Fender took notice and began to market it as an all-purpose instrument amplifier. It was quite successful as a bass amp in the beginning, largely because there were very few other options, but as bassists began to demand ever-more volume and clean headroom to compete with loud drums and guitars, the Bassman fell out of favor with the four-stringers, while simultaneously developing a reputation as a stellar guitar and harmonica amp. It wouldn't take the more familiar narrow-panel, tweed 4x10 combo form until around 1954, which also saw the power increased to a somewhat more robust 40 watts. Originally released in 1952 to pair up with Fender's new Precision Bass (released a year earlier and already taking the world by storm), the first Bassman was a 15" combo amp rated at around 26 watts, powered by a pair of 5881 vacuum tubes. The story of the Fender Bassman is well-known. Let's look at a handful of notable examples. This legacy is an important one, as more than a few of today's prized vintage guitar amplifiers were originally designed with bass in mind. It wasn't long, however, before guitarists started plugging into some of these underpowered bass amps, giving them a whole new life. Even then, this amp was rated at a mere 26 watts, not even close to enough power to keep up with a loud drummer, particularly if any sort of moderately clean tone was desired.Ĭleanly amplifying low-frequency sounds requires substantial headroom, and these early tube amps were just not up to the job. For bassists, however, the situation was far less satisfying.įender's Precision Bass came out in 1951-the first production-model electric bass guitar ever-but an amplifier designed specifically for it did not appear in music stores until 1952. For guitarists, this was not so bad, and many quickly grew to love the warm grit of a smaller tube amp pushed to its limit. In the beginning of the electric era, tube amps were just not terribly powerful, and they were next to impossible to keep clean at live band volume levels. More than a few of them have to do with bass amplifiers. There are, in fact, many such stories in the guitar industry. Well, not that much really, but it is a colorful and illustrative example of the dichotomy that often exists between a product's original intent, and where it ultimately finds its place in the market. You might be wondering what this story has to do with electric guitars. IBM took them up on their pitch, and the rest is history. It was not until several years later, after the utter failure of this wallpaper idea (as well as several others), that the team at the Sealed Air company decided to try marketing bubble wrap as protective packing material to the then-fledgling computer industry. Feel free to pause for a moment and contemplate the glorious possibilities of this concept. When bubble wrap was invented in 1957 by Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, it was marketed as a textured, three-dimensional wallpaper.
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