Bass History
How James Jamerson Became the Iconic Bass Player for Motown Records
James Jamerson’s playing is legendary, but how did he become the iconic bass player for Motown records? Tim Fletcher investigates…
James Jamerson was arguably the first ‘virtuoso’ bass guitar player. He was one of the bass players who gave the electric bass its own ‘voice’, one that was separate from the double bass that it was to gradually replace in popular music. Jamerson was able to create distinctive and interesting bass lines that were as recognisable within the songs he recorded as any of the other instruments. He helped to define the ‘Motown Sound’, and influenced bass players for years to come.
James Jamerson was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1938 (although he later discovered that the correct year was 1936), and he grew up in a musical family.
His grandmother played piano a little, and his aunt sang in the local church choir. He played the trombone while he was at elementary school, and also visited his cousin’s house in order to practice the piano, which he was soon able to play in church. His love of music grew as he got older, and he became an avid listener of pop, jazz, gospel and R & B songs being played on the local radio stations. When his mother moved the family to Detroit in 1954, James enrolled at Northwestern High School. With a desire to play music, James decided to sign up for the school jazz band, and he chose to play the double bass. He mastered it quickly, and by the following year, he was able to play jazz bass-lines in the style of Ray Brown and Paul Chambers. Soon, Jamerson was gigging regularly at wedding parties and dances with his friends Richard ‘Popcorn’ Wylie and Clifford Mack (who would both also later play for Motown), and he was establishing a strong reputation as a bass player on the local scene.
When he graduated from High School, he started to play for ‘Washboard Willie and the Supersuds of Rhythm’. This band played regularly around Detroit, and James Jamerson’s playing developed rapidly. In 1958, local singer and record label owner Johnnie Mae Matthews saw Jamerson playing with Washboard Willie and hired him to play on sessions for her new Northern Records label. This quickly established his reputation as a studio player, and other local studios began to hire him for their sessions. Around this time, Jamerson also played in Jackie Wilson’s backing band, whose big hit ‘Reet Petite’ had been written by Berry Gordy…
Berry Gordy had first found some success in the late 1950s as a songwriter, and his songs for Jackie Wilson and Barrett Strong were very successful.
He then became an independent producer, leasing the tracks to other labels. Wanting to start his own label and studio to enable more of the profits to remain in his hands, Gordy borrowed some money from his family, bought a two-track tape recorder, and in mid-1959 he bought a former photographic studio at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, Detroit where he converted the first floor into a basic recording studio.
Later in the year, producer Hank Cosby invited Jamerson to attend a recording session at Gordy’s new studio, later to be the recording headquarters of Motown Records. The bass player on the session was Tweed Beard, but he wasn’t able to get the right feel on the song. Jamerson was asked to try, and he managed to make it work immediately. The producer was impressed and began to call Jamerson for more sessions.
The first recording Jamerson played on for Gordy’s new Tamla label was for The Miracles song ‘Way Over There’ which was released in January 1960.
When Gordy set up Motown Records in April that year, he invited Jamerson to become one of the core group of studio musicians later known as ‘The Funk Brothers’. Jamerson played double bass on his early Motown sessions, but in 1961 he was persuaded to try a Fender Precision bass by Horace ‘Chili’ Ruth. He was reluctant to play the electric bass at first, but he soon found that the slimmer neck and narrower string spacing enabled him to play even more complex runs and sophisticated rhythms. His first recording on electric bass was on the 1962 song ‘Strange I Know’ by The Marvelettes. The Precision bass soon became the instrument of choice for both Jamerson and his producers, but he didn’t drop the double bass completely – he would often persuade producers to let him play it on sessions if he thought the song would sound better, or blend the sounds of the two instruments.
James Jamerson played on hundreds of sessions for Motown and others and featured on twenty-three Billboard Number One hit singles.
This enabled his playing to be heard across the world: Paul McCartney was to later cite Jamerson as the biggest influence on his playing. Sadly, due to Motown’s policy of not naming their session musicians (he wasn’t credited until Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album ‘What’s Going On’), his name wasn’t well known until after his death. After Allan Slutsky’s book ‘Standing in the Shadows of Motown’ book and a later documentary about the Funk Brothers, Jamerson’s work became better known, and he has become one of the world’s most revered bass players.
