The bass guitar as an instrument, an industry and a recorded sound.
Section 01
Every solid-body bass in production descends from two Fender drawings and a handful of arguments with them.
8 pieces in this section
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The 1957 revision of the Fender Precision — split-coil pickup, wider headstock, contoured body — is the instrument the rest of the industry has been redrawing ever since, not the 1951 original. Traces what changed between the two versions and why the correction, not the invention, became the template.
The Fender Jazz Bass arrived in 1960 with a narrower nut, an offset waist and a bridge pickup — and guitar players took to it immediately.
The Music Man StingRay of 1976 was Leo Fender's second attempt at correcting his own instrument — this time with an onboard preamp that gave the bass a top end it had not previously had.
The Rickenbacker 4001 and 4003 use a neck-through construction and a stereo output that most players never wired correctly.
The Höfner 500/1 is a hollow violin-body bass built in Bubenreuth, Germany, that became the instrument Paul McCartney used because it was left-hand symmetrical and cheap.
Dingwall's fanned-fret system — derived from Novax patents — sets each string at a different speaking length, giving the low B a longer scale than the G.
The instrument Jaco Pastorius called the Bass of Doom was a 1962 Fender Jazz he defretted himself and finished with marine epoxy — and it is now at the Bass Museum in Miami.
The five-string bass entered production in the early 1980s — the Fender Bass V being an early and failed attempt, the Music Man StingRay 5 a later, successful one — and the low B has divided players on tension, tone and neck width ever since.