The History of Bass Tone

Not a lot of people think about the idea of bass tone. That’s totally understandable, because not a lot of people consider bass a viable instrument. However, over the decades, bass tone has evolved a great deal, and nowadays there is everything from classic tones to modern sounds, plus futuristic and previously unheard noises filling the lower register of popular music.
Bass tone has almost universally been affected by the technology of the era, and occasionally by the stylistic trends. Let’s take a look back and see how it all came about, shall we?

We’re going to begin our journey at the dawn of the Rock And Roll era, the 1950s. The first electric bass, known as the Fender Precision, appeared on the scene in 1951. Prior to its introduction, there had been experiments at amplifying upright basses, but these were scarce and never really caught on. And, throughout most of the decade, the upright bass was still the most common means of providing low end for an ensemble, be it Jazz, Country, or this new wretched Rock And Roll fad that all the kids inexplicably liked. Thus, pretty much every bass player everywhere sounded pretty much the same.
To some extent, this ubiquity still exists in modern music, and I believe it has its roots in the recording studios of the day. Fear of equipment damage from low frequencies caused nearly all engineers and producers to push the bass back in the mix, and leave it as an afterthought unless a star bass player was being recorded. Those stars were pretty much exclusive to the Jazz milieu, and thus most bass was left in the background. One of the extremely rare examples of bass being pushed in the classic era was Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” which was produced by the legendary Tom Dowd in 1961. This did prove to be a hugely influential record over the next decade, where Rock And Roll took over the spotlight on the pop culture stage, but generally, bass was just there to fill a hole and nothing more. As a side note, I’m also convinced that this is where the clichés of “bass is easier” and “bass players are dumb” were born, since they (ahem) “weren’t doing anything difficult”. Thing is, why do anything difficult if nobody’s going to hear it? I’d say that’s the opposite of dumb, myself- show up to the recording session, do the minimum amount of work needed, and go home with the same cash in your pocket as the guitarist or horn players who agonized and sweated every note.

But I digress. In the 1960s, the development of better compressors and direct recording allows for bass to be pushed forward much easier. James Jamerson, the house bassist for Motown, is often credited with pioneering this concept, but it was unquestionably popularized by Paul McCartney, who cited Jamerson as an influence on his sound.
It is important to mention McCartney, since he more than anyone is the greatest ambassador for the downtrodden bassman. The Beatles had personalities that were as front and center as any movie star, and Paul made bass cool. He was not the dummy, nor did he play boring parts with no need for talent. Because of him, people wanted to be bass players. He has even been quoted as initially resisting being the bassist, since the bass player was always “the fat guy at the back, and [he] wanted to pull the birds”, though when he came along, that stereotype was laid to waste.

Sir Paul was not the only innovator of that decade, however. While he was taking a cue from Motown and creating a thick, rumbling, tone, a former French Horn player was trying to make his bass have the brightness of his previous instrument, while still having the undeniable sonic power that electric bass was quickly becoming known for. Some call him “The Ox”, some call him “Thunderfingers”, but most people call him John Entwistle. Working with string manufacturer RotoSound, he pioneered the modern string gauge and winding technique, designed to deliver brightness above all.
And boy, did he succeed. His tone was cutting like brass, but earth shaking, like, as he once said, “a B-17 flying overhead”. Pre-Entwistle, bass was murky, and the busiest players had to refine their technique to make it sing through all that mud. Post-Entwistle, clarity and definition became desirable traits in a bass tone, but never at the cost of low end.
This may or may not have been the inspiration for the next major technological innovation in bass tone: the purpose built bass amp.