By guest contributor Jon Magidsohn, a Canadian writer and musician living in London. He is the author of a 2024 book on the enduring influence of the Aussie/Kiwi band Crowded House. Visit online at jonmagidsohn.com.
It might have been enough for recording engineer Keith Stein to know that he’s had a long and fruitful career in music.
Photo provided by Keith Stein – posing with his prized vintage P bass
As the staff engineer at Vancouver’s Mushroom Studios from 1972 to 1998, he worked with some of music’s legendary artists, including Bachman Turner Overdrive, Ringo Starr, The Irish Rovers and, most notably, Loverboy for which he won a Juno award in 1982. He was at the board when the Incredible Bongo Band recorded ‘Apache’, the instrumental track that famously provided the sample for one of the earliest hiphop recordings (Stein even appeared in the documentary Sample This: The Birth of Hip Hop). But ask Stein what his musical legacy is, and he’ll say, ‘I’m the guy who invented the rollaway bass cabinet’, which he achieved long before he ever stepped foot inside a recording studio.
‘I came up with the idea,’ Stein, now eighty-one, says from his home in Vancouver, ‘while working as a design engineer for Acoustic Control Corporation in 1968. But it all started when I began playing guitar at the age of fourteen.’
Enraptured with the new guitar heroes of the day – Link Wray, Buddy Knox, Duane Eddy, The Ventures – the young Stein bought himself a Stewart arch top acoustic with the F-holes and distinctive trapeze tailpiece in 1958. It didn’t take long for him to take a stab at inventing a way of electrifying it.
‘I tried attaching a phono cartridge to the face and playing through the family hi-fi. That sort of worked. Then I discovered DeArmond pickups and fully electrified it with volume and tone controls.’
Constantly on the lookout for better and newer gear, he upgraded to a Fender Stratocaster after seeing Buddy Holly play in 1959 and went on the search for the best amplifier to put it through. But he couldn’t afford the Fender Vibrasonic that he wanted. Ever the industrialist, Stein found a JBL fifteen-inch speaker – the kind used in the Vibrasonic – in a local shop along with a sixty-watt power amp with EL34 tubes and, relying on the wood shop skills he picked up in high school, built a cabinet that imitated the Fender look. A few more tweaks, adding a pre-amp and tweeter, nearly got him exactly what he wanted at a fraction of the cost.
Ginger-haired and slight in stature but bursting with self-confidence, in 1962 Stein moved to Los Angeles to attend engineering school at Northrop Institute of Technology (now Northrop University) with the intention of becoming an aeronautical engineer. ‘I took my guitar and homemade amp with me,’ he says, ‘to try and get some gigs while going to school. I wanted to put the proper JBL speaker in my amp and that led me to seek out the JBL factory.’
At JBL, Stein befriended Harvey Gerst, their Director of Promotions. Gerst, like Stein also a musician, introduced him to the LA music scene, getting him backstage at The Troubadour and The Whiskey a Go Go where they rubbed elbows with the likes of Hendrix and Joplin. Stein, with his nascent guitar skills and his eyes on an endless horizon, not to mention his appreciation of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, knew he wanted to be a part of that landscape.
Meanwhile, committed to continuing his engineering studies, he found a job drafting schematics at an aircraft design company in Torrance, California. This was followed by six months in Seattle, Washington drawing up ‘castings and forgings’ for Boeing.
‘All this experience added up to a knowledge of industrial design and my engineering school courses included electronics and physics of sound,’ Stein recalls. ‘I became well equipped for what came next.’
Returning to LA, his friend Gerst, who had been hired by Acoustic Control Corporation, recruited Stein to come on as a designer draftsman to create production drawings for their new line of solid-state amplifiers.
‘They were basically blueprints. My aircraft experience gave me the knowledge to make the metal chassis designs, control panels and the final details on the cabinets. My early teenage cabinet experience was paying off.’
The first amp he worked on at Acoustic was the 260. With two fifteen-inch speakers it rivalled the Fender Dual Showman, according to Stein, ‘but it was really about the styling. The power head featured the famous blue label on the control panel.’ He likes to tell the story of how, in 1967, he helped deliver the first six 260s to the The Doors directly before one of their gigs in Santa Barbara. ‘Somehow Vince, their road manager, got us to put them on the stage where their stacks of Jordan amps were already set up. The band used them from then on.’
