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The bass guitar is similar in appearance and construction to an electric guitar but with a longer neck and scale length and most usually four strings.
This is a partial list of Wikipedia articles about companies (past and present) under which electric bass guitars have been sold.
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The bass guitar, electric bass or simply bass is the lowest-pitched member of the guitar family. It is a plucked string instrument similar in appearance and construction to an electric or acoustic guitar, but with a longer neck and scale length. The bass guitar most commonly has four strings, though five- and six-stringed models are also relatively popular, and bass guitars with even more strings or courses have been built. Since the mid-1950s, the bass guitar has largely come to replace the double bass in popular music due to its lighter weight, the inclusion of frets in most models, and, most importantly, its design for electric amplification. This is also due to the fact that the double bass is acoustically compromised for its range in that it's scaled down from the optimal size that would be appropriate for those low notes.
An electric guitar is a guitar that requires external amplification in order to be heard at typical performance volumes, unlike a standard acoustic guitar. It uses one or more pickups to convert the vibration of its strings into electrical signals, which ultimately are reproduced as sound by loudspeakers. The sound is sometimes shaped or electronically altered to achieve different timbres or tonal qualities from that of an acoustic guitar via amplifier settings or knobs on the guitar. Often, this is done through the use of effects such as reverb, distortion and "overdrive"; the latter is considered to be a key element of electric blues guitar music and jazz, rock and heavy-metal guitar-playing. Designs also exist combining attributes of the electric and acoustic guitars: the semi-acoustic and acoustic-electric guitars.
The guitar is a stringed musical instrument that is usually fretted and typically has six or twelve strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected strings against frets with the fingers of the opposite hand. A guitar pick may also be used to strike the strings. The sound of the guitar is projected either acoustically, by means of a resonant hollow chamber on the guitar, or amplified by an electronic pickup and an amplifier.
Rickenbacker International Corporation is a string instrument manufacturer based in Santa Ana, California. The company is credited as the first known maker of electric guitars – a steel guitar in 1932 – and today produces a range of electric guitars and basses.
In musical instrument classification, string instruments or chordophones, are musical instruments that produce sound from vibrating strings when a performer plays or sounds the strings in some manner.
C.F. Martin & Company is an American guitar manufacturer established in 1833 by Christian Frederick Martin. It is highly respected for its acoustic guitars and is a leading manufacturer of flat top guitars and ukuleles. The company has also made mandolins and tiples, as well as several models of electric guitars and electric basses, although none of these other instruments are still in production.
A fret is any of the thin strips of material, usually metal wire, inserted laterally at specific positions along the neck or fretboard of a stringed instrument. Frets usually extend across the full width of the neck. On some historical instruments and non-European instruments, frets are made of pieces of string tied around the neck.
Zithers are a class of stringed instruments. Historically, it could be any instrument of the psaltery family. In modern terminology, it is more specifically an instrument consisting of many strings stretched across a thin, flat body, the topic of this article.
The acoustic bass guitar is a bass instrument with a hollow wooden body similar to, though usually larger than, a steel-string acoustic guitar. Like the traditional electric bass guitar and the double bass, the acoustic bass guitar commonly has four strings, which are normally tuned E-A-D-G, an octave below the lowest four strings of the 6-string guitar.
The fingerboard is an important component of most stringed instruments. It is a thin, long strip of material, usually wood, that is laminated to the front of the neck of an instrument. The strings run over the fingerboard, between the nut and bridge. To play the instrument, a musician presses strings down to the fingerboard to change the vibrating length, changing the pitch. This is called stopping the strings. Depending on the instrument and the style of music, the musician may pluck, strum or bow one or more strings with the hand that is not fretting the notes. On some instruments, notes can be sounded by the fretting hand alone, such as with hammer ons, an electric guitar technique.
A multi-scale fingerboard is an instrument fretboard which incorporates multiple scale lengths. This allows each of the strings to have a different string tension and thus, balanced tonal characteristics.
In music, strings are long flexible structures on string instruments that produce sound through vibration. Strings are held under tension so that they can vibrate freely, but with control. This is to make the string vibrate at the desired pitch, with looser strings producing lower pitches, and tighter strings producing higher pitches. However, a vibrating string produces very little sound in of itself. Therefore, most string instruments have a sounding board to amplify the sound.
A fretless bass is an electric bass guitar whose neck is smooth like traditional string instruments, and like the acoustic upright double bass. As a guitar-like amplified alternative to this instrument, the Fender Precision Bass was introduced in 1951, with frets to help guitarists who are used to them, to provide precision, and to offer a different sound. This concept has since become the standard, as other companies followed with similar electric fretted basses, like the Höfner 500/1 of Beatle Paul McCartney, which looked like a viol but with frets.
An extended-range bass is an electric bass guitar with a wider frequency range than a standard-tuned four-string bass guitar.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to guitars:
A solid-body musical instrument is a string instrument such as a guitar, bass or violin built without its normal sound box and relying on an electromagnetic pickup system to directly detect the vibrations of the strings; these instruments are usually plugged into an instrument amplifier and loudspeaker to be heard. Solid-body instruments are preferred in situations where acoustic feedback may otherwise be a problem and are inherently both less expensive to build and more rugged than acoustic electric instruments.
An acoustic guitar is a musical instrument in the string family. When a string is plucked, its vibration is transmitted from the bridge, resonating throughout the top of the guitar. It is also transmitted to the side and back of the instrument, resonating through the air in the body, and producing sound from the sound hole. While the original, general term for this stringed instrument is guitar, the retronym 'acoustic guitar' – often used to indicate the steel stringed model – distinguishes it from an electric guitar, which relies on electronic amplification. Typically, a guitar's body is a sound box, of which the top side serves as a sound board that enhances the vibration sounds of the strings. In standard tuning the guitar's six strings are tuned (low to high) E2 A2 D3 G3 B3 E4.
The Rickenbacker Electro A-22, nicknamed the "Frying Pan" is the first electric lap steel guitar, also widely considered to be the first commercially successful electric guitar. Developed in 1931/1932, it received its patent in August 1937. A previous attempt, the Stromberg company‘s transducer-based "Stromberg Electro", was introduced in 1928. It used a "vibration-transfer rod" from the instrument's sounding board attached to magnets inside the guitar, and was not successful. George Beauchamp created the "Fry-Pan" in 1931, and it was subsequently manufactured by Electro String Instrument Corporation under the name Electro, later named Rickenbacker. The instrument gained its nickname because its circular body and long neck make it resemble a frying pan.
Each bass guitar tuning assigns pitches to the strings of an electric bass. Because pitches are associated with notes, bass-guitar tunings assign open notes to open strings. There are several techniques for accurately tuning the strings of an electric bass. Bass method or lesson books introduce one or more tuning techniques, such as:
Michael Tobias Design (MTD) is a Kingston, New York–based manufacturer of electric bass guitars founded by luthier Michael Tobias in 1994.