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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:

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.