Leo Fender The history of the bass guitar is a story of partnerships. For more than a half-century, instrument makers have been working closely with bass players as they conceived and built basses, searching for the best combinations of playability, flexibility, and good sound. In this column series, I’ll be looking at those partnerships and showing how builders and bassists have collaborated over the years to get us to where we are now, with an amazing variety of basses available in different configurations with different capabilities. As I chronicled in my book How the Fender Bass Changed the World [Backbeat/Hal Leonard], there were a number of early attempts to build an electric bass that could overcome the limitations of the acoustic bass, including such instruments as the Rickenbacker Electro Bass-Viol and the Gibson Electric Bass Guitar, both of which were played upright. The most significant development was Paul Tutmarc’s Audiovox Model 376, introduced in 1935, an