Considering the lengthy history of the guitar, it is surprising that it took until the 1950s for the bass guitar to reach its full potential. The upright bass was what bands had to work with for the first half of the twentieth century. While this acoustic instrument worked well in jazz, it was unsatisfactory for modern pop music—due to its low amplification, the fact that it is an instrument that requires extensive technique to play properly, and due to its large size as simply getting it to the gig was problematic. It became evident to guitar makers that new type of bass guitar was necessary if the bass was to be a prominent instrument in modern bands.

By the 1940s, Rickenbacker began making the first electric double basses, which dealt with travel and amplification problems. Guitarist Smiley Burnette, the bassist with Gene Autry’s band was one of the first players to use it, and it continues to be used by bassists playing salsa and Latin-jazz. It was Leo Fender however, who can truly lay claim as inventor of the electric bass. In 1950, he designed his first electric bass guitar, The Precision Bass, which was introduced commercially a year later, rendering the upright bass obsolete in pop music.

Even more impressive, this first rendition of the electric bass was so near perfection that it is produced to date with very little change. The fact that the design of the instrument has changed so little since its initial appearance makes it easy to overlook just how innovative Fender was. This was the first electric guitar with two cutaways, and many six-string electric guitars of the day didn’t even feature one cutaway. Fender had the insight to use two and also to extend the upper horn over the neck of the bass in order to achieve better balance and make his new instrument more playable. Fender also chose to use a 34” scale length as was dictated by the physics of the instrument, which is tuned to E, A, D, and G, like the bottom four strings of a guitar, but one octave lower.

The Precision model was so-named due to its fretted fingerboard, which allowed the player to play in tune “with precision.” This design revolutionized bass playing, as well as making the singing bassist possible as playing the double bass while singing was almost impossible, particularly with the microphones of the time. The electric bass allowed mobility and a virtuosity that was new to bass players, and a whole new school of bass guitarist began to evolve. John Entwistle, Stanley Clark, Marcus Miller, and Jaco Pastorius have been just a few of the hundreds of key players to watch. Pastorious being the one that was almost single-handedly responsible for the popularity of the fretless bass as he played a Fender Jazz with the frets removed.

Fender introduced the Jazz bass in 1960 as an alternative to the Precision. It is a more
versatile bass, with a narrower neck, making it easier to play, and competing with models that were being produced by other manufacturers. Although Rickenbacker didn’t introduce their first bass guitar until the late ‘50s, their designs proved to be as important as those of Fender.

Their first model was the 4000, which was joined several years later by the twin pick-up 4001. It is the 4001 which has since become one of the most popular and most recognizable of all basses. The Gibson guitar company produced their answer to the Fender Precision in 1953, as well as several other fine models such as the EB-0, 1, 2 and 3, and the Thunderbird, their bass equivalent to their Firebird guitars launched in 1963. John Entwistle used the Thunderbird extensively with the Who in the ‘70s, but overall, Gibson’s bass models never obtained the popularity of their guitars.

Fender produced still another classic bass model in the mid-70s for a company called Musicman. This was the Stingray, which was among the first bass to have active electronics on board. Fender designed several other models before his retirement and eventual death in 1991, including five- and six-string models ahead of their time. Although the increased higher range has become a highly desired trait in a bass model today, none of Fender’s original designs in this area attained as much popularity or had as much impact on how other company’s designed the instrument as the Precision, the Jazz and the Stingray.