Who was the first person to make a solidbody electric bass?
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So how did we get here?
The question we are concerned with is how we got to the first electric bass guitar—the “Spanish-style” instrument that’s played on its side, across the body, rather than upright. The bass guitar is a major leap in evolution from the upright bass. Without the bass guitar, there would be no McCartney, Entwistle, Flea, or Claypool. In last month’s column, we looked at the 1930s and the earliest attempts to electrify the bass. The instruments we looked at were all modeled on the upright bass viol—the doghouse.
Who was the first guy to say, “A bass, electrified, doesn’t really need a resonant body. We could make a bass out of a solid plank of wood and string it up with a fretted guitar neck”? The common answer to that question would be Leo Fender. The Precision bass, a fretted, solidbody instrument, was introduced in 1951 and is perhaps one of Fender’s greatest gifts to music. He perfected this new instrument.
Notice I say perfected. Leo Fender was not a great inventor, but he was a great innovator, meaning he took existing items and made changes to them that enhanced their performance. There’s a sizable cabal of writers, collectors, and historians who devote their time to finding specific origins of “where Leo got the idea.”
But enough pontification. Do you want to know who invented the electric bass guitar? (All three words must be present to win.) Here’s the answer: Paul Tutmarc.
And here’s the story: In the 1930s, Seattle had a thriving music scene made up of mostly amateur players interested in the latest styles of jazz, country, Hawaiian, and gospel music. This scene coincided with the advent of electric instruments. Peter Blecha, former curator of the Experience Music Project, also located in Seattle, has spent decades chronicling the people, the music, and the businesses involved in this scene. In the early ’80s, Peter began sharing his historical findings and memorabilia with the public. At an exhibit he was approached by a gentleman by the name of Tutmarc, who said his father invented the electric guitar.
As it turns out, the man was Bud Tutmarc, the son of Paul Tutmarc, who had been a musician in Seattle in the 1930s. Bud had a stack of photos showing his family playing early electric instruments. In one of the photos, Bud’s mother was playing an odd four-stringed instrument.
Blecha had heard rumors of an electric instrument maker from Seattle in the 1930s, but here was proof. Over the next few years, he kept in touch with Bud Tutmarc and kept his eyes and ears open for examples of these phantom instruments. In 1990, he came across an example of one of the lap steels—it bore the Audio-Vox brand and said “Seattle” on it. Connecting the dots, Blecha realized Bud Tutmarc had been telling the truth. Now with something real to look for, Blecha began scouring Pacific Northwest shops, eventually finding more Audio-Vox instruments. Over the years he accumulated a nice little stash.
One day in 1997, Blecha got a call from the owner of a junk shop he frequently bought from. The owner said he had another Audio- Vox, but an odd one—one with only four strings. Light bulbs went off in Blecha’s head and he ran to the shop. It was the first Audio-Vox bass to have surfaced, and the earliest known example of the electric solidbody bass guitar.
Dating from 1936, the Audio-Vox bass is made out of black walnut. Technically, it is a neck-through construction with wings glued onto the body. The pickup is a dual-coil horseshoe, wired for hum canceling (that’s right—a humbucker). The bass has a 30 5/16" scale with a fretted fingerboard. Fretted, solid, Spanish-style, electric. What more do you want?
Blecha says the bass plays and sounds like an electric bass, just as you would imagine. Today, the bass has its home at the Experience Music Project. You can hear it for yourself at empsfm.org.
Wallace Marx Jr.
Wallace Marx Jr. is the author of Gibson Amplifiers, 1933–2008: 75 Years of the Gold Tone. He is a lifelong musician and has worked in all corners of the music industry. He is currently working on a history of the Valco Company. He is a children’s tour guide at the Museum of Making Music, a struggling surfer, and he once hung out with Joe Strummer.
Wallace Marx Jr. is the author of Gibson Amplifiers, 1933–2008: 75 Years of the Gold Tone. He is a lifelong musician and has worked in all corners of the music industry. He is currently working on a history of the Valco Company. He is a children’s tour guide at the Museum of Making Music, a struggling surfer, and he once hung out with Joe Strummer.
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The early days of electric bass are explored
This metal-bodied Rickenbacker (c. 1935) and wood-bodied Vega (late ’30s) improved playability and provided the ability to transmit sound electrically, but still struggled to compete with the big-band sounds of the day due to inadequate amplification systems. Photos courtesy Lynn Wheelwright, Origins Collection
Watching We Jam Econo, a great documentary on punk pioneers the Minutemen, it got me thinking about bass. Mike Watt, the band’s bassist, played some seriously mean riffs on his 4-string, but according to the movie, the first time he saw a Fender Precision in the store, the thickness of the strings, the length of the neck, and the imposing mass of the whole instrument scared the snot out of him.
