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With early versions appearing in the 1930s, the modern bass guitar was invented by Leo Fender and marketed beginning in 1951 as a cheaper, more portable, and louder alternative for double bassists playing in dance bands.

The bass guitar comes in two variants: the solid-body electric bass guitar and the hollow-body acoustic bass guitar. Both are traditionally tuned like a double bass, with the same four lowest strings (E’-A’-D-G) as a guitar, but an octave lower.While the electric bass guitar is always amplified outside of personal practice settings, confusingly, the acoustic bass guitar can also be amplified electronically via pickups, usually in performance settings. The acoustic bass guitar is “acoustic” because its main amplification is its resonant, hollow body.Both the electric and acoustic bass guitars originally and typically have fretted fingerboards, which enable ease of intonation. Fretless bass guitars enable swooping glissandi, which can approximate the sound of the double bass

In Queen, Roger Taylor is the drummer and adds that extra flavor that is needed or you have no band! Drummers are also essential because they keep the beat to the song, and they also can make sounds unlike any instrument. It may be one of the easier instruments to learn, but hard to master.

Drums appear with wide geographic distribution in archaeological excavations from Neolithic times onward; one excavated in Moravia is dated to 6000 BCE. Early drums consisted of a section of hollowed tree trunk covered at one end with reptile or fish skin and were struck with the hands. Later the skin was taken from hunted game or cattle, and sticks were used. The double-headed drum came later, as did pottery drums in various shapes. The heads were fastened by several methods, some still in use. The skin might be secured to single-headed drums by pegs, nails, glue, buttoning (through holes in the membrane), or neck lacing (wrapping a cord around the membrane overlap). Double-headed drums were often directly cord-tensioned (i.e., through holes in the skin). Modern European orchestral drums often combine two hoops pressing against each head (one rolled in the skin, the other outside) with indirect lacing (i.e., to the hoops).

Drums typically have conspicuous extramusical functions—civil, message transmitting, and, particularly, religious. Credited with magical powers, they are frequently held sacred. In many societies their manufacture involves ritual. In East Africa, offerings such as cattle are made to the royal kettledrums, which not only symbolize the king’s power and status but also offer him supernatural protection.

The drum sound is produced by the vibration of a stretched membrane (it is thus classified as a membranophone within the larger category of percussion instruments). Basically, a drum is either a tube or a bowl of wood, metal, or pottery (the “shell”) covered at one or both ends by a membrane (the “head”), which is usually struck by a hand or stick. Friction drums, a class apart, are sounded by rubbing.

History

The first electrically amplified stringed instrument to be marketed commercially was designed in 1931 by George Beauchamp, the general manager of the National Guitar Corporation, with Paul Barth, who was vice president. The maple body prototype for the one-piece cast aluminum “frying pan” was built by Harry Watson, factory superintendent of the National Guitar Corporation.^[4] Commercial production began in late summer of 1932 by the Ro-Pat-In Corporation (Electro–Patent-Instrument Company), in Los Angeles, a partnership of Beauchamp, Adolph Rickenbacker(originally Rickenbacher), and Paul Barth.In 1934, the company was renamed the Rickenbacker Electro Stringed Instrument Company. In that year Beauchamp applied for a United States patent for an Electrical Stringed Musical Instrument and the patent was later issued in 1937

To produce sound, an electric guitar senses the vibrations of the strings electronically and routes an electronic signal to an amplifier and speaker. The sensing occurs in a magnetic pickup mounted under the strings on the guitar’s body. A simple magnetic pickup looks like this:

This pickup consists of a bar magnet wrapped with as many as 7,000 turns of fine wire. If you have read How Electromagnets Work, then you know that coils and magnets can turn electrical energy into motion. In the same way, they can turn motion into electrical energy. In the case of an electric guitar, the vibrating steel strings produce a corresponding vibration in the magnet’s magnetic field and therefore a vibrating current in the coil.