To my knowledge, Rounds didn't even exist until the '70's?? Perhaps someone here knows exactly when they became available.
Rotosound Swing Bass set were made available in 1966 thanks to John Entwistle!
^ This statement is correct, so what follows is just a wider context:
1- all guitar-like bass string instruments invented before the 20th century
(the Mexican
guitarrón; the Balkan contrabass
tamburitza a.k.a.
berda/berde/tamburaški bas/begeš; the Portuguese
violão baixo/viola-baixo; the Italian
chitarrone moderno; possibly others)
have traditionally come with roundwound strings, simply because that's all there originally was
(flatwounds were invented by Dorchester, MA -born Alpheus Babcock, who used them on his early 19th century pianos, of all instruments; after decades of oblivion, flats were patented in 1975 by a fellow named Hamilton, and gradually adopted for bowed string instruments);
of course, come the 1900s, it is possible and even probable that some of the aforesaid acoustic bass guitars, and others introduced in the meantime
(the bass mandolin; American upright figure-eight basses like the Regal BassoGuitar; the Russian contrabass
balalaika and, later, the Ukrainian contrabass
domra),
were occasionally equipped with flatwound double bass strings;
2- the first ever electric bass guitar, Seattleite Paul Turmarc's "Audiovox Model 736 Bass Fiddle" (1936), came with rounds, and so did its late-1940s revisitation by his son Bud, the "Serenader Bass";
3- throughout most of the '50s (first appearance of their Mastersound Flatwound line is on their 1959 catalogue), the sole bass guitar strings sold by Fender were their no. 90 Pure Nickel Wrap set.
Three years ago, Fender historian Terry Foster posted a picture of their packet sleeve on Instagram with the hashtag #notflatwound:
Now, I don't do Insta so comments and Foster's replies are invisible to me
(a propos of which, should anyone be so kind as to screenshot and post them here, I would be forever grateful),
but I've read the gist summarised as those no. 90 strings being some sort of modified roundwounds aka groundwounds, not unlike present-day D'Addario Half-Rounds;
4- other early bass guitars like the Höfner 500/1 (Paul McCartney's famous hollowbody violin bass aka "Beatle bass") came with flats all right, probably from the get-go (the Höfner and Pyramid Strings plants, makers of the Pyramid Gold chrome nickel flatwound line to this day, were neighbours in Bubenreuth, West Germany)
4- Danelectro basses (starting from their 1956 UB-2, the first short-scale 6-string bass - a type of instrument now commonly known as the "tic-tac bass" in Nashville recording studios, or "bass VI" after Fender's 1961 answer to it - and the precursor to the baritone guitar) came with roundwounds, made by Black Diamond, which a couple sources describe as polished i.e. ground (down to which extent is not known to me: half-rounds, in D'Addario parlance? quarter-rounds, as La Bella used to make?), and which were also available as replacement sets in US stores;
5- UK string manufacturer James How &Co., either as a NOS supplier for Burns of London and Vox, or under the marques "Top Strings" and "Rotop", later to become "Rotosound", started making stainless-steel bass roundwounds in 1962, probably with no fanfare and little impact on the market. They also wrapped them in a black nylon tape, at first selling them under the Burns label (they also came stock on some Burns bass models);
6- the Who's John Entwistle bought a Danelectro Longhorn bass in 1965, fell in love with it and its strings, tried to record the bass solo in "My Generation" with it but broke one string, couldn't find a similar string set in London musical instrument stores so bought one then two replacement Longhorns, kept breaking strings before one good take could be completed, the shop ran out of Danos to sell him, so he first finished the song with a Fender Jazz Bass with "tapewounds" (at the time in the UK it could mean *both* black-nylon wrapped, as mentioned above, *and* also regular metal flatwounds), then he learnt of Rotosound producing rounds, tried them, approached the company, worked with Mr. How in order to tweak the formula to his liking (this entailed a bigger core for the low E and A), and signed an endorsement deal that got him a lifelong supply of Swing Bass sets in exchange for his becoming the face (Mod pun intended) of the product. A Rotosound advert even appears in 1967's
The Who Sell Out album. The Ox's high profile as an influential bassist, along with other prominent adopters (Noel Redding, Chris Squire), ensured the success of the Swing Bass strings, later to be called "Swing Bass 66" in memory of the Roto/Entwistle connection, and in time the establishment of roundwounds as the now-undisputed standard for bass guitar.
) and before that it most often had DR nickel Lo Riders. But I just took a couple of basses to a the guitar guy I use to give them their occassional "check up" and pro set up and he's replacing the Chromes with a set of Elixir Nanowebs.
