TheBass Handbook Adrian Ashton hope. in return. that The Bass Handbook refiects the mutual respect amongst bass players and helps to maintain the great bass tradition. ABOUT THIS BOOK The Boss Handbook has something to offer bass players at all levels. but it is specifically aimed at new arrivals and intermediate player-s. The advanced player will be able to explore the history of the bass, amplification and effects while also dipping into new areas of study, such as sight reading. The new or intermediate bassist will find this book a pleasure to use. with its spiral-bound pages and a chapter by chapter analysis of the most important questions that are asked about the bass. As a tutor and author on the bass, I know that there are key questions students need to ask their studies. You'll find all the answers in The Bass Handbook. Finally. The Boss Handbook makes the perfect companion for the many bass teachers out there. Students have a study method, with backing tracks, in a layout that doesn't fall off a music stand. And you can refresh your memory (secretly of course) of how to wOI-k out Ohm's Law for cabinets of unequal impedance when your student asks, "Can I connect my 4 x 10" cab to my '2 x IO"?" Just in time for next week's lesson. BASS HISTORY Leo Fender produced the first widely available bass guitar in 1951 - and got much of the design right first time. Fender, a radio repairman in California who had turned to making guitars and Paul McCartney with his Hofner amps, developed the bass guitar at a time when the bassist in a band would be stuck with 500/1 'violin' bass. a large and often barely audible instrument, the double bass - what Leo called "the doghouse". He realised that bass players would welcome a louder, more pOt-table instrument that offered precise pitching of notes. Precision Bass In 1951 Leo provided bassists with the aptly named Fender Precision Bass. for $195.50/00, a sum that equates to something like $1 ,4001£800 now. Many of its features were based on his already successful and equally astounding solid six-str-ing electric guitar, the Telecaster. (The Stratocaster would arrive three years later.) HISTORY 7 The Fender Precision was an ash-bodied, maple- necked bass, its four strings tuned E A D G like those on the double bass and amplified via a simple foul~ • pole pickup controlled by two knobs for volume and tone. In 1957, Leo restyled the Precision, making it • look much as it still does today: Stratocaster-like headstock, sculpted body, and the distinctive split pickup. Early Precision users included jazz player Monk Montgomery. of the Lionel Hampton Band, along with many country-and-westerners who constituted a large percentage of Fender's customers at the time. The Precision is of course still widely used, and the design has been much copied by other bass makers. Jazz Bass Fender's next bass design, the Jazz Bass, was introduced in 1960, and was distinguished by an offset body shape similar to that of its contemporary, the jazzmaster guitar It also differed in having a narrower string spacing at the nut and the twin pickup arrangement to give more tonal variation via three knobs - volume per pickup, and overall tone. Gibson's basses have not done so well: the company introduced its first electric four-string, the original 'violin bass', in I953.This design was copied by the German maker Hofner- and won widespread Stanley Clarke with his Alembic. populanty when The Beatles' Paul McCartney played a Hofner violin bass in the I960s. Gibson's brief bass popularity came at the end of the 1960s when jack Bruce of Cream used an EB-3, a double-cutaway twin-pickup bass. Gibson's humbucker-equipped basses - sounded muddy, not helped by their short-scale necks, and they've never seemed senous contenders. Rickenbacker basses first appeared in 1957 with the debut of their 4000 model, but achieved popularity when used by players like Paul McCartney in the late I960s, Chris Squire ofYes in the I970s, and later in that decade Bruce Foxton ofThe jam. They are renowned for a bright sound, though this is often due as much to the player's style and amplification as to the instrument. Active Active circuitry offers increased tonal range by using an on-board preamp.The first bass to feature such a Circuit was the semi-solid Burns TR-2, launched by British guitar maker jim Burns in 1963 and featuring an on-board 9V battery to power an active volume, bass and treble circuit. Later; active electronics were made mOI"e widely available, originally through the work of Amencan company Alembic, formed in the late I960s as a workshop to pmvide 8 HISTORY