Bass (instrument)

There are a range of musical instruments that can be collectively be regarded as bass instruments. They belong to different families of instruments and can cover a wide range of musical roles, often going well beyond simply providing a rhythmic and harmonic foundation for other instruments to build on. What they have in common is that they are the lowest tuned instruments of their respective families.

As will be seen from the page on musical instrument classification, categorising instruments is far from simple but examples grouped by general form and playing technique include:

• Double bass from the violin family
• Bass guitar and acoustic bass guitar from the guitar family (although owing much of the their lineage to the double bass)
• Tuba and sousaphone from the wind family and low-tuned versions of specific types of brass and woodwind instruments, such as bass clarinet, bass trombone and bass saxophone

A musician playing one of these instruments is often known as a bassist, certainly in the first two cases, although other terms such as 'bass guitarist', 'double bassist', 'bass player', etc may be used instead.

See also bass for other meanings of the term, from biology and vocal music.