Steve Di Giorgio — born in the United States in 1967 — is the bassist who introduced the fretless bass into extreme metal and remains the instrument's principal reference within the genre. The fretless bass has no frets: the note depends entirely on finger position, which allows continuous glissandi and micro-tunings impossible on an ordinary instrument, but demands absolute precision — there is no metal to correct a badly placed finger. Using it in music played at extreme speeds was, until him, unthinkable. That choice changed the bass's function across a whole segment of metal. Instead of doubling the guitar an octave below, Di Giorgio writes independent lines that move in counterpoint to the riffs and frequently occupy the foreground. It is what one hears on Death's Individual Thought Patterns (1993) and on his return for The Sound of Perseverance (1998). His career is long and branching: he has been a member of Sadus since the 1980s, and passed through Testament, Autopsy, Iced Earth, Control Denied and Charred Walls of the Damned, among dozens of guest recordings. Few bassists in metal are identifiable by sound within a few notes; he is one of them.
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