At some point, bass became important in popular music. I mean the frequency range, not the instrument - you know, “bass boost” settings on home stereos, etc.
When I listen to rock records from the early eighties, like Talking Heads or XTC records, there’s no bass to speak of; the kick drums are mixed and eq’ed to highlight the attack sound of the beater, and the bass guitar is often mixed and eq’ed just like the regular guitars, but playing lower notes.
When you listen to an average rock band’s CD in 2008, the bass is massive and thumping - on the average Fallout Boy or My Chemical Romance record, the bass frequencies are as prominent as a rap record, all boom and thump.
It happened with the advent of the CD. In the days of records, mastering engineers had to compress the snot out of recordings, minimizing the impact of the bass so your tonearm wouldn’t jump out of the grooves. With digital recording, there are no mechanical barriers to reproduction, so they could put in as much bass as they wanted. Simple, really.
I’m an idiot, but I think it might have something to do with the tremendous amount of compression used starting maybe around the turn of the 90s. One of the first albums I noticed this on was Nevermind by Nirvana. It wasn’t just huge bass, but huge everything, a marked contrast from the reverby drums and dinky fake handclap hilarity of the 80s.
If you are asking when the bass became more featured as part of a band - that is well before the timeframe you point out - rock, early soul, funk, etc. all are in-part defined by emphasis on bass…
If you are asking when bass was more featured in recording - well, that certainly started with the Beatles: **fishbicycle **and **Biffy **know this stuff better than I, but I believe the way it worked on their recordings was that the basic recording levels were set without the bass track laid in at a level lower than the original targeted output level - they then laid in the bass track and increased its level until the overall mix was at the right output level. So the bass was critical to them getting the mix - just listen to Paperback Writer.
If you are asking when when mixes got so much “bigger” on records - well, that isn’t exclusive to bass; as you know, most CD’s these days are recorded at much, MUCH higher levels - the mixed is incredibly crowded and there is relatively far less dynamics on current recordings. Listen to, oh, Metallica’s Black album and everything is pushed way too far forward - it sounds metal (and great for that) but as an example of dynamic recording? Not so much.
I suspect what you are referring to is a combination of the last factor, coupled with the influence of bass-heavy hip hop and techno…
Off the top of my head, I’d say it actually started with disco and reggae/dub in the '70s. The rise of the 12-inch single allowed the bass to be cut a lot louder than on ordinary records, and both forms of music were oriented towards club play, where the bass could be jacked up by the DJ.
Advent of strictly bass woofers? Prior to 90s speakers crossover networks were tweeters and full range and then the cheap woofer was introduced. We now have WMD, Weapons of Mass Distortion.
I wasn’t trying to be rude - I just thought I was pretty clear that I’m not talking about the bass guitar, but rather the bass frequency range being highlighted in the way that it now is. This frequency range is a combination of many elements of the mix, from the kick drum to bass guitar, subharmonic synthesizers keyed or gated by things like the kick drum, etc.
I had always thought that it was a result of the evolution of the entire chain of the recording production system. The ability of a source component to produce bass frequencies was there before the CD.
But, the energy required to amplify the signal was expensive in the 50’s and 60’s (50W stereos were expensive) .
The cost per Watt RMS dropped through the 70’s 80’s and 90’s as solid state amplification methods improved.
The design and construction costs of speakers traced downward as the effort moved from large enclosures to stronger drivers. I think that bass awareness was a result of artists realizing that their audiance now possessed the capability of reproducing their content.
Until High Fidelity became technically feasible, I’d say ca. 1950’s, nothing of this sort was possible.
HiFi addicts – the kind who had exposed, glowing tubes and speaker cones without baffles – delighted in showing off what their systems could do. Not that the frequency response curve was realistic, just that they could produce sounds unavailable in your living room before unless you could hire an entire orchestra.
Then when the common man could afford enough amplification to be dangerous, it became part of every auto stero and boombox. Some people like the thump of the low bass more than anything else, so they accentuate it.
As far as bass lines – music, not booms and thumps – Motown was on the cutting edge of inventing more interesting lines than just the polka “ump-cha” which characterized very early rock-n-roll and Hootenanies. It probably wouldn’t have happened if the technology wasn’t there so we could hear it. What good would an interesting bass line have been on a 1930’s 78RPM record?
I hate those things. Ever since a guy in the cubicle behind me got one for Christmas. Everyone that passed by his desk set the damn thing off. “Take Me To The River”. 20 times a day, for days…
