Guitar Bassist

Learning guitar key with Guitar Bassist with six strings : E-A-D-G-B-E2.

A bass player, or bassist, is a musician who plays a bass instrument such as a double bass, bass guitar, keyboard bass or a low brass instrument such as a tuba or sousaphone. Different musical genres tend to be associated with one or more of these instruments. Since the 1960s, the electric bass has been the standard bass instrument for rock and roll, jazz fusion, heavy metal, country, reggae and pop music. The double bass is the standard bass instrument for classical music, bluegrass, rockabilly, and most genres of jazz. Low brass instruments such as the tuba or sousaphone are the standard bass instrument in Dixieland and New Orleans-style jazz bands.

The bass guitar or simply bass is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb, by plucking, slapping, popping, (rarely) strumming, tapping, thumping, or picking with a plectrum, often known as a pick.

The bass guitar is similar in appearance and construction to an electric guitar, but with a longer neck and scale length, and four to six strings or courses. The four-string bass, by far the most common, is usually tuned the same as the double bass, which corresponds to pitches one octave lower than the four lowest pitched strings of a guitar (E, A, D, and G). The bass guitar is a transposing instrument, as it is notated in bass clef an octave higher than it sounds (as is the double bass) to avoid excessive ledger lines. Like the electric guitar, the bass guitar is plugged into an amplifier and speaker for live performances.

Bass bodies are typically made of wood, although other materials such as graphite have also been used. While a wide variety of woods are suitable for use in the body, neck, and fretboard of the bass guitar, the most common type of wood used for the body is alder, for the neck is maple, and for the fretboard is rosewood. Other commonly used woods include mahogany, maple, ash, walnut, and poplar for bodies, mahogany for necks, and maple and ebony for fretboards. A common feature of more expensive basses is "neck-through" construction. Instead of milling the body from a single piece of wood (or "bookmatched" halves) and then attaching the neck into a pocket (so-called "bolt-on" design), neck-through bases are constructed first by assembling the neck, which may comprise one, three, five or more layers of wood in vertical stripes, which are longer than the length of the fretboard. To this elongated neck, the body is attached as two wings, which may also be made up of several layers. The entire bass is then milled and shaped. Many players believe neck-through construction provides better sustain and a mellower tone than bolt-on neck construction. While neck-through construction is most common in handmade "boutique" basses, some models of mass-produced basses such as Ibanez's BTB series also have neck-through construction.

Six strings are usually tuned B0-E1-A1-D2-G2-C3—like a four-string bass with an additional low "B" string and a high "C" string. Some players prefer B0-E1-A1-D2-F2-B2, which preserves the intervals of standard guitar tuning and makes the highest and lowest string the same note two octaves apart. While less common than four or five-string basses, they appear in Latin, jazz, and other genres, as well as in studio work where a single instrument must be highly versatile. Alternative tunings for six-string bass include B-E-A-D-G-B, matching the first five strings of an acoustic or electric guitar, and E-A-D-G-B-E, completely matching the tuning of a six-string guitar but one octave lower allowing the use of guitar chord fingerings. Rarer tunings such as E-A-D-G-C-F and F-B-E-A-D-G provide a lower or higher range in a given position while maintaining consistent string intervals.

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