Soon after, Acoustic realised they needed to maintain the competition with their competitors and craft an equally desirable bass amp.
They enlisted the help of Gene Czerwinski, founder of the speaker company Cerwin-Vega, to lead the team and he designed a four-foot-tall cabinet using horn loading to increase to audio output. As Stein explains it, ‘the sideways “W” cabinet design allowed for two theoretical horn paths of about three and a half feet to emanate from one eighteen-inch speaker. The speaker faced backwards clamped in a wedge-shaped sealed chamber in the middle of the cabinet. Across the back at the midpoint of the speaker cone was a sideways “V” splitter to divide the sound top and bottom and give the effect of two exponential horn paths, one above, one below the speaker. The inside rear corners each had a wooden baffle at forty-five degrees – essentially an interior bevel – to better reflect the sound around the corner.’
‘It just shouted “bass”’, Stein reflects, ‘and it sounded amazing.’
Bob and Steve Marks, the father and son owners of Acoustic, were delighted with the design but they marched into Stein’s office one day with a challenge: ‘This thing is big and heavy. Figure out a way to put wheels on the bottom or the side but do something.’
‘I had recently spoken to a roadie named Lee Housekeeper,’ Stein remembers, ‘who was the equipment manager for a band called “The United States of America”. He told me that he’d moved their Hammond organ by himself using a two-wheeled dolly, what we used to call a hand truck, with the handles on the top. I looked at the drawing of the amp on my board and realised the top and bottom rear corners were unused space because of the forty-five-degree ducting pieces inside. If I cut the corners off at forty-five degrees and mounted a pair of rigid casters there, then it would sit on its own bottom and the wheels would engage with the floor when it was tilted back and it could be rolled away. If I installed two handles on the same cut-off area at the top then it was its own hand truck.’
Drawing provided by Keith Stein
‘I made the drawing and showed it to Bob and Steve. They jumped up and down and said, “Wow, pure genius.” So we built one and the Acoustic 360 Bass Amp was the first rollaway sound cabinet in the industry.’
Photo provided by Keith Stein
Stein admits that the inspiration for his design was suggested by the original cabinet construction – a design Acoustic still uses to this day – but, with his engineering background and innate resourcefulness, he is responsible for adapting it to meet the company’s needs. And, as it turns out, changed the priorities of sound cabinet design forever.
‘At the time I just thought it was a logical thing to do,’ Stein says when asked how he reflects on that moment of ingenuity. ‘But maybe nobody else would have thought about it that way because they wouldn’t have known about the internal design of the cabinet. They might have just put four wheels on the bottom. Of course, now manufacturers all over the industry have adapted the design to other more conventional types of cabinets as well and since then I’ve seen them all over the world.’
Soon after Stein’s inventive contribution to Acoustic, they fired him for sleeping on the job, having spent too many late nights playing guitar on the Sunset Strip. He went back home to Vancouver and, after a long story involving Leonard Cohen’s girlfriend, landed his job as engineer at Mushroom Studios. ‘I’ve worked with everybody from the most famous people in the world to complete unknowns, and we’re all just musicians,’ which is about as philosophical as Stein gets.
Still, he can speak at great length about the music of his era, engineering and production techniques to a super-nerd degree, and he never fails to exhibit his pride at inventing the first rollaway bass cabinet.
‘One time in the 80s, I asked a roadie, who was wheeling a bass cabinet along, if he ever wondered how it first got its wheels. He said, “Haven’t they always been made that way?” I just had to laugh.’
How did the BB become so successful? Tim Fletcher looks at the history of a classic bass.
The Yamaha BB Bass – Workhorses That Became Thoroughbreds.
Originally designed as a basic model, the Yamaha BB bass has been championed by many great bass players, from session greats like Abe Laboriel, Pino Palladino and Nathan East; New Wave players such as Tony Kanal (No Doubt), Peter Hook (Joy Division and New Order), Andy Rourke (The Smiths); and rockers such as Jack Gibson (Exodus, Testament), and Michael Anthony (Van Halen, Chickenfoot).
Japanese instrument makers Yamaha were quite late to the world of bass guitars – their first model, the SB-2 came out in April 1966.
