Is electric bass a guitar ?

[Liam Wald]

When I see seven pages of replies to a question like this it really makes me wonder why I am wasting my time on TALK BASS.
But since I am here I will waste a little more time and add a few of my own.
Is a banjo really a banjo guitar? How about a ukulele? Is it a ukulele guitar?
Is a Hammond organ really an organ piano? How about a harpsichord? Harpsichord piano maybe?
How about a squeezy piano? You guessed it, accordion.
Can we just agree to call a tuba a bass trumpet?
What sounds better, a bass trumpet with mother of pearl key pads or a bass trumpet with tort keypads? Which keypad is best for Polka?
If you could only have one bass trumpet tuba thingy what would it be?
Do you like gladiator movies?

 

[Old Garage-Bander]

It makes sense on some level that "bass" is bass guitar since upright bass can also be called "bass violin". However, does this mean a cello is a "tenor violin" and a viola is an "alto bass"?

And what is a piccolo bass?
Then there's bass flute, bass clarinet...

This whole thing can get quite confusing...

In the ukulele world, soprano, "concert" and tenor uke have identical range (although baritone ukulele tunes lower).

Bottom line, for me, is that as long as the person speaking and the person being spoken to both understand and neither is offended then it's fine.

Now, as this is my first post here, and I've spent the weekend dealing with a 2-month old and a sick 4-year old (see screen name) please don't all take me to task for any of this.

Perhaps Jeff Berlin could provide a more academic response

-DBB

Welcome to TB.
Sorry to hear about the sick kids.
Hope everyone gets feeling better soon.

 

[Old Garage-Bander]

When I see seven pages of replies to a question like this it really makes me wonder why I am wasting my time on TALK BASS.
But since I am here I will waste a little more time and add a few of my own.
Is a banjo really a banjo guitar? How about a ukulele? Is it a ukulele guitar?
Is a Hammond organ really an organ piano? How about a harpsichord? Harpsichord piano maybe?
How about a squeezy piano? You guessed it, accordion.
Can we just agree to call a tuba a bass trumpet?
What sounds better, a bass trumpet with mother of pearl key pads or a bass trumpet with tort keypads? Which keypad is best for Polka?
If you could only have one bass trumpet tuba thingy what would it be?
Do you like gladiator movies?

Shirley, you jest?

The only true and proper solution to the argument is... Tort.

Over, Unger.

 

[ll Rip ll]

When I see seven pages of replies to a question like this it really makes me wonder why I am wasting my time on TALK BASS.
But since I am here I will waste a little more time and add a few of my own.
Is a banjo really a banjo guitar? How about a ukulele? Is it a ukulele guitar?
Is a Hammond organ really an organ piano? How about a harpsichord? Harpsichord piano maybe?
How about a squeezy piano? You guessed it, accordion.
Can we just agree to call a tuba a bass trumpet?
What sounds better, a bass trumpet with mother of pearl key pads or a bass trumpet with tort keypads? Which keypad is best for Polka?
If you could only have one bass trumpet tuba thingy what would it be?
Do you like gladiator movies?

Talkbass is great. You get to have your opinions read by other self-proclaimed experts on all things bass. What's not to love?

 

[Old Garage-Bander]

Semantics. The electric bass (bass for short) is not equal to the electric guitar (guitar for short). The upright bass (bass for short) is even more different than the acoustic guitar (guitar for short).

How about a 30" scale bass, (short for short?)

 

[lbbc]

It's a lower pitched stringed instrument in the shape of a guitar.... it's a bass guitar. Much like an instrument made out of metal and played with a reed is a Saxophone. I happen to play tenor and bari sax....not Alto, but it's still a Saxophone.

 

[ll Rip ll]

How about a 30" scale bass, (short for short?)

Exactly my point! They're obviously not the same, but you can use blanket adjectives to descibe very different things and not be wrong in doing so.

 

[Smooth_bass88]

Who says it's not a car? Once again, semantics. And once again, don't care what you call it.
If you only use it to take the kid to music practice then how does it differ from any other vehicle, many of which are cars in a more narrow definition of the term. You can call an F-150 a pizza if you wish.

I was simply pointing out that the argument of car vs truck, carries no logical weight in arguing what to call a musical instrument.

Exactly. Call it whatever you want.

A car is a vehicle
A bass is an instrument
There are many different vehicles. There are many different instruments. That was my logic. I guess my point is that Leo Fender wasn't trying to make a lower-pitched guitar, he was trying to make a smaller more portable ampifiable version of the upright.

