writing, is rarer than it should be.

4001 or 4003

The question every buyer asks, and the answer is less romantic than the price difference implies. The 4003 replaced the 4001 in 1981 with a different truss rod design and a harder fret wire, the latter because fast fret wear had been a common complaint on the older instrument once roundwound strings became standard. Its pickups are higher in output, and the bridge pickup was redesigned along more conventional lines while keeping the horseshoe surround as a visual feature. So: the same instrument, made more durable and a little hotter. Anyone chasing a specific record from the 1970s is chasing a 4001, but the musical gap between the two is much smaller than the used market suggests.

One footnote for anyone reading dates on a photograph: these instruments changed quietly and often across twenty years of production, so a 4001 from 1964 and a 4001 from 1979 are not the same bass in any detail that matters. Attributing a particular record to a particular year of instrument is guesswork unless the player has said so.

Beyond prog

The 4001 was never a specialist instrument. Roger Glover played one with Deep Purple and Rainbow, and Paul McCartney’s left-handed example is the source of the 4001C64 reissues. That breadth is worth remembering when the bass is described as the prog bass: it was simply a good, bright, well-made instrument that happened to suit a genre with a crowded midrange.

Go deeper

The two players have their own guides, Chris Squire’s Rickenbacker and Geddy Lee’s basses and gear, and the whole instrument survey is in the guide to prog rock gear. For the playing, see the best prog rock bassists and the best bass solos in prog rock. Both sides of this story – the British bands and the North American ones – are covered across my Beyond the Sound series, Yes in Beyond the Thames and Rush in Beyond the Atlantic.

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