“The bass is the foundation… Whatever you play puts a framework around the rest of the music.” Carol Kaye
No matter which musical genre you enjoy, the foundations are always built around the bass. Browse our sheet music and scores, covering all different styles and genres, for all ages and stages, take a look at our Bass Guitar Sheet Music Downloads, and start wandering through the wide world of bass guitar with Stretta Music today.
The challenges facing the bass in the early 20th century, as various new musical genres began to emerge, were size and volume. As early as 1910, Gibson developed an acoustic bass guitar, which started to tackle the question of size, but it wasn’t for another twenty years, before the question of volume was first addressed. Paul Tutmarc in Seattle built the first electric bass in 1933, the Model 736 Bass Fiddle, which was still fairly large, and used an electromagnetic pickup.
Although Tutmarc’s following prototypes started to look more and more like the modern bass guitar, integrating frets and becoming more compact, the bass guitar didn’t see great success until 1951, when Leo Fender created the Precision Bass. From there, many different manufacturers have developed bass guitars in various designs and shapes, and today, there are four main types of bass guitar: Electric Bass, Electric Acoustic Bass, Fretless Bass and Extended Range Bass (ERB) which has five or six strings.