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, fretted electric bass instrument with a 30½-inch scale length. The change 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. Around 100 of these instruments were made during this period.
Around 1947, Tutmarc's son, Bud, began marketing a similar bass under the Serenader brand name, prominently advertised in the nationally distributed L.D. Heater Co. wholesale jobber catalogue of '48. 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 (or "P-bass") evolved from a simple, uncontoured "slab" body design similar to that of a Telecaster with a single coil pickup, to a contoured body design with beveled edges for comfort and a single four-pole "single coil pickup." This "split pickup", introduced in 1957, appears to have been two mandolin pickups (Fender was marketing a four string solid body electric mandolin at the time). Because the pole pieces of the coils were reversed with respect to each other, and the leads were also reversed with respect to each other, the two coils, wired in series, produced a humbucking effect (the same effect is achieved if the coils are wired in parallel).
In the 1980s, bass designers continued to explore new approaches. Ned Steinberger introduced a headless bass in 1979 and continued his innovations in the 1980s, using graphite and other new materials and (in 1984) introducing the Trans Trem Tremolo Bar.In 1987, the Guild Guitar Corporation launched the fretless Ashbory bass, which used silicone rubber strings and a piezoelectric pickup to achieve a "double bass" sound with a short 18" scale length. In the late 1980s, MTV's "unplugged" show, which featured bands performing with acoustic instruments, helped to popularize hollow-bodied acoustic bass guitars amplified with pickups.
During the 1990s, as five-string basses became more widely available and more affordable, an increasing number of bassists in genres ranging from metal to gospel began using five-string instruments for added lower range—a low "B" below the standard "E" string. Some bass players who performed a lot in a solo setting used five-string basses to get a higher range by adding a high "C" string as the fifth string (this is known as "tenor tuning"). As well, the onboard battery-powered electronics such as preamplifiers and equalizer circuits, which were previously only available on expensive "boutique" instruments, became increasingly available on modestly priced basses.
In the first decade of the 21st century, some bass manufacturers included digital modelling circuits inside the instrument to recreate tones and sounds from many models of basses (e.g., Line 6's Variax bass). Traditional bass designs such as the Fender Precision Bass and Fender Jazz Bass remained popular in the first decade of the 21st century; in 2006, a 60th Anniversary P-bass was introduced by Fender, along with the introduction of the Fender Jaguar Bass.
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