All About That Bass Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

Jul 15, 2015

Last week we started taking a look at the history of the upright bass. Like all the instrument histories we’ve been exploring, the bass has gone through a number of changes, always being adapted to fit the ever evolving needs of musicians. The upright, or double bass began its existence as a large, often unwieldy thing, and yet despite its great size and the skill of some early virtuosos, the sounds these acoustic basses could produce were often the quietest in the band. This problem was most evident in the late 1800s and early 1900s when New Orleans jazz bands began utilizing the bass to its fullest potential. New playing and fingering techniques helped the bass be better heard, but it was still being drowned out by the rest of the band. And it is here, in the early part of the 20th century, where we continue to story of the bass.

The first third of the 1900s saw a few important leaps forward in the development of the bass. The first came in the ’20s, when Lloyd Loar got working for that fabled guitar manufacturer, Gibson. Loar added an electro-static pickup, similar to those being used in the new electric guitars, to the upright bass, allowing for some kind of amplification. Unfortunately, amplification of the bass frequencies was maddeningly underdeveloped, so there was still no real way to hear it. It would be a few years more, in the early 1930s, that the bass’s size went through its first major alteration. Paul Tutmarc, a musician, inventor, and lap steel guitar manufacturer decided to see if he could reinvent the bass in a more practical size. His first prototype reduced the size only slightly, bringing it down to about the size of a cello, and it also featured a primitive and rudimentary pickup for amplification. However, this design proved to still be too heavy, and he went back to the drawing board. For his next prototype, Tutmarc looked to another stringed instrument for inspiration: the guitar. Using the guitar as a template, Tutmarc’s newest bass was a mere 42 inches long, sported a solid body made from black walnut, used piano strings, and like the cello sized one before it, had a pickup.

What followed was a boom in experimental electric bass production throughout the mid 1930s. Most major musical instrument manufacturers got in on the game, including Lyon & Healy, Gibson, and Rickenbacker. Each of these companies produced a bass that was similar to Tutmarc’s, in that they were much smaller and easier to handle than the original. But the modern electric bass as we know it today still hadn’t quite arrived yet; these instruments were still tall, played in the upright position, and still didn’t have frets.

It wouldn’t be until about 1940 that Tutmarc’s son, the aptly named Paul Tutmarc, Jr., began manufacturing his own guitars and basses, including his Serenader bass. The younger Tutmarc had taken his father’s guitar sized and styled prototype to its logical conclusion with the Serenader. This new design was the first actual bass guitar; it was a small instrument, designed to be played horizontally, just like a guitar. And also just like a guitar, it featured frets for the first time in the bass’s long history. This new design had two main defining features as far as most musicians were concerned. The first was the pickup, specially designed for the bass to help it compete with the louder pieces of the band, and the second was its compact size. Previously the bass player had to travel alone, apart from the rest of the band, due to the sheer size of his instrument. This caused all kinds of problems, including bass players getting lost and showing up to gigs late, if at all. With this new compact size, the bass player could now travel with the rest of the band. However, despite these innovations to the instrument, this new electric bass still was unable to reach marketable success.

Commercial success didn’t come to the electric bass until 1951 with the Fender Precision bass. Its name came from the frets, which allowed bassists to perform notes with unprecedented accuracy. To many people, this was the first true modern electric bass, and to be fair, I was the first many had seen of the new style. The Fender Precision bass, or P-bass, was the most mass-produced and easily recognizable bass guitar of the time. And the truth is it remains one of the most recognizable bass guitars even today. What would go on to become the most copied bass guitar design ever had evolved from an un-contoured body design and a single coil pickup in 1951, to a beautifully curved and contoured body featuring beveled edges for player comfort, and a much more complicated split single coil pickup that utilized four poles on each half, with two poles for each string, along with a redesigned pickgaurd and headstock coming about in 1957. Fender would continue this innovation into the ’60s when they designed and created an electric bass guitar specifically for jazz. This new Jazz bass used two separate pickups in place of the split pickup on earlier Fender basses. With this came a surge in popularity for the Fender brand basses, leading to competitors like Gibson and Rickenbacker to follow their lead. Now, multiple brands putting out their own bass guitars helped to create a consistent rise in the popularity of the instrument, granting it its place as a fundamental part of modern musical genres including rock, jazz, blues, reggae, and funk, to name just a few.

In the decades since its invention, there have been many stand-out bass guitar performers. The ’60s saw great acts like Led Zepplin’s John Paul Jones, Booker T. & the M.G.’s (and less notably the Blues Brothers) Donald “Duck” Dunn, and the original Motown legend James Jamerson. The ’70s had Geddy Lee with Rush, Paul McCartney, and Paul Simonon of the Clash. However, when the ’80s hit there was a slight drop in the popularity of the bass guitar: it had been superseded by electronically synthesized dance music. Regardless, we still had a few legendary bass players from the era, including jazz musician Marcus Miller, Sting of the Police, and Ben Orr from The Cars. Today, the bass enjoys a huge amount of popularity, and modern bassists like Flea from The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Mike Dirnt of Green Day show audiences the importance of the instrument in today’s popular music. The only somewhat unfortunate thing about how the electric bass guitar has evolved, and the rise in popularity that followed, is that now the upright bass has fallen into relative obscurity again. In fact, just saying the word “bass” almost exclusively brings the modern bass guitar to mind, rather than its forefather, and much longer lived relative, the upright or double bass.