FACTOID #53: If you thought Antarctica was inhospitable, think again - its land area is only ninety-eight percent ice. Reassuringly, the other 2% is categorised as "barren rock".
The Fender PrecisionBass, known as "P-bass" for short, is an early model of the electric bass designed by Clarence Leonidas Fender on the electronics and his team crafting the body and neck, and brought to market in 1951.
Although the PrecisionBass was first presented some 15 years after the original solid body, fretted, horizontal, electric bass produced by the Audiovox Manufacturing Company in Seattle, Washington, the PrecisionBass enjoys the status of being the first mass-produced and commercially successful electric bass.
The double bass (also called Bass viol, Contrabass, or upright bass) is a very difficult instrument to master, is physically cumbersome, difficult to transport, and by the late 1930s was increasingly hard to hear with big horn sections or next to resonator or amplified electric guitars.
The PrecisionBass (or "P-bass") evolved from a simple, uncontoured 'slab' body design similar to that of a Telecaster with a single piece, four-pole pickup to a contoured body design with beveled edges for comfort and a single "split coil pickup" (staggered humbucker).
Gibson basses also tended to be smaller, sleeker instruments; Gibson did not produce a 34" scale bass until 1963 with the release of the Thunderbird, which was also the first Gibson bass to utilize dual-humbucking pickups in a more traditional position, about halfway between the neck and bridge.
Fretless basses have a distinct sound: the absence of frets means that the string must be pressed down directly onto the wood of the fingerboard and can buzz against it as with the double bass, sometimes described as a "mwaah" sound by bassists.
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