![]() ![]() Traditional upright players didn’t like Fender’s latest idea, thinking that it was a fad that wouldn’t catch on. The last change was to have a direct output from the on-board electronics to the amplifier, meaning that the bass finally competed with the rapidly growing drum-kits of the era. The second design innovation was to make the fingerboard flat and fretted in order to give the player more precision (hence the name) when it came to intonation (while making the use of a bow no longer an option). The advantage for the guitarist is that the bass viol is the only member of the violin family to be tuned to perfect fourths (causing purists to doubt whether it is a violin at all), which is similar to the bottom four strings of the Spanish guitar (only an octave lower). He revolved the neck by 90 degrees so that any standard guitar player could recognise the format and adapt quickly to it. ![]() Leo Fender literally revolutionised the design. ![]() It didn’t need to as it was rarely used for anything more creative than the addition of sonic ballast, with the player rarely doing more than bowing the dominant and tonic notes of the scale. While the Spanish guitar had been evolving for centuries, the double bass hadn’t changed significantly since the 1600s. When the Precision Bass hit the market in 1951, it was one of those genuine moments of surprise, because no one had seen anything like it before. Something had to be done.Īmerican guitar designer, Leo Fender, who had been working on an electric version of the Spanish six-string guitar (which would later become the legendary Telecaster), applied the knowledge he had gained in electrifying the higher-range instrument to its lower-range four-string counterpart. Wildly disproportionate in size to its output volume, it was also becoming too big for touring bands to pack into their buses. ![]() By the 1940s, so-called big bands were becoming loud to the point where the traditional upright bass that had been borrowed from the classical orchestra could no longer be heard. ![]()
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