Was There Electric Bass Before Leo?

Jurassic BassesBy Mikael Jansson & Scott Malandrone | January, 2000There’s no doubt Leo Fender forever changed the world of bass in 1951, when he launched his Precision Bass. But a couple of recent finds have cast his innovations in a new light.Sure, many had tried to amplify the double bass before Fender performed his feat: Ampeg, Rickenbacker, Regal, and Vega all made production-model solidbody electric uprights in the 1930s—and as early as the ’20s, Gibson’s design genius, Lloyd Loar, had made an electric-upright prototype. But all of these basses were extensions of the tried-and-true acoustic bass. [Ed. Note: For more information on these early basses, see A Brief History of the Electric Upright in the 1994 BASS PLAYER BUYER’S GUIDE.]In 1933, a Seattle lap-steel guitarist, Paul H. Tutmarc (1896–1972), built a solidbody electric-upright prototype with a magnetic pickup. Since gut strings were the sole option for upright bassists back then, Tutmarc used metal piano strings to generate a signal from the pickup. His ambition, from a bassist’s point of view, was heartwarming. “My dad, being a bandleader and a traveling musician, always felt sorry for the string bass player,” says his son, Paul H. “Bud” Tutmarc Jr. “The instrument was so large that once the bassist put it in his car, there was only enough room left for him to drive. The other band members would travel together and have much enjoyment, while the bass player was always alone. That is the actual idea that inspired my father to make an electric bass.” Paul Tutmarc, who had founded the Audiovox Manufacturing Company and was one of the earliest makers of electric guitars, took his concept one step further: he made a solidbody, somewhat guitar-shaped, fretted electric bass, to be strapped on and played horizontally. Sounds familiar, right? Tutmarc’s 16-fret, 30d"-scale Audiovox Model 736 Bass Fiddle debuted around 1935 or 1936, according to Bud Tutmarc, who estimates his father may have made as many as 100 such basses. (The instrument is briefly mentioned in The Bass Book by Tony Bacon and Barry Moorhouse, which is published by Miller Freeman Books.)“The idea of the electric bass was very important to my father, but he was dissatisfied with his cello-size instrument. It was too heavy, and it wasn’t exactly what he wanted—a bass that was small and lightweight yet capable of producing more sound than several acoustic basses playing together. So he set out to build a solidbody bass made of black walnut, like his guitars.”An advertisement printed in a 1937 publication proves the existence of Tutmarc’s electric bass guitar. In the picture, the inventor poses with two lap steels and the Bass Fiddle; the instrument had a surprisingly futuristic shape, with a large mirror-steel pickguard and a non-adjustable metal bridge. The headstock was asymmetrical and bore the script Audiovox logo, while the cable plugged into the upper bout of the body. “My father continued to manufacture his instruments for many years,” remembers Bud Tutmarc, who played one of them in a junior-high band in the late ’30s. “He sold many of his electric basses to traveling music groups.” Recently, one of the original Audiovox basses surfaced and will soon be on display at The Experience Music Project museum in Seattle.The Tutmarc bass story does not end here. Bud Tutmarc himself, now 73, made a number of Serenader bass guitars, similar in design and construction to his father’s basses. Bud claims to have made close to 100 such instruments between 1945 and ’51. “They were distributed by the L.D. Heater Music Company in Portland; they put out a nice brochure advertising my Serenader. This was the first time a large distributor had handled an electric bass.”Leon Bixler, bassist of Bud Tutmarc’s gospel quintet, often appeared onstage and on promotional posters with a Serenader bass. Since the group toured all over the U.S. (including California) in the late ’40s, it’s possible Leo Fender might have seen such a poster, or may even have seen the band. Fender was very fond of Hawaiian music, and at the time, Bud Tutmarc—a former student of lap-steel legend Sol Hoopii—had developed a reputation as a virtuosic Hawaiian guitar player. We will probably never know, as the history of invention is full of coincidences and parallel developments. But how come none of the Tutmarcs’ basses made it commercially? Perhaps the timing just wasn’t right. And since the instruments were played mostly in churches and only