For the most part, early bass amps were merely high powered guitar amps with the preamp modified to pass more bass. In fact, the first bass amp ever, the Fender Bassman, is more revered as a guitar amp than for its virtues on the four-string. And, like all innovations in the music world, a few builders had experimented with the concept, but it was one device that cemented the idea of an actual bass amplifier: the almighty Ampeg SVT.
The SVT (which stands for Super Valve Technology) was a quantum leap forward in tone. At a whopping 300 watts (three times the power of the bass amp Paul McCartney used at Shea Stadium less than five years before, which was the most powerful bass amp on earth at the time), the SVT was designed to drive TWO cabinets with eight ten inch speakers in each. On top of that, it had a ridiculously flexible EQ, with the ability to emphasize ultra low AND ultra high frequencies simultaneously, plus full control of the midrange in a wholly innovative way. Suddenly, bassists realized that “good enough” was not good enough, and they could now be heard and felt, not just seen. During the 1970s, the bass becomes almost as important a voice in popular music as the guitar. Even if it wasn’t the dominant sound, compare any recording from the middle to the end of that decade with one made during the Johnson administration and the difference in bass volume and presence is shocking. Though it was power trios like Cream or The Jimi Hendrix Experience that first made room for the bass to be more than just a seat holder, by the mid 70s bassists in an ensemble of any size could be a pivotal part of the overall sound of the band, and the SVT played a huge part in this development.
Most listeners were first exposed to these majestic beasts when watching a Rolling Stones concert in the early 70s. Even though the SVT made its official debut at the National Association of Music Merchants trade show in 1969, it is often the ’72 Stones tour that is credited with introducing them to the world. This was one of, if not the first times that a huge modern PA system was taken on the road and everyone in the house could hear everything. Nowadays, you can walk into a small club with 150 people and see a band with every instrument miked up into a giant mixing board and pumped out through massive multi watt power amps, but fifty years ago this was a luxury. And one thing that happened on that ’72 tour was that, for perhaps the first time in history, people who didn’t play bass, heck, people who couldn’t play anything except the radio, were commenting on how awesome the bass sounded. Bass had finally arrived as a legitimate instrument.
Very quickly, the SVT became a must have for any touring band. Unfortunately, they were way too powerful for anything smaller than an arena (man, times have changed), and were also very expensive and ridiculously heavy-an all tube SVT weighs around eighty pounds-so you needed a roadie to haul it for you, especially when you factor in those two 8×10 cabinets.
Seemingly overnight, high wattage solid state amps get developed and become quite popular, due to their power, volume, and decreased weight, but… they don’t sound very good. Solid state technology is based on transistors, which are the same component that allowed every teenager in the 50s to have a radio in their pocket. Like guitar and bass amps, radios used to be powered by vacuum tubes (or, as they’re called in Europe, valves). Transistors process electricity in basically the same way but in a fraction of the space. Transistors eventually evolved into integrated circuits, which lead to microchips, which are single-handedly responsible for you being able to read this article in the first place. So, while transistors are another huge technological innovation, in the earliest version, they simply did not sound good.

The eventual death of tone arrives during the 1980s, and it’s due to several factors. One, the aforementioned solid state amps become prevalent. While a few of them, such as the Acoustic 360 or the Sunn Coliseum do, in fact, sound quite good, those are not the ones most people are using, as they are aimed at the professional market and are way too overpowered for a typical club band, as the SVT had been before.
Secondly, multitrack recording becomes much more expansive and affordable in this era. In the 70s, top end artists were using twenty four track machines, now the biggest selling acts are using seventy two, ninety six, even one hundred twenty eight tracks. This makes the mixes very dense, layered with keyboards, piles of doubled harmony vocals all heavily chorused, synthetic percussion, the “cannon” snare drum, and so on. This relegates bass to a very narrow sonic spectrum, usually just a notch in the low mid that is then compressed within an inch of its life just to be present amongst the other sounds.
Third was the rise of MTV. In this era, visuals become more important than sonics, and the traditional Fender, Gibson, and Rickenbacker designs that were revolutionary twenty five years before seem stodgy and conservative now. Coupled with the poor quality of the contemporary instruments being produced by many of those makers, the sleeker, hipper, better built alternates from Yamaha, Washburn, Hamer, Jackson and so forth become quite attractive. Unfortunately, most of these instruments are designed to look good, with tone being an afterthought. Nearly all of them have a Precision/Jazz pickup setup, usually passive, and the ones with active circuitry are typically so complex that the average player just turns it off. Like the fashions of the time, the instrument designs demonstrate that we were very confused as a culture, but we sure looked modern.
Now, I must clarify that this is exclusively what was happening in the mainstream. There were certainly players who were engaged in a never ending quest for tone in this era. Bassists like Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, Stu Hamm and Billy Sheehan all customized their instruments or had special ones built with the goal of better tone. These specialized instruments were usually run into multiple amplifiers set for specific EQ ranges with different sized speakers to compliment them. Like the star bassists of the 1950s, these players were generally Jazz performers, and usually had a very vocal, midrange-y tone. Most Rock players were not so dedicated, and simply piled more amps on stage resulting in a wall of speaker cabinets, because more amps equals louder, and louder is good, duh. One obvious exception was our old friend John Entwistle, whose bi-amped and tri-amped rigs kept pushing the sonic boundaries while other bassists were languishing in mediocrity, tone wise.

