Who invented the electric bass guitar?
Where would the modern rock band be without the trusty bass guitar? The instrument takes pride of place in the line-up of pretty much any amped-up band out there today, holding down the rhythm section of their sound. We might not always pay attention to its thumping buzz filling out a song’s bottom end and driving it where it needs to go, but we’re almost certain to notice the moment it’s gone. Just ask fans of The White Stripes.
At its best, the bass can encompass the bulk of a band’s soundscape, as it does on Royal Blood’s self-titled debut album. It can also provide an iconic introduction to a track, as with the classic Talking Heads single ‘Psycho Killer’ or Pixies album opener ‘Debaser’. It can throw an infectious riff into the mix, like on Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’ or Green Day’s ‘Longview’, or provide some respite during the middle section of a relentless guitar stomper, as in the Nirvana song ‘Lithium’.
It’s difficult to imagine so many of the songs we cherish without a bass plugged in and laid down on their basic studio track alongside the drums. This state of affairs is a fairly recent innovation, though. Even more recent than we might imagine.
Well into the first decade of rock and roll, it was still standard practice to hear an acoustic double bass on recordings by some of the genre’s leading exponents, from Elvis Presley to Little Richard. The latter’s 1957 single ‘Keep A-Knockin’’ features a double bass prominently in its intro before Little Richard and the rest of his band fly into the song. While the bass prelude is effective as it is, it’s easy to imagine how the ringing, buzzing tone of an electric bass might have given the track an even livelier opening.
Nevertheless, until the end of the 1950s rhythm and blues acts using upright, acoustic bass instruments was standard practice. But things had already begun to change, ushering in the dawn of the rock band in the mid-1960s.
So, who started it?
The first pioneer to take the bold step of using an electric bass guitar was actually a jazz musician, which is ironic given that upright basses are still widely used in jazz today. Monk Montgomery bought himself the first electric bass to go on the market, the Fender Precision Bass, in 1953. He played the instrument while touring with the Art Farmer Sextet, and the first record to feature an electric bass is a recording of the band’s song ‘Mau-Mau’ made on July 2nd, 1953.
Leo Fender developed the Precision Bass himself with George Fullerton, releasing it to the mass market in October 1951. But long before these two guitar innovators had produced the first electric bass model for mass production, another inventor had already created the instrument.
That inventor was Paul Tutmarc, a jazz musician based in Seattle during the 1930s. As Tutmarc’s son Bud told Bass Musician in 2020, “My dad, being a bandleader and travelling musician, always felt sorry for the string bass player as his instrument was so large.” Tutmarc thought there must be a way to create a version of the instrument that was less cumbersome for his bassist to transport. “That is the actual idea that got my father into making an electric bass,” his son explained. “The first one he hand-carved out of solid, soft white pine, the size and shape of a cello. This was in 1933.”
This first design, which Tutmarc dubbed the “Electric Bass Fiddle”, was played upright with a body similar in size and shape to that of a cello. Three years later, he made a further leap forward for bass players everywhere, creating the solid-bodied “Audiovox Electronic Bass Fiddle”, which resembled a modern bass guitar much more closely and could be played horizontally.
Tutmarc began reproducing the model on a small scale, but because his production method was so costly and time-consuming, the bass guitar was too expensive to sell well. He managed a few sales in the Seattle area, but the idea largely remained in prototype form for the next 15 years until Fender and Fullerton took the basic elements of Tutmarc’s design and turned it into a saleable product.
So, while the electric bass might be a more recent addition to popular music than we realise, as an invention, it’s actually much older than many of us would imagine. Tutmarc was way ahead of his time, and Fender reaped the benefits of his brilliant foresight when the time was right for rock and roll to take over.
