tring to get a membership
Playing an instrument was something that I had always wanted to do when I was younger. I had asked my parents to let me play the drums, but that was out of the question. When I moved to Akron in 1999, I met my now close friend Jacob who played the drums. He told me about a friend of his who played the lead guitar and that they were looking for a bass player so they could start a band. Thus, my bass-playing career began. I have now played the bass for four years and wanted to investigate the history of this great instrument and the important influences it has had on me and other musicians. I found that the World Wide Web had tons of information about the origin of the electric bass guitar and the many musicians who have made it famous. The bass line of instruments as we know them can be traced back hundreds of years, but the invention of the electric bass guitar is a very recent addition (Manus & Manus 2003). The very first electric bass, the Fender Precision Bass (p-bass), was invented in 1951 by Leo Fender, the founder of Fender Guitars (Leach 2003). The Precision Bass received its name for its new more precise pitch. Initially, Leo Fender designed the bass guitar for his “out-of-work”, guitar-playing friends. He felt they could master it easily. To his surprise, his four-stringed electric bass had an even more unique sound than his solid body electric guitar (Leach 2003). It is pretty much fact that Leo Fender invented the first electric bass guitar, and it is the only one that I accept. However, a man by the name of Bud Tutmarc, who has his very own web site, claims that his father, Paul H. Tutmarc, was the first producer of a modified electric bass. He stated that his father decided to invent a more feasibly sized bass that could fit into a smaller space. This thought came after wishing that all of his band members could ride together in one car on the way to performances. This was in 1933, in Seattle, Washington, where a photograph of this new invention was supposedly featured in the Seattle Post-Intellingencer newspaper (Tutmarc 2003). I felt that this person, Bud Tutmarc, developed a web site to try to promote his father’s fame, but that the information was not accurate.