An Electric guitar, usually with four heavy strings tuned E'–A'–D–G. The electric bass guitar was invented by Leo Fender and was first marketed as the Fender Precision Bass in 1951 (see Fender). The instrument was introduced to meet the needs of musicians playing the bass part in small dance bands in the USA: they wanted not only a more easily portable instrument than the double bass, but one that could match the volume of the increasingly popular solid-bodied electric guitar, and could be played with greater precision than their large, fretless, acoustic instruments. Fender's electric bass guitar answered all these requirements. It was based on his already successful Broadcaster (later named Telecaster) six-string electric guitar, with a similar solid body of ash and neck of maple. The four strings were tuned to the same notes as the double bass (an octave below the bottom four of the six-string electric guitar), and a single pickup fed controls for volume and tone; the fretted fingerboard offered players the precision they wanted.
As with the electric guitar, Fender's earliest customers for the Precision Bass were country-and-western players, but the electric bass, which was quickly adopted by many makers of electric guitars, began to infiltrate other popular music forms and has been widely used in pop, rock, jazz, rhythm and blues, reggae and rock and roll. Players usually use the first two fingers of the right hand to pluck the strings, though some musicians, especially those who have a background in playing six-string electric guitars, use a plectrum. Chords are possible, but are rarely played, the emphasis being on a single supportive bass line with runs. A method of playing that has developed among some jazz and ‘funk’ bass players involves striking the lower strings with the edge of the thumb, while flicking higher strings with the fingers, producing a very percussive and almost anti-melodic style; known as ‘slapping’, it was apparently first used by Larry Graham, the bass player with Sly and the Family Stone in the late 1960s.
The name ‘Fender’ became almost generic for electric bass guitars at one time, and a number of new models were introduced, including the Jazz Bass (1960), and a six-string electric bass (1962), originated by Danelectro in 1956, tuned an octave below the normal electric guitar. Fender models are still very popular. Other American and East Asian manufacturers have taken a large part of the market, but electric basses are also made in Europe and elsewhere.
The original Fender design remains practically unchallenged, though features such as the number of pickups and the winding of the strings vary. Since the late 1970s some electric bass guitars have made use of ‘active electronics’ to enhance their sound. This system uses a pre-amplifier, built into the instrument, to boost the volume and widen the frequency range available from the instrument's tone controls; it was popularized by the Alembic company of California who began in the 1970s to produce superlative electric basses, as used by the virtuoso Stanley Clarke.
The fretless bass guitar is a normal electric bass except that it lacks frets. The singing tone it produces is quite unlike that of its fretted counterpart, and was made popular by Jaco Pastorius of the jazz-rock group Weather Report in the late 1970s and early 80s. One attempt to change the design of the electric bass came in the 1980s from the American maker Ned Steinberger. The Steinberger Bass was constructed entirely from injection-moulded plastics, lacked the conventional peghead at the upper end of the neck, and had a tiny body, barely wide enough to carry the pickups, control knobs and machine heads. Five-string and six-string ‘extended’ bass guitars began to appear during the 1980s, the latter pioneered by session bassist Anthony Jackson. Hybrid ‘electro-acoustic’ bass guitars with acoustic guitar-like bodies and built-in pickups have also gained a certain currency since the late 1980s.
K. Achard: ‘The Fender Bass Story’, Sound International, no.12 (April 1979), 19
T. Bacon: The Ultimate Guitar Book (London, 1991)
T. Bacon and B. Moorhouse: The Bass Book (London, 1995)
P. Trynka, ed.: Rock Hardware: 40 Years of Rock Instrumentation (London, 1996)
TONY BACON