History of the Bass Guitar

For the four-string guitar enthusiast, the history of the bass guitar stems from the antiquity of the bass register of music. Throughout the Renaissance and into the modern day, the bass registers of music were carried either by brass instruments like the tuba or the cello-like (a 6-foot-tall double bass).

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While the guitar went through hundreds of years of experimentation across many generations of luthiers, the bass remained relatively unchanged. That is until the 1930s, when a man named Paul Tutmarc took the idea of a double bass but redesigned it to play horizontally, producing the first bass in a guitar format.

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From the 1930s through the early 1950s the only bass guitars that could be found were all custom shop prototypes.  Popularizing and setting the standards for electric guitars, Leo Fender made and produced the 1st electric bass guitar. Since that inception, the bass guitar has been cemented in pop culture and it is present in almost every genre of music that exists today.