Bass Guitars

Bass Guitars

Denmy Minaya
ENGLISH 1
January 6, 2012

The bass guitar or is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb, or by using a pick. The bass guitar is similar in appearance and construction to an electric guitar, butwith a longer neck and scale length, and four, five, six, or eight strings. The four-string bass is by far the most common is usually tuned the same as the double bass, which corresponds to pitches one octave lower than the four lower strings of a guitar (E, A, D, and G). The bass guitar is a transposing instrument where you can use a capo to make its tone or pitch higher. Like the electric guitar,the bass guitar is plugged into an amplifier and speaker for live performances. Since the 1950s, the bass guitar has largely replaced the double bass in popular music as the bass instrument in the rhythm section. The bass guitar is used in many styles of music including rock, metal, pop, punk rock, country, reggae, blues, and jazz. It is used as a soloing instrument in jazz, fusion, Latin, funk,and in some rock and metal styles.

In the 1930s, musician and inventor Paul Tutmarc from Seattle, Washington, developed the first electric string bass in its modern form, a fretted instrument designed to be held and played horizontally. The 1935 sales catalog for Tutmarc's electronic musical instrument company, Audiovox, featured his "Model 736 Bass Fiddle," a four-stringed, solid-bodied, frettedelectric bass instrument with a 30½-inch scale length.The alteration to a guitar form made the instrument easier to hold and transport, and the addition of frets enabled bassists to play in tune more easily. About 100 of these instruments were made during this period. In 1947, Tutmarc's son, Bud, began selling a similar bass under the Serenader brand name, advertised in the nationally. However,the Tutmarc family inventions did not achieve market success.
In the 1950s, Leo Fender, with the help of his employee George Fullerton, developed the first mass-produced electric bass .His Fender Precision Bass, introduced in 1951, became a widely copied industry standard. The Precision Bass evolved from a simple, uncontoured "slab" body design similar to that of a Telecaster with a singlepickup, to a contoured body design.
Bass bodies are typically made of wood, although other materials such as graphite have also been used. While a wide variety of woods are suitable for use in the body, neck, and fret board of the bass guitar, the most common type of wood used for the body is alder, for the neck is maple, and for the fret board is rosewood. Other commonly used woods include mahogany,maple, ash, and poplar for bodies, mahogany for necks, and maple and ebony for fret boards. Other design options include finishes, such as lacquer, wax and oil; flat and carved designs; Luthier-produced custom-designed instruments; headless basses, which have tuning machines in the bridge of the instrument and several artificial materials such as luthite.
Another design consideration for the bassis whether to use frets on the fingerboard. On a fretted bass, the frets divide the fingerboard into semitone divisions as on the guitar . The original Fender basses had 20 frets, but modern basses may have 24 or more. Fretless basses have a different sound, because the absence of frets means that the string must be pressed down directly onto the wood of the fingerboard as with the double bass.The standard design for the electric bass guitar has four strings, tuned E, A, D and G, in fourths such that the open highest string, G, is an eleventh below middle C, making the tuning of all four strings the same as that of the double bass. This tuning is also the same as the standard tuning on the lower four strings on a six-string guitar, only an octave lower. String types include all-metal...