A contrabass guitar is a low-

register Register or registration may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * Register (music), the relative "height" or range of a note, melody, part, instrument, etc. * ''Register'', a 2017 album by Travis Miller * Registration (organ), ...

bass guitar The bass guitar (), also known as the electric bass guitar, electric bass, or simply the bass, is the lowest-pitched member of the guitar family. It is similar in appearance and construction to an Electric guitar, electric but with a longer nec ...

, typically with six strings. It is often called, simply, a six-string bass guitar. The five-string bass guitar is rarely called a contrabass guitar, even though it typically has the same lowest note.

History

Contrabass guitars have been around since 1899, when a "Grand Concert Contra Bass Guitar" was listed in Joseph Bohmann's catalogue. Bohmann Catalogue 1899 with image of "Contra Bass Harp Guitar"
at harpguitars.net Bohmann, a

violin The violin, sometimes referred to as a fiddle, is a wooden chordophone, and is the smallest, and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in regular use in the violin family. Smaller violin-type instruments exist, including the violino picc ...

mandolin A mandolin (, ; literally "small mandola") is a Chordophone, stringed musical instrument in the lute family and is generally Plucked string instrument, plucked with a plectrum, pick. It most commonly has four Course (music), courses of doubled St ...

, guitar and

zither Zither (; , from the Greek ''cithara'') is a class of stringed instruments. The modern instrument has many strings stretched across a thin, flat body. Zithers are typically played by strumming or plucking the strings with the fingers or a ...

manufacturer Manufacturing is the creation or Production (economics), production of goods with the help of equipment, Work (human activity), labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of the secondary se ...

from

Chicago Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...

, developed a large 6-string guitar. While some logically speculate that this instrument was tuned one

octave In music, an octave (: eighth) or perfect octave (sometimes called the diapason) is an interval between two notes, one having twice the frequency of vibration of the other. The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon that has been referr ...

lower than a standard guitar (basically an Acoustic Bass VI), no reliable information is available about its tuning. A "classical contrabass guitar" (aka Acoustic Bass VI) is tuned E₁–A₁–D₂–G₂–B₂–E₃, like the

classical guitar The classical guitar, also known as Spanish guitar, is a member of the guitar family used in classical music and other styles. An acoustic wooden string (music), string instrument with strings made of catgut, gut or nylon, it is a precursor of the ...

, but one octave lower. It is popular in

Fado Fado (; "destiny, fate") is a music genre which can be traced to the 1820s in Lisbon, Portugal, but probably has much earlier origins. Fado historian and scholar Rui Vieira Nery states that "the only reliable information on the history of fado ...

bands in

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic, is a country on the Iberian Peninsula in Southwestern Europe. Featuring Cabo da Roca, the westernmost point in continental Europe, Portugal borders Spain to its north and east, with which it share ...

and

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...

. In this sense, it may actually be considered as an

acoustic bass guitar The acoustic bass guitar (sometimes shortened to acoustic bass or initialized ABG) is a bass instrument with a hollow wooden body similar to, though usually larger than, a steel-string acoustic guitar. Like the traditional electric bass guitar ...

, for it shares the same low-end range. Although called a contrabass guitar, the fact that it is tuned only an octave lower than a normal guitar makes it—in modern terminology—more an acoustic bass guitar than a

contrabass Contrabass (from ) refers to several musical instruments of very low pitch—generally one octave below bass register instruments. While the term most commonly refers to the double bass (which is the bass instrument in the orchestral string family ...

instrument. Its strings are much thinner than a conventional acoustic

, so it lacks the "thick" tone of those instruments. Contrabass guitars from the 1970s are often tuned B₀–E₁–A₁–D₂–G₂–C₃ (B₀ being the lowest B on a standard 88-key piano). Some players prefer B₀–E₁–A₁–D₂–F₂–B₂, which preserves the intervals of a standard guitar tuning (lowered by a twelfth) and makes the top and bottom notes the same pitch. They are usually

electric Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter possessing an electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by Maxwel ...

instruments with a solid wooden body. After

guitar maker A luthier ( ; ) is a craftsperson who builds or repairs string instruments. Etymology The word ' is originally French and comes from ''luth'', the French word for "lute". The term was originally used for makers of lutes, but it came to be u ...

Carl Thompson made a first, arguably non-satisfying attempt to create such an instrument in 1974, Ken Smith built the first entirely usable electric contrabass guitar in 1982. This was again at the request of bassist Anthony Jackson, who later asked Vinnie Fodera and Joey Lauricella of Fodera Guitars to build several instruments according to his ideas."Contrabass Conception: Anthony Jackson's Journey To 6-String Supremacy
interview with Chris Jisi
( Bass Player magazine US) The contrabass guitar influenced the development of the six-string electric bass.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Contrabass Guitar Bass guitars Guitar family instruments Contrabass instruments Bass (sound) Rhythm section

History

See also

References