The Last Bass Outpost

You are right. Thanks. This top 25 is not perfect, and maybe too simple for us nerds. For this I had the average reader in mind.

This is translated by software. I gave it a quick ran through, but it can have some mistakes. A pickup in Dutch is an element. Strange but through. The software didn't translate element to pickup, I did, but it can have some more mistakes.

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Text: Chris Dekker

The 25 most influential basses

We often talk about influential bassists in De Bassist. But what are the basses that have changed the instrument landscape? And why? We dived into the history of music and the bass and listed the most influential instruments for you.

If one bass can be called influential, it is the Fender Precision Bass. That fact is almost well known. If you walk into a music store, almost all basses still have the features of this first mass-produced bass guitar. The bass world owes Fender a lot. But what was the first fretless bass? The first five-string? The first with active electronics? And what was the first boutique bass? Some choices are factual, others based on opinion or feeling. Completely disagree? Email us! Oh yes: the order, especially after the top 10, is somewhat arbitrary.



1 Fender Precision Bass
The Bass
Over seventy years ago, Leo Fender came out with the Precision Bass and the music world changed. It may not have been the first bass, but it was the first mass-produced one. It was viewed skeptically at first, then Fender Bass became a generic name for the electric bass, like jeep for all-terrain vehicle, and anno 2022 we can't imagine the bass guitar ever not being there.
The P appeared in 1951 and in 1954 the body was somewhat rounded. We now often call these types Tele Bass (see the Sire test in the previous edition of The Bassist) because of their similarities to the Telecaster guitar. In 1957 the model with the two pickups parts appeared and it has been in production almost unchanged for 65 years now. Meanwhile, 90% of the basses have the Fender-determined scale of 34 inches, four tuners in a row, a bolt-on maple neck, a maple or rosewood fingerboard and we also see the split P on many brands.
Early basses had flatwound strings and damping under the chrome cap, for a short, dry double bass sound. Soon players removed that damping and in the 1970s Rotosound came out with the first roundwound strings. Partly because of Fender's construction, this also created a completely new and aggressive bass sound that was no longer under but in the mix. Suddenly the bass was audible and that again gave room for melodic players to step forward. With the Jazz, the P is the most copied bass ever.



2 Fender Jazz Bass
The virtuoso bass
In 1960, Fender came out with the Deluxe Model of the Precision. The official name became Jazz Bass, after the Jazzmaster guitar, which in turn was a deluxe brother of the Telecaster and Stratocaster. In terms of construction, the J did not differ greatly from the P. In the beginning, Precisions usually had alder bodies and a maple fingerboard, while the Jazz often had a maple body with a rosewood fingerboard. Over the years, the two adopted much of each other in terms of woods.
The J is distinguished by a narrower neck, an offset body (the line of the middle of the body is perpendicular to the neck and the whole thing appears to be tilted forward a bit) and, of course, it has two single-coil pickups. Partly because of the bridge pickup, the J later became known as a slap bass and it can sound even nippier than the P. Of course, the J is the example for many boutique builders, such as Sadowsky, Stenback, Lull and many, many others, but precisely also for entry-level Squier, Harley Benton, Fazley and more. In the 1970s, many bassists mounted a J pickup on their P and the so-called P/J configuration can be seen in every music store with many brands.   



3 Audiovox 736
The very first bass
Would the Precision Bass have been conceived without the Audiovox 736? We will never know, but what is certain is that Leo Fender knew of the existence of this bass. Designed by Paul Tutmarc, the 736 had frets and a solid body and was intended to be played horizontally. The Audiovox Model 736 Bass Fiddle came on the market in 1936, 15 years before the Fender P, but did not become a success. It was, however, the first electric bass guitar.


4 Music Man StingRay
The first active bass in series production
It may surprise you, but Vox, Burns and Höfner were already working with active circuits in their basses and guitars in the 1960s. And then you had the Gibson EB-0F with built-in fuzz. Alembic - more on that later - provided a new wave of builders of active basses, but the first mass-produced active bass was the Music Man StingRay in 1976.
After the sale to CBS, Leo Fender remained a consultant and builder with his brand for a time. His last creation was the Fender Mustang Bass. Look at the bridge of the Mustang and the StingRay and you can see family traits. Music Man had its own amp factory and the brand hired Leo (and people like George Fullerton, with whom Fender would later found G&L) to build basses and guitars with his own company CLF Research, which were sold under the Music Man name.
The bass became an instant success, including in the 1970s/80s disco and slap world. This new sound gave the likes of Louis Johnson, Queens John Deacon, Cliff Williams of AC/DC, Tony Levin, Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tim Commerford of Rage Against The Machine, Vulfpecks Joe Dart and Gail Ann Dorsey, among others. And then we have Pino Palladino, who gave the fretless bass a new sound with his StingRay.
Since the first Music Man, active basses have been commonplace and the MM pickup is supplied by all pickup makers and we see them at Sandberg, Warwick and many other brands.



