For the bass player, 1935 was the year everything changed.

That was when American musician and inventor Paul Tutmarc developed the electric bass that was to be mass-produced 15 years later by Leo Fender. Compared with its predecessor, the double bass, the difference was huge.

It was smaller - which meant the musician could travel around more easily. It could be played horizontally, allowing the musician more manoeuvrability. And it also included ‘frets’, raised pieces of metal spaced along the neck that allowed the musician to play more accurately and with greater control.

But most importantly - it had more power.

The double bass had always been a quiet instrument, struggling to be heard over the rest of the band. Just like the acoustic guitar, it had to fight to compete with the big brass sections. It is remarkable when you consider today’s pop and dance music in which the bass so frequently dominates.

Without needing the large acoustic space of the double bass to generate the low frequencies, developments in the electric bass guitar focused on keeping it as light and evenly balanced as possible (imagine playing a two-hour gig with it slung around your neck) and on the number and position of the pickups, which transfer the movement of the strings to an electrical signal. More on that later.

Custom Revolution

It wasn’t until 1971 that companies embraced the concept of making custom guitars on which Overwater now prides itself. Rick Turner co-founded the company, Alembic, which produced made-to-order bass guitars for musicians such as Phil Lesh (Grateful Dead) and Jack Casady (Jefferson Airplane). Along with another company, Tobias, and independent luthiers such as Carl Thompson, it would kick-off an era of innovation such as introducing graphite necks and adding a fifth and sometimes sixth string to the traditional four.

More radical changes were attempted in the 1980s. To make the bass guitar lighter, Ned Steinberger removed the headstock, (“the cricket bat look” says Chris), and the Guild Guitar Corporation added rubber strings to give the sound of a double bass. In the 2000s, some manufacturers even added digital modelling circuits to recreate tones from different models of bass guitars.

Developments are usually driven by the musicians themselves. “Every development that I’ve made since I first started doing this in the 1970s has been as a reaction to players,” says Chris. “So a player comes to me and says “I want this, but I can’t quite do it like that. I need it to go lower. I need it to be more even.” We then analyse and it’s a gradual process.”

Very often a new genre of music is formed by musicians reacting to the previous one, and so instrument development has followed that trend. Chris has come to understand how the pattern goes: “That’s why it keeps going back every so often. So you’ll get sophisticated prog rock, then you’ll get punks. Then that starts to get more sophisticated with the new wave thing and the new romantics and the synthesiser people and all the rest of it. And then you get grunge...particularly the creative people who are cross-generational.” 

Birth of the C-Bass

When bassist Andrew Bognor was invited to tour with the synth-based Thompson Twins in the 1980s he realised that, since everything keyboard orientated is all in the key of C, as opposed to E or A like guitar bands, he needed something different.

He turned to Chris. “He said can you build me a bass that instead of tuning E A D G, it can do C F B flat E flat - which is four semitones lower. So after a lot of fiddling about and experimenting - we made it longer and had to have special strings made and all the rest of it - we made this thing.

"...and he got the sack for asking for more money, but the instrument was made!”

As a result, Chris began receiving requests from luminaries such as Pink Floyd for this new ‘C-Bass’. “[David] Gilmour himself phoned me up and said “can you build me a bass and how much?” which is quite rare for rock stars because they usually just stop at the “can you build me a bass” because they like things to be given to them if possible. And this whole low-tuning thing developed from that.”

Soon a whole host of high-level musicians wanted one, including Mick Feat, who worked with Mark Knopfler [Dire Straits], Guy Pratt, who played with Pink Floyd, and John Entwistle of the Who - a big influence on many bass players.

“We made about 40 of these things for all sorts of people and after about a year Mickey Feat came back to us and said “I want you to build us a five-string”, and that was the first five-string. So it’s this thing of being reactive. And we made the first five-string for Mick and its first outing was the Tina Turner album that Mark Knopfler produced.”

Having to follow the wiles of musicians can be troublesome for manufacturers. As Chris explains, the distorted signal enjoyed so much over the years by lead guitarists is actually a by-product of inferior technology. Players found that turning up valve amplifiers created a lovely thick sound.

For those early manufacturers, says Chris, like Jim Marshall and Leo Fender, “it was a pain in the arse”.

“They wanted to try to make their technology better so that it was clean. But once the guitar players had used the distortion, the next generation of guitar amplifiers went back and asked why does this distortion sound good and this distortion doesn’t sound good, and there were all these early transistor amps that they’d built distortion into that sounded like a bee in a jam jar.

"It didn’t have that dynamic that you would have with valve distortion and a certain speaker cone and all the rest of it.” 

Making instruments is simply not like other manufacturing industries where there are steady incremental improvements as each new model is released: “Technology does move forward,” says Chris, “but it’s like the art has to catch up with the science. With this industry, because essentially it’s art, it’s creative, it’s not like that. The parameters are different.”