With all due respect Bill, John is not right. I’ve played with a few stand-up bass players (plus a "stand-up electric bass" player, but that's another story), and you’re right, a stand-up sounds very different from an electric. A good way to appraise the quality of a sub (or the woofer of a full-range loudspeaker) is to play a good recording of an acoustic bass through it; the better the sub, the more you hear it’s true timbre, tone, and woody resonance, which is markedly different than that of an electric bass. The hollow body of an acoustic has much more depth than does the electric’s solid plank of wood, only the sound of it’s vibrating strings being amplified. Some early Rock ’n’ Roll and Blues recordings contain the stand-up bass playing of Willie Dixon. Modern day Rockabilly bands wouldn’t dare have an electric bass---that would be sacrilege!
One stand-up player I worked with put a pick-up on his, running it into his electric’s amp. The other was more of a purist, using a microphone. Atkinson apparently believes that an electric bass, by virtue of it not having the large, hollow body of a stand-up, is now the mythical "bass guitar". There are a couple of things wrong with that belief:
1- The bass, and the guitar, are tuned an octave apart, the guitar, obviously, the higher. Putting a pick-up on a bass does not change that fact. Whether the bass is a solid body electric, or a hollow body acoustic/stand-up, they are tuned the same, and play the same notes---bass notes. They are both basses---one an electric, the other an acoustic. The fact that the electric has the movement of it’s strings turned into an electronic signal does not change the fact that the notes of those strings are still bass notes, not guitar notes. The same can be said about an electronic organ; a Hammond B3 is just as much an organ as is a Pipe Organ, not by virtue of it being electronic now being named something else. An electronic organ vs. a pipe organ, an electric bass vs. a stand-up bass---same difference.
Atkinson is not the first to call the electric bass a bass guitar, and neither I nor any bass players I know have any idea where that originated. What is surprising about Atkinson using that term is that it is commonly used by beginners and non-players, never, and I mean never, by seasoned bass players themselves. If you call the instrument in the hands of a good and/or pro bassist a "bass guitar", he will either take that as an insult, or dismiss it as coming from someone who just doesn’t know any better ;-).
2- An electric guitar and an acoustic guitar play the exact same notes as each other (assuming they are both 6-string versions, and tuned the same). The solid body and the pick-ups of an electric guitar does not make it instead a bass ukulele, if you follow my analogy. It is still a guitar, just an electric one. Same with an electric bass.
3- The standard electric bass has four strings. In the early 1960’s, Fender came out with a 6-string bass, naming it the Fender 6. It was still considered a bass, it’s four lowest strings tuned the same as those of a 4-string, the two extra strings tuned, as with the others, an octave above the corresponding strings on a guitar. Brian Wilson sometimes had one of his three bassists play one, the other two being a solid body Fender electric an a stand-up acoustic. Guitarist Duane Eddy played some of his distinctive early 60’s songs on a Fender 6---very cool sounding! The Fender 6 used lighter-gauge strings than a 4-string electric bass, and it’s tone was about halfway between a 4-string and an electric guitar. It was still considered a bass, though if any instrument could conceivably be called a bass guitar, it would have been the Fender 6.
In one sense, it’s just a matter of semantics---everyone knows what instrument is being referred to when someone says bass guitar. But come on, think about it literally: what the heck is a bass guitar? That’s an oxymoron!