occasionally in secular musical surroundings, they may have failed to reach the influential jazz, C&W, blues, and pop musicians of the day.Further electric trails were blazed in 1934, when James Thompson, father of custom bass builder Carl Thompson, built a solidbody electric guitar for use in his homemade studio. [Ed. Note: One of Carl Thompson’s modern creations was featured in The Great Basses in June ’97.] James—born in 1902—was employed by Westinghouse as a coil winder of huge “house-size” generators. But he was also a musician who built the machines he needed to manufacture parts for his many musical inventions. In fact, in the 1920s he constructed a lathe on which Carl Thompson still machines his truss rods. “My father was not a bass maker by any means,” says Carl. “He was just a guy who happened to be a master of all trades. The man was a great woodworker, a phenomenal machinist, and an excellent audio engineer. He did everything.”James built his electric guitar with the aim to eliminate feedback during recording. The Thompson guitar, which was assembled from a “Blue Bird” neck and a body fashioned from two 2x4s, featured a dual-coil humbucking pickup he built himself. The humbucker was handwound on his lathe. Carl’s mother told him she “could always tell when ‘Pappy’ was building pickups, because he’d to bake the insulation in the oven, which would stink up the whole house!” Eventually, almost all the stringed-instrument players in town had James B. Thompson pickups in their instruments.An ill-fated recording session in 1942 initially inspired James to build an electric bass. Apparently he had a difficult time miking the acoustic upright and wanted to record the bass direct. His electric 4-string blossomed from a broken Kay arch-top guitar; he carved a solid block to fit the inside of the box, which would help to support the pickup and thick strings. The area of the strings directly above the Thompson dual-coil pickup was painted with a conductive coating and wrapped with steel wire to generate signals in the coils. It was a success, and James used this bass on many home recordings; Carl himself played it when he was 12. Although Carl still has many of those early recordings, the bass (which was the only 4-string his father made) has since “disappeared into the family.” James Thompson passed away in 1974, but he lived to see some of his son’s earliest bass-building experiments.Another, less radical, guitar/bass hybrid was a custom-made Gibson electric-upright bass guitar from the late ’30s. The Gibson bass may be an awkward piece of woodwork, but without a doubt it’s a historically significant one. According to a letter from former Gibson employee Julius Bellson (the company’s first historian), two such basses were made between 1938 and ’40, and the features are typical of the era. Bellson writes that one bass—pictured location—was sold to a Hawaiian band (in 1940, according to accompanying documents); the other went to Les Paul’s bassist, who, according to Bellson’s letter, played it on some of the guitarist’s recordings. The hollowbody instrument has a thick maple top, a double-bass scale of 42", and a flat fingerboard with frets that were filed down flush, yielding a smooth fretless surface (similar to today’s lined-fretless fingerboards). The pickup is of the so-called “Charlie Christian” type, similar to the ones used on Gibson’s first arch-top guitars. This instrument, too, now resides at The Experience Music Project museum.Whether or not Gibson’s builders made this bass from their own design, or if it was based upon a customer’s request, may never be verified. A few other companies had built standup acoustic bass guitars; in the late ’30s, Regal made a huge “Basso-Guitar” model briefly endorsed by Israel Crosby, and Dobro even made an extremely rare standup resonator bass guitar—but Gibson’s is most likely the first to have a pickup. In 1953, with the company’s first production bass guitar, the violin-shaped Electric Bass (now often called the EB-1), Gibson returned to the standup bass guitar concept. This instrument could be fitted with a telescoping endpin, making it playable standing up as well as strapped on.In the end, Leo Fender may have won the bass race, even though he may not have been the leader from the start. And while the Precision will always be considered the first commercially available electric, the early forerunners have no doubt played an important part in the history of the instrument we all cherish today.http://www.bassgirls.com/