It is a plucked string instrument similar in appearance and construction to an electric or acoustic guitar, but with a longer neck and scale length.

The electric bass guitar is acoustically a relatively quiet instrument, so to be heard at a practical performance volume, it requires external amplification.

It can also be used in conjunction with direct input boxes, audio interfaces, mixing consoles, computers, or bass effects processors that offer headphone jacks.

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians refers to this instrument as an "Electric bass guitar, usually with four heavy strings tuned E1'–A1'–D2–G2.

Mottola's Cyclopedic Dictionary of Lutherie Terms begins its definition of the instrument as "A bass guitar that produces sound primarily with the aid of electronic devices.

They are responsible for converting the vibrations of the strings into analogous electrical signals, which are in turn passed as input to an instrument amplifier.

[14] In the 1930s, musician and inventor Paul Tutmarc of Seattle, Washington, developed the first electric bass guitar in its modern form, a fretted instrument designed to be played horizontally.

[18] The Fender Electric Instrument Manufacturing Company began producing the Precision Bass, or P-Bass, in October 1951.

By 1957 the Precision more closely resembled the Fender Stratocaster with the body edges beveled for comfort, and the pickup was changed to a split coil design.

[24] Roy Johnson (with Lionel Hampton), and Shifty Henry (with Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five), were other early Fender bass pioneers.

[20] Also in 1953, Gibson released the first short-scale violin-shaped electric bass, the EB-1, with an extendable end pin so a bassist could play it upright or horizontally.

The EB-0 was very similar to a Gibson SG in appearance (although the earliest examples have a slab-sided body shape closer to that of the double-cutaway Les Paul Special).

[27] In 1957, Rickenbacker introduced the model 4000, the first bass to feature a neck-through-body design in which the neck is part of the body wood.

[25] With the explosion in popularity of rock music in the 1960s, many more manufacturers began making electric basses, including Yamaha, Teisco and Guyatone.

[34] In the late 1960s, eight-string basses, with four octave paired courses (similar to a 12 string guitar), were introduced, such as the Hagström H8.

[40] Basses with active electronics can include a preamplifier and knobs for boosting and cutting the low and high frequencies.