This was largely modeled on the Fender’s designs – the body shape was loosely based on the Precision, but it had two single-coil pickups like the Jazz. The main deviation from the Fender shape was a more radical headstock which wouldn’t have looked out of place on the 1980s ‘Superstrat’ guitar. By 1968 the SB series became a more radical design, with an almost ‘tear-drop’ shape to the body, and in the 1970s, further iterations of the SB bass included designs reminiscent of Gibson’s Les Paul and SG shapes. By 1976, the now Fender Jazz-like SB had been joined by the PB, a near-direct copy of the Fender Precision. None of these instruments found success outside of the far east – a new approach was required.
In the mid-seventies, Yamaha spent some time developing what was to become the cornerstone of their bass range.
Yamaha wanted their new bass to appeal to players in the main market – the USA – and encouraged West-Coast session players to try out their prototypes and give feedback on them. The new BB (short for Broad Bass) model first appeared in 1977, alongside a redesigned SB bass, and the PB. There were three BB models – the bolt-on necked BB800 and BB1000, and the through-neck BB1200. All had a single-coil split pick-up like the Fender Precision.
Yamaha basses were well-made, but relatively cheap compared to their competitors, and they appealed to bassists in up-and-coming bands.
One early fan was Peter Hook of Joy Division who used his BB1200 on their classic song ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.
Although he used other basses onstage, he has continued to use a Yamaha 1200s in the studio. In an interview with GuitarGuitar in 2020, he revealed that “Every single track that I’ve ever recorded, up to the last one I did which was the Gorillaz about a month ago, was on a Yamaha BB1200S! Peter Hook’s loyalty to the BB was recently rewarded with a new signature model based on his BB734A, but including elements of his beloved 1200S.
Yamaha continued to develop their BB designs, which was now the most successful bass in their range.
In 1978, they brought out the BB2000, which had a ‘PJ’ pickup configuration, adding to the tonal range of the instrument. Four years later the BB3000 was debuted, with a deeper lower cutaway and a change to the pickup configuration – the ‘precision’ split coil was reversed. 1984 saw the release of the first commercially available five-string bass, the BB5000, and it became popular with many players looking for an extended range instrument, but didn’t wish to pay for a custom-built instrument. These included Pino Palladino and Nathan East who played them on many session tracks for major artists in the mid-80s.
By 1986 the BB range had been extended, and now included seven models from the basic BB550 to the BB5000.
The old PB and SB instruments were dropped, and the more radical RBX, BX, and MB designs took their place. However, even with more modern looking instruments appearing in the catalogue, the decade-old BB models still attracted younger players. Tony Kanal, who was to gain fame as the bassist in No Doubt remembers how he found his first Yamaha BB: “As luck would have it, Gwen’s [Stefani] father worked for Yamaha at the time and he was able to get me a discount on a brand new bass. That’s this BB1600 [that he still plays today]. I remember looking at a pricing list and going “this one sounds cool!” I really had no idea. It was just the one that I could afford and the natural wood description sounded cool. I borrowed the money from my dad and that was the start of me playing the Yamaha BB series.”
By the mid-1980s, Yamaha was now more known for its basses than its six-string models, and the bass range was further expanded to include the more aspirational TRB series which included the company’s first six-string bass, and the ‘Attitude’ which was co-designed with bass virtuoso Billy Sheehan.
VIDEO: Billy Sheehan on the Yamaha Attitude 30th Bass
By the end of the decade, Yamaha began to include active circuitry to the BB range, and the 1100, 1200, 3000, and 5000 all had active options.
In 1994, Yamaha brought out the BB-NE model – a departure from the BB shape that was designed in conjunction with session bass legend Nathan East. But by the end of the 1990s, the original BB basses were starting to seem dated, and the range was reduced to three models. By 2000 they disappeared from the catalogue completely, apart from the BB3000 and BB3000MA (Michael Anthony) models, and a custom order version.
Although it seemed that the BB’s days were numbered, Yamaha revived the design in 2002, as it looked like a sister instrument to its phenomenally successful Pacifica guitar series.
The first new models were the bolt-on neck, budget-oriented 404 and 405 instruments, but Yamaha also attached the BB initials to some new designs: the 405, 605, 2004, and 2005 models. These were joined in 2005 by the 414/5 and active 614/5 active versions. A revamp of the range in 2010 included a five-piece neck on the 424/5 versions, and a through stringing option on the 1024/5 and 2024/5 models. A further facelift in 2011 brought in pickguard options.
