The Bass Guitar

The bass is an instrument also played with the fingers or thumb, or by using a pick. It looks like an elecrtic guitar, but with a longer neck and with four, five or six strings. It's usually tuned like a double bass. The bass guitar is a transposing intrument. To play it, you have to plug it to an amplifier and  speaker like the electric guitar.

Since the 1950's, the bass guitar has replaced the double bass in popular music as the bass instrument in the rhythm section.

The bass guitar is used in many styles of music including rock, metal, pop, punk rock, country, reggae, blues, and jazz. It is used as a soloing instrument in jazz, fusion, latin, funk, and in some rock and metal styles.

Uses

Popular Music

Popular music bands and rock groups use the bass guitar as a member of the rhythm section, which provides the chord sequence or "progression" and sets out the "beat" for the song. The rhythm section typically consists of a rhythm guitarist or electric keyboard player, or both, a bass guitarist and a drummer; larger groups may add additional guitarists, keyboardists, or percussionists.

Jazz

The electric bass is a relative newcomer to the world of jazz. The big bands of the 1930s and 1940s used the double bass. The electric bass was introduced during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when rock influences were blended with jazz to create jazz-rock fusion. The introduction of the electric bass in jazz fusion, as in the rock world, enabled the bass to be used in high-volume stadium concerts with powerful amplifiers, because it is much easier to amplify the electric bass than the double bass.

Contemporany classical music

Contemporary classical music uses both the standard instruments of Western Art music (piano, violin, double bass, etc.) and newer instruments or sound producing devices, ranging from electrically amplified instruments to tape players and radios. The electric bass guitar has occasionally been used in contemporary classical music (art music) since the late 1960s.