Of course, musicians of this caliber could afford to run these complex rigs. For the average working player, these were but pipe dreams. Most weekend warriors used small combos from the official amplifier manufacturer for the American garage band, the one and only Peavey electronics corporation.
Peavey was started in 1965, but it was the TNT bass amps and Bandit guitar amps, from 1979 and 1980 respectively, that really put them on the map. These guys made good sounding, affordable amps right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. They weren’t mind blowing in any sense, but they were reliable (practically bulletproof in fact), and sounded…well, like they were supposed to sound. Like the SVT before them, they had a very flexible EQ, with a speaker that was voiced quite well for the job, and unlike other manufacturers, they had somehow cracked the equation of how to make transistors sound musical while keeping the resulting product within the budgetary range of the average consumer. They weren’t as dynamic and three dimensional as a high powered tube heads, but they also weren’t as lifeless and dull as the amps offered by Fender, Gibson, and most other big name manufacturers at that time. To this day, the Mark series of bass heads from the 80s, in particular the Mark IV, are prized for their sonic flexibility and reliability despite being almost forty years old. The bass amps and PA systems that Peavey created in this era did more than anything to establish them as a reliable workhorse brand, and this reputation continues into the twenty first century.

One thing the 80s is remembered for is the cultural obsession with newness. Modern was all the rage, and vintage was all but non existent, save for some 50s nostalgia. Old things were just that, old, and that was not a desirable trait at the time. Which baits the question: what happened to all that old gear that people used in the 60s and 70s? Well, some of it was simply closeted, mostly the more iconic guitars like Strats, Teles, and Les Pauls, all of which would later see a resurgence in popularity. Many of the budget instruments like Melody Makers and Duo Sonics became the test beds for the first wave of aftermarket parts and at home modifications. Most of the Precision and Jazz basses stayed right where they’d always been, in the hands of working musicians. But the amps, where did they go?
Like the outdated eight track recording machines, many of the old bass amps wound up in budget studios. It was not uncommon to find an old Bassman or flip top Ampeg in a church vestry, high school band room, or ratty old practice space, either. This would lead to the next revolution in bass tone, and not a moment too soon. Even though there were plenty of decent players out there, using their trusty P-bass through a Peavey amp, many of them were setting their knobs to sound like the records of the day, so even gear that had the potential to sound good rarely did. However, a revolution was brewing that would shake the music world to its core, and make new what once was old. I am, of course, referring to the Alternative music scene that would eventually explode in the early 1990s.

Most of the bands in this scene were from working class backgrounds, and rarely could afford to have nice gear. Many of them couldn’t even afford a new Peavey amp, especially not once they bought the bass. And, often those basses were not that coveted either, resulting in many of these bands using second string models like the Gibson Ripper, often plugged into a late 60s tube amp, or early 70s solid state one from one of the reliable makers. Lots of Sunn and Acoustic amps started to reappear on stages, as did mid to late 60s Fender Bassman heads and Ampegs that weren’t SVTs, such as the V4. Of course, the player had the dream of one day replacing this knackered old gear with a nice, new SWR or Trace Elliott rig. The thing is, those old amps had a certain character that had all but been forgotten, and in the environment they were being used, that character got a chance to shine and eventually re-entered the public consciousness.
As mentioned, few if any of the Alternative bands came from money, and few if any made much, either, at least at first. Therefore, they were not making their albums in ultra modern studios, and they certainly couldn’t afford to be as self indulgent as, say, Def Leppard when it came to overdubs. So, with the mixes being pared back due to budget constraints, the bass started to become a voice again rather than just white noise. One of the most distinct bass tones to arrive courtesy of the Alternative scene was Brian Ritchie of Violent Femmes. His Ernie Ball Earthwood acoustic bass punched right through the bare bones sonics of the band, whose sound consisted of acoustic guitar, brushed snare drum, the occasional cymbal, and three singing voices in addition to the bass. Their minimalist approach was a result of them starting off as street musicians in Milwaukee, and had the added benefit of allowing them to take the public bus to gigs, complete with all their gear. Ritchie’s playing was also revolutionary, making the bass THE lead instrument in their group, and his influence affected bass players almost immediately.
He was not alone in this endeavor, though. Artists like Les Claypool and Flea were making the bass the star of their respective bands, incorporating Funk into their style, and making every white kid think they can play slap. Likewise, Mike Watt was taking bass in a melodic direction rather than just being a supporting role, and almost overnight, post Punk and Hardcore bands started having interesting bass lines.
Of course, since these bands generally played in a very simplistic style, and since the records they made were pretty much unadorned, these bass parts could be heard very clearly. Often times, they upped the ante by using the bright EQ that a Funk player would use, even if they weren’t playing Funk. This is probably due to most of these bassists being frustrated guitar players, so they tended to work the upper strings rather than the lower ones, thus a brighter EQ to help it cut through the actual guitars.
Most of the artists who broke into the mainstream were, unfortunately, subjected to the practice of the time of making the bass sound generic and boring. Go ahead, sing a distinct bass line from Nirvana that isn’t “Lounge Act” or one from Pearl Jam that isn’t “Jeremy”. Can’t do it, can you? But all that changed with the release of one song from a trio of snotty, bay area kids: “Longview”, by Green Day.

