The Fender Acoustic Bass Guitar is just what it sounds like — basically a large acoustic guitar with four bass strings on it. Its closest relative in the musical instrument family is the Mexican guitarron, the huge-looking acoustic guitar typically played in mariachi bands and other traditional Mexican music.
The earliest acoustic bass guitar was built by Harmony in Chicago, in the 1950s. Ernie Ball developed its own model in the early 1960s. The Ball models were designed to sound more like an acoustic guitar, and so match up better sonically with them.
In 1972, Ernie Ball and a former Fender worker named George Fullerton designed the Earthwood acoustic bass guitar. That only lasted a couple of years, although production began again for a few years in the early 1980s. The Earthwood was larger and deeper than most other acoustic bass guitars available, which made it much louder, especially in the lower tones.
One popular music group that used an acoustic bass guitar was the Violent Femmes. Then in the late 1980s acoustic bass guitars were frequently used in performance on MTV’s Unplugged program series.
Fender did not generally make acoustic bass guitars — the ones it did manufacture were more commonly regarded as hollow-body electric basses, similar to Paul McCartney’s famous Hofner bass.
Other manufacturers that did make and sell the acoustic bass guitar include Martin, Tacoma, Takamine, Alvarez, Dean, Gibson, Washburn, and Ibanez, among others.