5 Ibanez ‘Lawsuit’-models
A revolution in bass world
We could write a few pages full about just these basses, and perhaps we will do so some day. Harry Rosenbloom was an Ibanez distributor in America in the 1960s and 1970s. First alone, then with Ibanez as a partner, and later parent company Hoshino took over distribution entirely. In the late 1960s, under the leadership of Harry and his Japanese colleagues, Ibanez came out with a line of copies of American models.
While the quality at Fender and Gibson declined - due to new owners and more mass production - the Japanese copies looked great and some were very good, too. Not only Fenders were copied, but also Rickenbackers and obscure Gibson models, such as the low-impedance Les Paul basses, but often with a bolt-on instead of a glued-on or through-neck.
Certainly the Fender models were often of better quality than the originals, and the Japanese became major competitors to the American brands. In Europe they supplanted budget brands like Egmond and Framus, which could not build as cheaply as the Japanese. Brands kept coming, such as Tokai and Fernandes (which looks a bit like Fender) but also Takamine, whose logo was a copy of Martin.
In 1978 Gibson patented the shape of their headstock and they asked Ibanez to stop making this shape. Whether there really was a lawsuit is debatable, but since then we speak of pre-lawsuit or simply lawsuit guitars. Ibanez adapted the headstock and was working on its own models anyway.
The instrument world had changed forever. American brands themselves chose to collaborate with Asian parties, which is why we now have affordable premium brands like Squier and Epiphone. You have the line of Japanese Fenders and 99% of Gretsch production comes from Asia. And it all started with some Japanese copies of Ibanez.



6 Alembic series I/II
The first boutique bass
We can attribute the first true boutique bass to Alembic. Alembic began in the 1960s as Owsley Stanley's little workshop in the practice room of the Grateful Dead, near San Francisco. The idea was to help the band with equipment to record live shows, but soon they were repairing and modifying PA systems, basses and guitars.
By 1970, electronics expert Ron Wickersham, instrument builder Rick Turner and sound engineer Bob Matthews were at the helm, and soon Phil Lesh and Jack Casady's Guild Starfire basses were completely rebuilt with active electronics and proprietary pickups. In 1972, the brand built an entirely new bass for Casady, full of active electronics and filters, and the first boutique bass was a reality. Later, greats such as Stanley Clarke and John Entwistle of The Who followed.



7 Ibanez Musician Bass
The first affordable boutique bass
Can you have a mass-produced, affordable boutique bass? Yes and no. Nowadays we call it boutique bass (or amp or guitar), but once we used the term noble bass. There is no set definition, but usually it refers to a hand-built bass with beautiful and different woods, special electronics and luxury inlays. So when we think of this term, we think more of brands like Alembic and Fodera, rather than the relatively "simple" hand-built basses from, say, Sadowsky. Ibanez still supplies very many affordable instruments with beautiful woods - walnut, purpleheart - and pickups from Nordstrand and EMG, but it all started in 1979 with the Musician series with a through neck, one or two pickups and 3-band electronics; there was even an eight-string version. The neck itself was five-piece maple and walnut, while the body was mahogany and ash. Later models received Ibanez's Tri-Sound switch for parallel, series and single-coil options for the pickups. Despite being relatively inexpensive basses, they were embraced by Sting, Adam Clayton of U2, Entwistle of The Who, Fleetwood Mac's John McVie, Victor Bailey and Mike Porcaro of Toto. 


8 Alembic five string
The first bass with five strings
In 1976 Alembic built a five-string bass for Jimmy Johnson and this is the first modern five-string with a low B. The model had no specific name, but since 1977 the fifth string was on the brand's option list. Brands like Yamaha and Music Man get an honorable mention, as they provided the five-string basses in the 1980s. The era when the bass guitar had to compete with the low notes from the hugely popular synthesizers, and for a while we thought the four-string might disappear altogether.


9 Fender V
The very first five string – but different
Another five-string? Yep. In 1965, Fender introduced the V: a Roman five. This was the first multi-string and the bass differs from the later five-string models, which are still popular today. The V stands out for its relatively long body and short neck, with only 15 frets. However, the scale - say, the effective string length - was exactly the same as the P and J: 34 inches. What was striking, however, was that there was no low B but a high C string. The idea of this bass was that you could play more from one left hand position instead of sliding across the neck. With one more string and several fewer frets, the highest note is the same as that of a four-string P or J. Only about two hundred were built until 1971, and the only two players of note are John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin and our Remus Aussen.