In 2017, on the 40th anniversary of its introduction, the BB series received a major restyling.
Yamaha hired award-winning designer Piotr Stolarski to create a new design for this now-classic bass. The body was re-shaped to include a more comfortable contour design that also shaved some weight from the body, and the pickup shapes were changed to enable owners to change them for standard pickups. The neck now has a six-bolt mitre neck joint for enhanced stability.
The range includes both budget, mid-price, and more expensive models, and it has become the bass most associated with the manufacturer. Its now-classic design, playability, and sound have endeared it to many generations of bassists and with a modern version on the market, it is likely to be the dominant bass in Yamaha’s catalogue for the foreseeable future.
Moments in Bass History… Class D Amplifiers and Smaller Speakers – the Rise of Smaller, More Lightweight Bass Gear.
Bass amplification is heavy. To get a decent sound we need to use powerful amplifiers and huge speaker systems….or do we? Tim Fletcher looks into the rise of smaller, more lightweight bass gear.
The first time I saw a Class D amplifier was about a decade ago, in a shop managed by one of my former students. It was by Yamaha, and I asked him if it was just a headphone amp: “No, it’s a proper amp – it’s just really small. It’s a Class D amp, and these are the future!” I was sceptical – how this could possibly compete with a big, powerful amplifier. He was right though… Fast forward to the present day, and these amplifiers have gradually become commonplace in the bass community, and manufacturers such as Mark Bass, Demeter and Quilter have developed high quality products that match, and sometimes surpass the quality and power of their more traditional predecessors.
Although we may think of Class D amplifiers as being something new, they have been around for over sixty years.
The originator of the concept was Alec Reeves, a brilliant British scientist whose work included helping set up the first transatlantic phone cable, developing digital delay lines and condenser microphones. He also designed the first PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) system, and during WW2 he helped develop electronic counter-measures and radio navigation aids for British Royal Air Force. He later led a team that produced the first fibre-optic cables. During the 1950s he developed the first Class D amplifier by dispensing with the heavy toroidal transformer (and therefore also meaning that the heat sink and fan used in traditional amplifiers was not needed) by using pairs of transistors as switches rather than as linear amplifiers.
Reeves’ new amplifier concept first found a commercial use in 1964, when Sinclair Radionics’ produced the X-10 amp, a home-build kit system that produced a whopping 2.5 watts.
This was followed by the more powerful X-20 in 1966, but the quality of the transistors on these early models made them very unreliable, and a commercial failure. However, this wasn’t the end of the Class D amplifier, and the development of the more advanced MOSFET transistors eventually enabled a more reliable product to be made. The first of these was the Sony TA-N88 studio power amp that was first produced in 1978, and the first commercially available bass amplifier using Class D technology was made by Peavey in 1984. These amplifiers was still quite bulky, but in 1996 the electronics component manufacture Tripath developed the Class D on a much smaller integrated circuit board. This allowed the size of bass amplifiers to shrink from the standard 19” rack mount size to around the size of a book.
The bass world is generally quite conservative, and it was relatively slow to respond to the new technology.
The early Class D amps were very light and portable but lacked the ‘oomph’ of traditional tube amps (and even the older transistor amplifiers) and bass players were reluctant to let go of their big heavy gear. Gradually, the development of better-sounding and more sophisticated Class D amps in the last few years by newer manufacturers such as TC Electronic and MarkBass has encouraged more players to invest in the new technology (myself included), and this success has prompted the major brands to produce their own versions. Now almost all have at least one Class D model in their range, and some seem to be competing to make the smallest possible amplifier, with TC Electronics’ BAM 200 (920g) and Trace Elliot’s tiny Elf (730g) leading the field.
As amplifier technology improved in the last decade, so did speaker technology – the paper in the cones has been replaced with more advanced materials such as Kevlar and carbon fibre, other components are stiffer and more able to cope with higher sound levels more efficiently, and voice coils are more effective in dissipating heat. Advancements in enclosure design have also made for more effective replication of the frequency range, especially the low end. All these advances mean that lower frequencies are produced effectively by smaller speakers, and the huge rigs of old are no longer needed – I used to use a rig that was taller than me, but now I use two 210 cabinets, and it’s probably about as loud.
