History of The Electric Bass Guitar
Rarely can the genesis of a musical instrument be traced directly to one person, but the fact is that the electric bass guitar didn't exist until Leo Fender invented it.
Even if he hadn't also been the father of the legendary Stratocaster® and Telecaster® guitars and a stable of famous amplifiers, the invention of the first commercially successful electric bass guitar alone would ensure Leo Fender's lofty place in the history of popular music and the musical instrument industry.
Nobody asked him to do it and nobody really knows what prompted him to even consider the concept in the first place. The swelling volume levels of bands in the late 1940s and early '50s spelled trouble for cumbersome upright acoustic basses—their sound and pulse never easily discerned with great clarity, they were awkward to amplify and were hence often drowned out by horns, drums and increasingly louder amplified guitars.
Whatever his inspiration might have been, Leo Fender evidently decided around the time of the 1951 arrival of his revolutionary Telecaster guitar that an amplified bass instrument in solid-body Spanish-style guitar form was simply a good idea whose time had come. The world would soon come to agree.
Later that very year, Fender introduced a revolutionary and previously nonexistent type of musical instrument, the electric bass guitar. The Fender Precision Bass was the world's first electric bass guitar; played like a guitar and fretted so that it could be played with “precision” and amplified, thus liberating bassists from unwieldy and inaudible acoustic basses. It sounded great, it looked cool, it was easy to play, it was affordable, and it was certainly much more portable and convenient than an upright.
It quickly changed the sound of popular music worldwide. With its companion, the loud, sturdy Bassman amp, the Precision Bass meant that bassists finally and suddenly found themselves able to compete, volume-wise. It also meant that guitarists lacking in upright technique could easily play bass parts; the Precision thus heralded the arrival of not only a new kind of musical instrument, but also a new kind of musician—the electric bassist.
With so much more sound now coming from guitars, drums and the new Fender electric bass guitar, the big bands of the 1930s '40s and early '50s now gave way to smaller, often raucous groups of three, four and five musicians—the first rock 'n' roll bands. They ushered in a new and wildly exciting musical and cultural idiom, and within a decade these acts would morph into the first full-fledged rock groups.
In studios and on stages worldwide throughout the 1950s, the Precision quickly became so ubiquitous and so universally preferred that it was not at all uncommon to see production credits and album liner notes naming so-and-so on piano, so-and-so on guitar, so-and-so on drums and so-and-so on Fender bass. The instrument simply became omnipresent.
Bass guitar-wise, Fender could've easily stopped right there, content to rest on the four-string laurels of the Precision Bass for decades to come, but Leo Fender and his staff soon envisioned a deluxe bass guitar model that would provide a supercharged alternative to its stalwart predecessor.
This second bass guitar model, the Jazz Bass, was introduced in 1960, and became even more successful than the Precision (to this day, many bassists insist on having both models in their arsenals). The offset-waist body of the Jazz Bass was even more curvaceously sexy than the Precision, and its thinner neck made faster passages even easier to play. With two single-coil pickups, its signature growl complemented the single-pickup Precision's signature boom.
Together, both basses provided a player with all the options. If you felt like gunning a muscle car on the street, you donned your Precision. If you felt like taking the track at Le Mans, you grabbed your Jazz.
Fender built a bass empire on these two instruments. Largely unchanged over the ensuing decades, the Precision Bass and Jazz Bass guitars together comprise a deep-end dynasty that continues to rule popular music with seeming impunity; the first-choice bass guitars for literally thousands of musicians worldwide. In fact, many are the bassists who would choose a beat-up Fender Precision or Jazz over a brand-new high-end boutique bass without thinking twice about it.
Other Fender basses made their mark, too. The short-scale, student-friendly Mustang, Musicmaster and Bronco basses of the 1960s and '70s introduced many young players to the world of bass. The original Precision Bass design was reintroduced in 1968 as the Telecaster Bass; many players swear by it as one of the greatest pure rock basses ever made. In 2006, Fender introduced its highly successful Jaguar Bass, a sleek and smartly designed model derived from the venerable Jaguar guitar of the 1960s.
Fender bass amplification, too, has evolved over the years. As noted, the original Bassman amp of the 1950s was designed specifically for the Precision Bass, and one of the great ironies of its long existence is that while its power was outpaced within a decade or so as a bass amp, it quickly became heralded as one of the greatest guitar amps of all time. Fender continually experimented with bass amplification, scoring many hits and misses over the years; its bass amps from each era were appreciated for their great tone, but the company often struggled to provide the features and power offered by competitors who specialized in nothing but bass amplification.
From the mid-1990s onward, however, as Fender gradually re-emerged as an industry leader after years of difficulty and disappointment under CBS, more focus was trained on bass amplification. The new Fender's re-engineered combo bass amps were especially well designed, highly regarded and enormously popular, and the company devoted more resources than ever to the development of powerful and competitive bass head/cabinet designs. In 2002, Fender Bass Amplification (FBA) was established as a distinct entity within the company and soon offered a comprehensive range of products from redesigned Bassman amps to popular Rumble combos to the student-friendly B-..o the concert-level PRO series power amps, preamps and cabinets. Today, the full line of FBA products delivers thick, natural and powerful bass tone that sits fat in live and studio mixes as the perfect complement to Fender bass guitars.
It's no exaggeration to say that Fender is synonymous with bass. And in a global musical instrument industry clouded by competing claims and controversy regarding who invented what and when they did it, Fender is the undisputed inventor and foremost exponent of the electric bass guitar, pure and simple. Fender remains the worldwide leader when it comes to bass guitars, a central truth that to this day continues to boom forth from stages, studios, clubs, schools, basements and bedrooms near and far.
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