Love them or hate them, it cannot be denied that this song brought bass back into the public eye with its irresistible hook, which was perhaps the first time that an entire nation was singing a bass part. And Mike Dirnt’s tone made that riff jump out of the speakers. Like Entwistle before him, his tone was bright and clear, yet still round and heavy enough to fill out the stage sound of a one guitar band. It was, quite literally, a perfect storm of the “flat and muddy” sound of the mainstream and the “thin and plinky” that was so popular in the underground punk scene. I can tell you from experience that “Longview” was a huge thing for Alternative musicians at the time: I graduated high school in 1994 as that song was racing up the charts, and every bass player in every local band, mine included, learned that riff. Most of the guitar players even learned that riff, that’s how important it was.
So now a whole new blueprint was set for bass tone, specifically the Pop Punk idea of really chimey, almost jangly sound with a frenetic style, preferably one involving some fretboard dexterity, but as long as it was fast and cut through, that’s what mattered.
There was another evolution happening concurrently, though, which was the down tuned sludge that would one day morph into Nü Metal. Much of this was played on instruments that continued the 80s tradition of it looking cool but sounding generic; the Ibanez SoundGear series were extremely popular in this application, and are still in production today. While five-strings had been around for a while, I think it was the success of Grunge and the tendency of many of its players to tune to drop ‘D’ that spearheaded the down tuned trend. Bands like Korn and Coal Chamber embraced the low end of five-string basses and seven-string guitars, and frequently tuned them down from their standard tuning, often tuning the low ‘b’ to a low ‘a’.

The musical schizophrenia of the 90s is well demonstrated in the multiple bass tones heard on the radio at the time. One could literally hear a song with the generic 80s squashed low mid rumble, followed by one where the bass line practically rips your ears off with treble, and then one where you wouldn’t even know there was a bass part unless you had a subwoofer. Likewise, classic tones like the old tried and true Fender through SVT of the late 70s started to work their way back into the sonic palate, as bands like The Hives and The Strokes gained popularity with the so called “Garage Rock Revival” of the early 2000s.

Perhaps the newest trend is pedals. While pedals have existed since the 60s, and players have been using them since their inception, it is only recently that bass players are showing up at gigs with massive pedalboards that rival their guitarists’. This is probably best exemplified by Chris Wolstenholme from MUSE, whose outboard processing gear takes up a space about the size of two refrigerators. In addition to his iconic heavily fuzzed out tone courtesy of an Electro Harmonix Big Muff, he also incorporates classic clean Fender sounds and futuristic synth patches, all of them tweaked by a myriad of pedals, rack mount processors, and MIDI implemented by computers. It is only in recent years that bass pedals have been offered with such variety, and even less time that boutique builders have been plying their craft.

So what does the future hold? If history is a guide, we are about due for another era of “sameness”, but I think there is simply too much variation out there now to go back to sonic homogeny. In addition, with the digital revolution in full swing, we have more options available to us as players than ever before. Recording is rarely done in professional studios anymore, as home setups have become extremely high quality at a very consumer friendly price. Thus, time constraints are a thing of the past, and rushing a project for fear of going over budget is all but a distant memory. Bass players can obsess about tone, though most of them are still a plug and play lot. And for the ones who do, digital processing allows for everything from recreating classic tones and effects via plug-ins like Amplitube to creating entirely new, practically alien sounds with modern synth software.
Funnily enough, though, at the end of the day, most of us just like to find a bass that sounds good, plug it into an amp that sounds good, and turn it up until our pants flap.

Honesty.
Integrity.
BASS.