In most rock, the bass is felt more than heard — a shadow under the guitars. Prog refused to leave it there. Its players reached for new instruments, split their signals across two amps and treated the low end as a lead voice with a personality of its own. The best bass tones in prog rock are not really about notes but about character: the growl of a pick on fresh roundwounds, the woody bloom of a fretless, the glassy chime of a tapped Chapman Stick. Here are five players whose sound you can name in a single bar, plus a wider field worth chasing down.

Chris Squire — Yes

The tone that turned bass into a lead instrument. As a founding member of Yes, Chris Squire built a sound no one had heard before: bright, trebly and thick with midrange bite, cutting through the band’s dense arrangements like a second guitar. He reaches it with a Rickenbacker 4001, fresh Rotosound roundwound strings for every show, and a split signal that sends the low frequencies to a bass amp and the highs to a guitar amp, so the instrument can both anchor and sing. MusicRadar ranks him among the greatest bassists of all time, singling out the dynamic growl of that Rickenbacker as his signature. His playing stands as the template for melodic prog bass.

Tony Levin — King Crimson and Peter Gabriel

The most inventive tone-shaper in prog. Tony Levin has spent decades moving between a Fender Precision bass, the upright and the instrument he did more than anyone to popularize: the Chapman Stick, a tapped board that yields a clean, piano-like attack unlike any bass guitar. With King Crimson and on Peter Gabriel’s records he also plays with funk fingers, short drumsticks strapped to his fingertips that strike the strings for a hard, percussive snap. Each choice is a different voice rather than a gimmick. Rolling Stone places him among the greatest bassists of all time, and his low end has shaped the texture of art-rock for two generations of players.

Nick Beggs — Steven Wilson and Steve Hackett

A modern master of the tapped low end. Nick Beggs is the bassist and Chapman Stick player behind the touring bands of Steven Wilson and Steve Hackett, and he treats tone as a palette. On the Stick he finds a bell-like clarity; on his Wal bass he switches to a rounder, more muscular voice; and he has even rebuilt a Stick as a fully MIDI-capable instrument to widen the range further. No Treble, the bass players’ site, has celebrated his playing and his recent reunion with the Wal that first made his name. Few musicians in current prog command so many distinct bass voices from one pair of hands.

Jonas Reingold — The Flower Kings and The Tangent

Fusion fluency at the heart of modern symphonic prog. The Swedish bassist Jonas Reingold anchors The Flower Kings and The Tangent, and has also held the low end for Karmakanic, Kaipa and, since 2019, Steve Hackett’s touring band. His grounding is in jazz-fusion, and it shapes his approach: fast, melodic lines that move across the beat and treat the bass as a soloing voice rather than a root-note anchor, keeping every note distinct even through the densest Flower Kings epic. On a Tangent groove or a fusion workout, his bass carries the melody as often as it carries the bottom of the arrangement.

Mike Howlett — Gong

Melodic bass where the Canterbury scene met space rock. Mike Howlett held the bass chair in Gong from 1973 to 1977, the band’s most celebrated stretch, playing on Angel’s Egg (1973) and You (1974), two-thirds of the allegorical Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy. The music asked its bassist to be both anchor and melodist: to lock with the drums through long instrumental passages while tracing tuneful, moving lines beneath the swirl of synthesizers, glissando guitar and saxophone. Howlett’s parts give those extended jams their forward motion and their shape, and they remain a quiet cornerstone of the Canterbury sound.

More essential prog bass tones

The genre is full of players with a sound you can name blind. Geddy Lee drives Rush from a Rickenbacker and later a Fender Jazz, one of rock’s most recognizable bass voices, while Mike Rutherford held down Genesis on bass and bass pedals before moving to guitar full time. In Dream Theater, John Myung threads clean six-string runs through prog-metal’s most complex arrangements, and Pete Trewavas gives Marillion a melodic, song-serving low end. Percy Jones, the fretless pioneer of the jazz-rock band Brand X, remains a touchstone for anyone who wants the bass to slide and sing. Any of these players rewards a slower, closer listen.

Go deeper

Compare notes with the other halves of the prog sound in our guides to the best guitar tones of 1970s prog and the best synth tones in prog rock. Meet the wider cast at the prog musicians hub, then hear these players in context among the essential progressive rock albums and the greatest progressive rock songs. Follow the tones back to the records with our guides to Yes, King Crimson, Gong, The Flower Kings and Steve Hackett. If these tones leave you wanting the stories behind the players and their eras, the “Beyond the Sound” book series maps them from the first wave to the present day.

Want the stories behind these bass tones? The books map every era →

Enjoyed the read? Find your next one on the bookshelf below →