Electric basses are the most popular type of bass.  They usually have four strings but some can have up to twelve strings.  All basses have from twenty to twenty four frets.  Frets are raised pieces of plastic to separate the different tones on any kind of guitar.  As you go up higher on the neck, the sound gets higher.  All basses are made out of wood of some sort.  Some of the most common types of wood used to make basses are maple, mahogany, ash, rosewood, and alder.  If the wood is rare, at a shortage, or it is in good shape, the instrument will usually be more expensive.  On the other hand, if the bass is made out of a highly stocked and/or easy to find, the instrument will tend to be less money.  All electric basses have pickups.  Pickups are like magnets that “pick up” the sound waves and vibrations that the strings create.  There are jazz pickups which are used in sets of two and are long and skinny.  There are soap-bar pickups which obviously look like soap-bars. Then there are the precision pickups, which are two small, rectangular pickups.  Precision pickups in most cases are stacked one atop another. One is offset to the left and one is offset to the right.  Then there is any other type of pickup combination that you could use.  The parts of a bass are pretty simple.  There is the body, pickups, input jack, neck, fret board, headstock, tuning pegs/tuners, volume knob(s), tone knob(s), and the strings.  That is the bass simply broken down.  There are solid-body basses and hollow-body basses.  The solid-body basses usually have a shorter, sharper, less sustained sound than that of the hollow-body.  The hollow-body basses, however, have a much deeper, resonant, more sustained sound.  The strings also play a very important role in how a bass in how a bass guitar sounds.  Strings are pieces of metal that are wrapped very, very tightly around a straight piece of metal.  Some of the top brands in electric bass guitars are as follows: Washburn, Rickenbacker, Fender, Warwick, Tobias, Samick, Ernie Ball, Modulus, Carvin, Traben, Ibanez, Peavey, Rogue, and Squier.  Electric basses are a crucial part in the world of any kind of music genre.  Be sure to check out the other pages!