 

[lowfreqgeek]

Here's an idea; just call things what you feel they should be called, regardless of any historical or formal definition of the term. Any word can mean anything you wish it to mean, as long as you believe in your heart that your definition is the right definition.

 

[Drgonzonm]

Exactly. Call it whatever you want.

A car is a vehicle
A bass is an instrument
There are many different vehicles. There are many different instruments. That was my logic. I guess my point is that Leo Fender wasn't trying to make a lower-pitched guitar, he was trying to make a smaller more portable ampifiable version of the upright.

and then someone decided bead was the way to go.

 

[knight of ni]

At this point I feel I have to make it clear that :
-There's some of irony in the thread title and poll (although maybe not after all)
-The question is not about how I/we should call the instrument we're talking about, I don't care much about that. What I do care about is how it is called may have a negative impact on how it is perceived by other people, particularly musicians practicing other instruments (including guitars but not of the bass sort !).

 

[Old Garage-Bander]

Exactly. Call it whatever you want.

A car is a vehicle
A bass is an instrument
There are many different vehicles. There are many different instruments. That was my logic. I guess my point is that Leo Fender wasn't trying to make a lower-pitched guitar, he was trying to make a smaller more portable ampifiable version of the upright.

Do you know for a fact that was Leo's intent? If you want to do a post mortem of what Leo had in mind let's look at what we do know to be fact and maybe throw in some addition questions to ponder.

Leo used frets on his bass, unlike the upright which has no frets.
Are there five and six string electric basses? Are there five and six string upright basses?
An electric guitar plugs into an amp, so does an electric bass.
You wear a guitar using a strap around your neck. But you don't do that with an upright.
Did not the first brochures for the Fender electric bass, refer to them as a bass guitar?
Do we know the percentage of guitar players vs upright players who transistioned to the electric bass in the first five or ten years after the Fender P bass went on the market?
Were the frets there to help people transition from the guitar or upright?
Is there not a BG section of Talkbass as well as DB section. I think the G stands for Goodness.
And if the electric bass is a smaller variation on the double bass or the upright bass, why isn't it called single bass or a down wrong bass?
Or maybe more to the point, when did people start calling it an upright bass? Certainly there was no need for that until there was a need to differentiate it from some other kind of bass.

You can argue this both ways. But to what end? At least in doing so, I have tried to draw correlations, using comparisons that are somewhat relevant to the argument.

I agree that a car is a vehicle and a bass is an instrument.
And you might more easily be able to transport an upright bass in an F-150 than in most, non truck passenger vehicles. But that doesn't make the car/truck comparison analogous to the bass/guitar comparison.

 

[Kevin1960]

I voted no because I have tried both and think the techniques and use's to which they are being used (in western music) makes me believe they are distinctively different enough to be recognized as separate instruments entirely even though they do share some aspects. A baritone guitar should be called a bass guitar and if I put tenor bass strings on my bass, what do I call it? These crossovers that sit between are new to the scene and should be better defined.

 

[hrodbert696]

Here's the thing that I think causes the confusion: we use the word "guitar," by itself, to describe a six-stringed 25" scale instrument. But we forget that this usage is a contraction. In fact, the instrument we call simply a "guitar" is a "SPANISH guitar." That's even embedded in the names of a lot of Gibson models - it's what SG stands for, and ES models (the semi-hollows) are "Electric Spanish." The Spanish Guitar became sufficiently popular around the 1920s or so, overshadowing the mandolin and banjo that used to dominate the market, that it became the "default" style of guitar so people just started calling them "guitars." Gibson is an old enough maker to go back to that transition, so its models preserve the time when people still called them "Spanish guitars."

So we get confused; a "guitar" has six strings and a 25" scale, a bass guitar doesn't, so a bass must not be a guitar!

But of course the reality is that "guitar" is properly the term for a whole family of instruments, and really is a large subset of the broader Lute family of instruments that would include the banjo, ukulele and mandolin (each with their many variants...), among others. The electric bass guitar is a member of that family alongside its brothers, the Spanish guitars in both their acoustic and electric versions, as well as baritone guitars, tenor guitars, and others.

Is a Baritone Guitar more of a Bass or more a Guitar?

Yes.

There are tenor guitars, which are 4 string. I bought an electric bass guitar from a guy with a pretty nice collection of them. I have played guitar for a long time, and I never knew they existed.

Bingo!

Soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, bass saxophone. Just because you can play one well doesn't mean you can swap to the next without a little learning curve in both functionality and role. Also doesn't mean you can't be good on more than one. Each has its own role in music, but they are all still saxophones. I feel the same way about ukulele, guitar, and bass; variations of the same instrument with different roles.

And Bingo again!

But doesn't the ukelele family derive from a non-guitar instrument from Portugal in the lure family? Yup.

Wouldn't calling it a "little Hawaiian guitar" actually be a disservice to its history, lineage, function, etc...? Yup.

Not sure why it would be a disservice. It's not the name of the instrument, sure, but it's a perfectly valid descriptor of it. Hawaiians didn't invent ukuleles from their indigenous tradition; they picked up other members of the guitar family from passing sailors and then modified it into the "Hawaiian Guitar" (predecessor of the lap steel) and the ukulele.

 

[Bflat]

Apparently since I now own the first one made and the guy who made it in 1936 advertised it as an electric bass fiddle, that is what it is/was........

shameless self promotion

 

[Pocket4]

I'm usually conscientious when i call my bass a guitar, out of respect to the standup bass and it's historical place in music. Electric bass has the same electro mechanical setup as "guitar". Still, no way does my playing figure out to be the 3rd guitar in the band, I play bass for whatever the song needs for bass.

 

[Nephilymbass]

Obviously since it looks like a guitar it should be one, or that's what wikipedia says. But apart from somewhat sterile instrument family trees, I feel naming bass a guitar or rather giving it a guitar status leads to misconceptions that go beyond that.
It implies that if you know how to play guitar you somehow know how to play bass. That if you teach guitar you should somehow know how to teach bass.
I feel this is wrong, I mean the closest instrument I feel bass is related to is double bass not guitar ! If I get a second instrument it will be EUB for sure. I actually created some problems at the (small) music school where I get instruction because I asked the violin teacher (also a bassist) for instruction and not the guitar teacher, who is supposed to be in charge of bass instruction but not himself a bassist... and plays bass like a guitar (you know what I mean).

One point maybe in favour of electric bass not really belonging to a guitar family is that it is often played fretless whereas fretless guitars are (very ?) uncommon, in fact the very definition of a guitar states that it is fretted.

Sorry if the subject has been discussed before, it is obviously quite difficult to search forums based on "bass guitar" keyword.

Opinions anyone ?

Yes in the same way that a baritone guitar or a tenor guitar are guitars a bass guitar is a guitar also. They're all in the Guitar family. Just like a bass clarinet is still a clarinet. Saxophones have saprano, alto, baritone, I played trumped when I was a kid and they also have piccolo trumpets. Bass guitar is clearly from the Guitar family in my view. Now if you want to talk about a term that bugs me a little. It's "bass drum." Of course a bass drum is still a drum but I think a lot of people fail to understand that a bass drum and a kick drum are actually two different things that you don't even play with the same limbs. You play a kick drum with your feet and a bass drum with your hands.

 

[DadBandBassist]

I routinely disagree with the guitarist in one of my projects - who is also my brother-in-law - over the classification of the piano. While it is a string instrument he insists it belongs to the percussion family.

-DBB

 

[Knavery]

IMO, the electric bass and upright bass are two different instruments. So, I'd go as far as saying the electric bass is closer to the guitar than an upright. I started on electric guitar and moved to bass. There wasn't much of a difference at all. The theory was the same, the frets were the same, etc. You just play the music differently with different techniques.

If someone put am upright in front of me, I wouldn't have the foggiest idea how to play it. So yeah, the electric bass is a guitar.

 

[easyj]

So, for some sick reason, I like this thread.

As I often mention...I play electric guitar, and I play bass guitar. When I am playing one of my bass guitars, I can't help but notice that they are extremely similar to electric guitars. I think that these:

are one of these:

........with fatter and longer strings, and they could have one or two less of them.

But other than that, they are pretty much designed and built the same way. I think the accepted term "bass guitar" is in no way a misnomer for an instrument designed exactly like an electric guitar that can play in the bass register. In addition, it is not derogatory in any way. I think the bass guitar has more than proven itself as a legitimate, popular instrument that can handle the bass register in modern music.

I think some people think that, when they are playing a bass guitar, it is pretty much the same as one of these:

It's not. THAT thing is NOT a guitar. It is WAY more similar to a double bass than a bass guitar, or electric bass, or whatever you want to call it is....and I'll spare you the picture of that.