10 Ampeg AUB-1
The first fretless bass
There are several philosophies behind the Precision Bass. The instrument is a lot more compact than a double bass, so easier to carry around. It is easily amplified, so audible. It has a shorter scale, so easier to play. Last but not least, the frets allow you to play very precisely, and that quality even gave the bass its name. Still, it's not surprising that fretless basses came soon, because double bass players were used to a certain sound and playing style. In the beginning, basses were made fretless by players. Think of Bill Wyman who can be heard on many Stones songs with his converted Dallas Tuxedo and who was thus one of the first players of a fretless bass guitar. Jaco Pastorius removed the frets from his bass in the early 1970s, but it was Ampeg that came out with the first fretless bass in mass production: the AUB-1, which hit the market in 1966. And the first Fender was ... a Precision! A contradiction, then. How creative Fender could have been with names. Rick Danko (The Band) was one of the famous players of a fretless Ampeg.


11 Rickenbacker 4000-serie
The first neck through
The Rickenbacker 4001 and 4003 are influential for more reasons. Although the 4000 sometimes had a glued neck, this was the first bass with a neck-through. Neck through in English. There is a piece of wood that runs from bridge to headstock and the body parts are glued to this neck on two sides. Later we saw this in the Gibson Thunderbird and nowadays Ibanez and Warwick, for example, use the principle a lot. The latter brand sometimes lets the neck run under a separate top, after which one speaks of a 'hidden neck through'.
The 4000 series was introduced in 1957, so about the same time as the P as we know it today. One of the reasons the Rickenbacker is on our list is the list of users, who brought the typical bright Rick sound to the masses, such as Geddy Lee of Rush, Chris Squier of Yes, Roger Glover of Deep Purple Mike Rutherford of Genesis and Bruce Foxton of The Jam. Just to name a few.
Then there is the "other" Rickenbacker sound. Just listen to Paul McCartney's enormously thick bass sound on the outstanding live album Wings Over America. Of course, The Beatles were responsible for a huge sales boost of Rickenbacker guitars and basses. And then we have names like 
Roger Waters (Pink Floyd), John Entwistle (The Who), Pete Quaife (The Kinks) and Motörhead's Lemmy, who made the bass sound more like a fat guitar.



12 Gibson Thunderbird
The first long Gibson
The Thunderbird is a notable and influential bass in more areas. Fender was the clear market leader in the bass field in the 1950s and 1960s, while Gibson could keep up well in the guitar field with the LP, SG and ES-335, among others. Yet the Gibsons seemed a bit old-fashioned/traditional compared to the Fenders with special colors and futuristic shapes, which is why Gibson came up with the trio Flying V, Explorer and Moderne as early as 1958. Only the first two were built, but the world was not ready for such extreme shapes.
In 1963, Gibson tried again with the Firebird guitar and Thunderbird bass, which did resemble a very rounded Explorer. Of particular note was the continuous neck, and the design came from retired car designer Raymond H. Dietrich. After the shortscale EB-0, EB-2 and EB-3, the T-bird was the first longscale Gibson bass. The bass always remained fairly popular with a group of enthusiasts, and metal bassists like Nikki Sixx embraced the particular model.
There have always been tangents between the automotive industry and the guitar world. Think of the Fender and Gibson Custom Colors, which came directly from the automotive world, and the competition stripes on various basses, such as the Mustang. Later, Music Man would partner with the American BMW design center to design the Bongo Bass.

Very strange, cos we have tens of thousands of hits. Send me your e-mail address and I'll send you the text

I get an Avast warning and block when I try to access this link. Is there a problem with it?

Yes there is one virus scan which thinks we are affected. We fight it for over ten years now. We get in touch, they check it, they say there's nothing wrong... ....and they still block it. Drives me insane. Maybe try it on your phone, tablet or other computer.

A lot is made by Cort.

Of course Warwick makes almost all Sadowsky's now, except for a handfull yearly from Roger himself. I think Sadowsky's are made in the Chinese Warwick factory, which is their own, if I'm right.

I guess you need to know the story about Fac.51, the Haçienda, and Factory Records to get that yellow/black bass.

I would only consider one if they copied the yellow/black striped one with a  5 and a 1 as f-holes. The Fac.51 bass. Love that one!

I thought the forum was a goner!

Our resident polder-hopping philanderer didn't get to post about Paul McCartney's missing bass. 

I did that some minutes ago:)