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First bass
In the 1930s, musician and inventor Paul Tutmarc from Seattle, Washington, who was manufacturing lap steel guitars, developed the first electric string bass in its modern form, a fretted instrument designed to be played horizontally. -
2º bass
In the 1950s, Leo Fender, with the help of his employee George Fullerton, developed the first mass-produced electric bass. His Fender Precision Bass, which began production in October 1951, became a widely copied industry standard. -
3º bass
With the explosion of the popularity of rock music in the 1960s, many more manufacturers began making electric basses. First introduced in 1960, the Fender Jazz Bass was known as the Deluxe Bass and was meant to accompany the Jazzmaster guitar. The Jazz Bass (often referred to as a "J-bass") featured two single-coil pickups, one close to the bridge and one in the Precision bass' split coil pickup position. -
4º bass
The 1970s saw the founding of Music Man Instruments by Tom Walker, Forrest White and Leo Fender, which produced the StingRay, the first widely produced bass with active (powered) electronics. This amounts to an impedance buffering pre-amplifier on board the instrument to lower the output impedance of the bass's pickup circuit, increasing low-end output, and overall frequency response (more lows and highs) -
5º bass
In the 1980s, bass designers continued to explore new approaches. Ned Steinberger introduced a headless bass in 1979 and continued his innovations in the 1980s, using graphite and other new materials and (in 1984) introducing the TransTrem tremolo bar. -
6º bass
During the 1990s, as five-string basses became more widely available and more affordable, an increasing number of bassists in genres ranging from metal to gospel began using five-string instruments for added lower range—a low "B". -
7º bass
In the 2000s, some bass manufacturers included digital modelling circuits inside the instrument to recreate tones and sounds from many models of basses. Traditional bass designs such as the Fender Precision Bass and Fender Jazz Bass remained popular in the 2000s in 2011, a 60th Anniversary P-bass was introduced by Fender, along with the re-introduction of the short-scale Fender Jaguar Bass.