Are the days of huge bass rigs over?
Probably not, as they still have a specific sound that bass players still like, and they look cool onstage…
How Paul McCartney Became the Bass Player in The Beatles
With a few exceptions, most bass guitars look very similar to Leo Fender’s Precision, Jazz, or Music Man designs. When the first Steinberger headless (and nearly bodyless) designs appeared in 1979, they were very definitely a departure from the norm. Tim Fletcher investigates the birth of one of the most radical instruments ever made…
Birth of One of the Most Radical Instruments Ever Made, the Steinberger L2
Steinberger L2… Ned Steinberger was originally a furniture maker, training at the prestigious Cooper Hewitt museum in New York.
After he graduated, he joined the Brooklyn Woodworkers Co-Operative where he met guitar maker Stuart Spector. Steinberger liked Spector’s ideas, and in 1977, he offered to design a bass using the ‘form follows function’ concept that he had learned at Cooper Hewitt. The result was the NS-1, a through-neck bass with smooth flowing curves that fitted around the player. This bass became quite popular with the bass playing community, and enthused by its success, Steinberger started a company – Steinberger Sound – to produce his own instruments.
Having little experience as a musician, and coming from a background where practicalities were more important than tradition, he wondered why bass players put up with an instrument that was cumbersome and awkward to play.
He recalled that “getting the instrument to be comfortable was a top priority for me. And no matter what, I couldn’t get the bass to balance right with a headstock. It was always neck heavy…the big breakthrough moment for me was when I realized that you didn’t have to put the tuning machines [on the headstock]. You could put the tuning machines on the body.”
Having dispensed with the headstock, Steinberger then went to work on the neck and the body.
During the development process for the Spector NS-1, he had met boatbuilder and carbon fibre expert Bob Young, and was intrigued by the possibilities of using the material in a bass guitar design. Wood, being a natural substance, is not a consistent material, and even seemingly identical wooden instruments have small differences in sound and playability. In addition, wooden bass necks tend to have a ‘dead spot’ around the fifth fret on the G string. It is suggested that most wooden bass necks vibrate naturally around this pitch (C), and the two vibrations (the neck and the string) cancel each other to some extent. Steinberger realised that using a composite man-made material instead of wood could potentially eliminate these issues. Steinberger also considered the traditional large body and bolt-on neck of most basses to be unnecessary, and he developed a much smaller, lighter one-piece design.
The new bass, named the Steinberger L-2, was headless, with a very small body, and made of a synthetic composite of graphite and carbon fibre.
It was premiered at the 1980 NAMM show, but the more traditionally minded bassists were extremely sceptical. Ned Steinberger recalls: “we had made a half dozen basses and pretty much everybody felt we were a joke. Headless instruments made out of plastic?” They were described as ‘cricket bats’ and ‘egg-boxes’ but they did get some support from Andy West of The Dixie Dregs, and by the end of the event, the Steinberger stand was beginning to get some more positive attention.
The new basses had a very even response and were much lighter than traditional designs, but some players found their sound ‘artificial’ or ‘synthetic’.
However, the new design soon found favour with a number of high profile players, including Geddy Lee, Sting, Tina Weymouth, Tony Levin, and Bill Wyman, and this helped to make the instruments more accepted by the wider bass playing community. Steinberger considers that his bass design came out just at the right moment: “People in the 80s were much more into innovation then. And the idea of hi-tech—people were attracted to that. In the late 80s, it shifted back again to a vintage mentality.”
The development of carbon graphite composite as a bass-making material was taken up by a few other manufacturers, including Status, a UK manufacturer that blended the headless design with more traditional body styles.
Steinberger sold his company to Gibson in 1987 and has since focused his new company NS Design, on developing electric upright instruments such as double basses and cellos.
Moments in Bass History… the Six-String Electric Bass
Today, six-string electric basses are commonplace, with virtuosos like Oteil Burbridge, Steve Bailey and John Myung all-embracing the extra range and tonal possibilities that they allow. But which company took the first steps into this brave new world, and how did players respond to the new instrument?