We don’t talk about bass much around here—it is, after all, called Premier Guitar for a reason. But it’s a solid fact that a lot of our gigs would be a lot less groovy without the thumping low end of the guitar’s 4-string brethren. As anyone who reads this column knows, I like to get the story straight, especially when it comes to history. Knowing that a lot of guitarists—and even bassists—out there think that electric bass goes back about as far as Leo Fender’s workbench in 1951, I thought we’d take a couple of columns to see just what life was like before Leo made it “easy” to pump out the low end.
Throughout the years between the turn of the 20th century and World War II, American music evolved from basically European-rooted dance music to being very simplified, downbeat-centric, and influenced by colloquial and provincial styles. That’s a massive oversimplification, but we’re getting somewhere with it. The two main American musical forms, jazz and blues, both cropped up during this period as well, and each relied heavily on syncopated rhythms driven by percussion, low-register brass, or stringed instruments. By the late 1920s, a jazz band could have either a tuba or a bass viol pumping out rhythm, sometimes both. The tuba began to drop in popularity to the bass viol in the early 1930s. The growing country music genre in particular eschewed the brass-band feel of the tuba for the down-home thump of the bass viol. Musicians in the jazz world also began to migrate to the viol for its playability in comparison to the brass behemoth.
Almost as soon as this migration took place, the limitations of the bass viol in a modern band setting became apparent. The foremost issue was volume, but the second issue was playability. Even if it was easier to thump walking lines on a viol, the size of the neck and strings made it a specialty instrument that only a small portion of the playing population could handle. Then, as now, most guitar players wouldn’t touch the thing. Beyond that, string basses don’t crank out the volume. Even in comparison to an unamplified archtop guitar, the viol is but a whisper. Put it next to a drum kit or a banjo and it’s lost. Builders and inventors immediately set out to find a way to make the string bass louder and more accessible to a wider range of players.
In the 1930s, electric amplification was a new thing. Seeing the success of electrically amplified guitars, violins, and banjos, builders looked at ways to do the same thing for bass. To address playability, a number of builders attempted to make bass instruments that utilized a standard, fretted neck and fretboard. Gibson, among others, experimented with oversized tenor guitars and mandolins. These instruments were somewhat easier to play, but lacked volume, and their tone didn’t impress either.
On the flip side, other builders stayed with the traditional bass viol neck and fingerboard, but looked at ways of improving volume. Displayed here are two very early examples of the electric upright bass, courtesy of Lynn Wheelwright, who is the owner and curator of the Origins Collection of early electric instruments. Both feature a streamlined body, traditional-size bass viol neck, and early electro-magnetic pickups. The metal bass is a Rickenbacker circa 1935. The wood bass is from Vega and was available in the very late 1930s.
“The Rick uses gut strings with a ferrousmetal wire wrapped around the string where it passes through the horseshoe magnets,” explains Wheelwright, an expert on early pickup technology. “The Vega can use any strings as it takes the vibration from the plate the bridge sets on. The plate floats on rubber grommets at each corner. Attached to the underside of the bridge plate in the center is a slim rectangular ferrous-metal rod. This rod passes through a round coil that is surrounded by horseshoeshaped, ferrous-metal pole pieces. The metal rod acts like a string as it vibrates within the coil energized by the pole pieces; a larger horseshoe magnet magnetically charges the pole pieces. The entire assembly housed under the bridge plate is adjustable so the best signal can be obtained. There were a number of variations on this theme, beginning with the Stromberg Electro—the first electrified guitar back in 1927.”
“These basses played similar to a standard upright bass, with the advantage of the streamlined body,” says Wheelwright. “Although still modeled after the viol, they were at least a known evil. The major limitation was in the amplifiers themselves.”
Clear bass tone, even today, requires enough wattage to provide clean headroom in volume before ranging into overdriven territories. In the 1930s, few musical amplifiers ventured above 15 watts. Larger amplifiers were available, but they were generally reserved for theaters and public address systems, and large enough to fill a good-sized closet.
Throughout the 1930s, playability and volume remained the challenges in finding a true electric bass solution. Next month, we’ll see glimmers of the future as guitar, bass, and amp begin to come together.
Wallace Marx Jr.
Wallace Marx Jr. is the author of Gibson Amplifiers, 1933– 2008: 75 Years of the Gold Tone. He is a lifelong musician and has worked in all corners of the music industry. He is currently working on a history of the Valco Company. He is a children’s tour guide at the Museum of Making Music, a struggling surfer, and he once hung out with Joe Strummer.