From Double Bass to Slap Funk: The Story of the Bass
In 1951, musicians flipping through trade news could read about something new from a small company in Fullerton, California. Leo Fender, a radio repairman turned guitar maker, had built a bass that looked like an oversized electric guitar. It had frets, a solid wooden body and a pickup, and you could carry it under one arm. He called it the Precision Bass, and it would quietly change the sound of popular music.
But the story of the bass begins centuries earlier, with a towering wooden instrument that bassists still play today. To understand why Fender's invention mattered so much, we have to follow the low notes from Baroque orchestras to New Orleans, Detroit and beyond.
A giant in the orchestra
The double bass grew out of the large string instruments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially the deep members of the viol family. That ancestry still shows: many double basses have the sloping shoulders of a viol rather than the rounded shape of a violin, and the strings are tuned in fourths rather than the fifths of the violin family. Historians still discuss exactly how its design settled, and for a long time basses came in many sizes with different numbers of strings.
In the orchestra, the bass usually doubled the cello line an octave lower, giving weight to the harmony. A few remarkable players showed that it could do much more. The Italian virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti, active in London around 1800, astonished audiences with his agility, and in the nineteenth century Giovanni Bottesini toured as a soloist and wrote showpieces that bassists still perform.
Walking bass: the double bass finds jazz
Early jazz bands in New Orleans and elsewhere often used a tuba or sousaphone for the bass line, since brass carried well outdoors and on early recordings. During the 1920s and 1930s, as recording technology improved, the string bass took over. Players plucked the strings with their fingers instead of using a bow, and they developed the walking bass: a steady line of notes on every beat that moves through the chords and drives the band forward.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jimmy Blanton, playing with Duke Ellington's orchestra, showed that the bass could play melodic, horn-like lines, and he is widely regarded as a founder of modern jazz bass. After him came giants such as Ray Brown, whose swing powered countless recordings, and Charles Mingus, who was also one of jazz's major composers.
The double bass had one big problem, though. It was huge, hard to transport, and in a loud band with drums and amplified guitars, it could be difficult to hear.
1951: Leo Fender's Precision Bass
Electric basses had been tried before. In the 1930s, the Seattle inventor Paul Tutmarc offered an electric bass played horizontally, but it made little commercial impact. Leo Fender's design succeeded where others had not. The Precision Bass, introduced in 1951, had a solid body, a magnetic pickup and, crucially, frets. The name pointed to that last feature: with frets, players could find notes precisely, without the fine pitch control a fretless upright demands.
Guitarists could switch to it easily, and bassists could finally travel with their instrument in a car and play at volume through an amplifier. Fender followed with the Jazz Bass in 1960, with a slimmer neck and a brighter, more focused tone. Other makers soon joined in, from Höfner's lightweight violin-shaped bass, which Paul McCartney made famous with the Beatles, to many more.
Motown and the bass that sang
In the 1960s, the electric bass stepped into the spotlight in Detroit. At Motown Records, the session musicians known as the Funk Brothers played on a long run of hits, and their bassist, James Jamerson, transformed what a bass line could be. Plucking his Precision Bass with a single finger, he played busy, syncopated lines full of chromatic passing notes that were melodies in their own right. Generations of bassists have studied his parts note by note.
At the same time, players such as Carol Kaye, one of the most recorded session bassists of Los Angeles in that era, were laying down lines for pop, film and television music. The bass guitar had become the foundation of the modern rhythm section.
Funk, slap and the fretless revolution
Toward the end of the 1960s, Larry Graham of Sly and the Family Stone popularised a startling new technique: striking the low strings with the side of his thumb and snapping the higher strings with his fingers. He has described developing this percussive "thumping and plucking" approach to fill in for a missing drummer. Slap bass became a signature of funk, carried further by players such as Bootsy Collins and Louis Johnson.
In the 1970s, Jaco Pastorius brought the fretless electric bass to wide attention, especially through his work with the jazz fusion group Weather Report. His singing, horn-like tone and harmonics showed that the electric bass could be a lead voice. Around the same time, players began using basses with five or six strings to extend the range in both directions.
The bass in modern music
Since the 1980s, the low end has also been shaped by machines. Synthesizer bass lines drive electronic dance music, and the deep, booming bass of drum machines and samplers became central to hip-hop. Yet the bass guitar and double bass have never gone away. They anchor rock, reggae, metal, gospel, jazz and pop, and virtuosos keep pushing technique while session players keep doing the essential job: locking in with the drums and holding the harmony together.
Playing the bass today
The instrument that started as a viol-shaped giant now comes in every form, from carved upright basses to headless electric models and compact travel instruments. Many players begin by learning the classic lines of Motown, funk and rock, and practising steady timing against a click.
If you want to try it straight away, you can play a virtual bass guitar free in your browser on HarmonyHub, and keep your groove steady with the free online metronome. From Dragonetti's concerts to Jamerson's grooves, the bass has always been about the same thing: the note underneath that makes everything else make sense.