Six-string guitars have been played since the 1200s, double basses with five strings had been used since the late 1700s, but there was no middle ground between the two until Paul Tutmarc’s early attempts in the 1930s (see part 3 of this series). Leo Fender’s 1951 Precision bass, however, began the widespread acceptance of the bass guitar as the main bass sound in popular music. From this point, the development of the instrument happened very quickly, with manufacturers soon adding more strings and extending the range of the electric bass.
The first development came from Danelectro, a New Jersey company founded in 1946 by Nathan Daniel.
The new company initially built amplifiers, but by 1954 they began to make electric guitars – the single pickup U-1 and the double pickup U-2.
In 1956, Danelectro produced its first electric bass, but this was, surprisingly, a six-string model.
At this point, the Fender Precision hadn’t yet fully established its popularity, and Danelectro aimed to make a bass instrument that was potentially more appealing to guitarists. The UB-2 model had a scale length of 30” (shorter than the Precision’s 34”) and like a guitar, it was tuned EADGBE, but an octave below standard guitar tuning. Advertising copy for the UB-2 emphasized that it was “a brand new instrument that combines the best qualities of the Spanish guitar and the big string bass.”
Nathan Daniel later explained the thinking behind the UB-2:
“We simply made the neck a bit longer [than the guitar]. We started with a six-string bass because it’s hardly any more trouble than a four-string and it gave the player something more for the same money. It took time for that to catch on, but if the player was capable, he had more stuff to play with.”
The sound of the UB-2 was very distinctive, with a more guitar-like twang and punch than the longer scale Precision, and producers found a use for its tone alongside the more traditional double bass.
The technique of doubling the finger-style double bass track with a UB-2 played with a pick was known as ‘Tic-Tac’. It was used on Nashville recordings by artists such as Patsy Cline, Elvis Presley, and Roy Orbison, and it had also been used on Duane Eddy’s 1958 album ‘Rebel Rouser’.
By 1959, Danelectro had redesigned their electric models and bought out the Longhorn range, which included their first four-string models, but also a six-string bass guitar. This distinctive instrument caught the attention of Duane Eddy, who found one in a Hollywood music store, and he used it on every song on his next album ‘The Twang’s The Thang’. Despite Duane Eddy’s endorsement, the six-string model didn’t sell well, and Danelectro began to focus more on its guitars and four-string basses.
Gibson produced a rival instrument in 1960, the semi-acoustic EB-6, which looked similar to their 335 guitar model.
This was soon replaced with a solid-body instrument based on the SG guitar, but these instruments were not very popular – Gibson only sold around 130 six-string basses before they ceased manufacture in 1965.
Fender, not wishing to be outdone by their main rival, brought out their Bass VI model in 1961, again tuned to an octave below a standard guitar. It was used by The Beatles on their ‘White Album’ and later by John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, but like the Danelectro it found limited popularity outside the studio, perhaps due to the narrow string spacing. Fender discontinued the Bass VI in 1975, but it returned to the catalogue in 2006.
In 1965, Fender produced the Bass V – the first commercially available five-string bass guitar.
It had a standard 34” scale, and the extra string was a high C, rather than the low B of later five-string basses. However, it only had fifteen frets, giving it roughly the same range as a four-string bass. It was another commercial failure, and by 1970 Fender had pulled it from their range.
These early attempts at extending the range of the bass guitar by adding more strings were not very successful, but by the mid-seventies, high-end luthiers were beginning to make multi-string basses as we know them today. Carl Thompson made a six-string (BEADGC) for bass player Anthony Jackson, and Overwater, Alembic, Ken Smith, and Tobias all made one-off five-string instruments. The first commercially available production five-string bass with a low B string is thought to have been the Yamaha BB5000 in 1984, and this was quickly followed by basses by MusicMan, Ibanez, Peavey. Oddly, Fender didn’t produce a commercially available BEADG tuned five-string bass until the late 1980s, but now they are a staple of their catalogue.
It could be argued that Danelectro, Gibson and Fender had produced six-string ‘bass guitars’ (electric guitars that played low notes) rather than six-string electric basses, but this is an argument about semantics rather than instruments.
When Leo Fender brought out his Precision model in 1951, there was no certainty that it would become a successful instrument and was certainly viewed with some skepticism at the time. The attempts to build electric instruments with wider ranges were to some degree experiments, but then, so was the Fender Precision.