When it comes to bass design, I'm a huge fan of the late Leo Fender. In my eyes, the P-bass, the Jazz bass and the Music Man Stingray were all masterpieces that largely defined the look & sound of electric bass as we know it. Aside from his obvious technical and artistic genius, I suspect that Mr. Fender was so influential because he was highly attuned to the needs of the working musician. It was no accident that his instruments looked gorgeous, worked like a charm, onstage & in the studio, and yet were reasonably priced. (That is, before they became collector's items!)
The G&L L-2000 was his last major bass design, and curiously,
his least celebrated. With two coil-switchable humbucking pickups,
a defeatable active circuit with optional treble boost and two
bands of passive tone control, this was his most ambitious and
versatile offering. I was lucky enough to get my hands on an early
model (1981), and now it and I make a lot of music, together.
First and foremost, I like that neck! It's wide but relatively flat: perfect for grooving. The acoustic tone is loud and warm. Very nice... There's a glaring dead spot on the 5th fret on the G string. Sometimes that's the price we pay for personality. (C2 on the D string sounds fine, and I'm not afraid of shifting.) The '81 uses the 3-bolt neck system with the tilt adjustment. I've never had a problem with this system; my two very favorite basses of all time (of which this happens to be one) use it.
The bridge is nice and solid, and it uses a set screw to press all the saddles together to form one large resonant mass. Aside from adding noticable punch, this feature keeps the saddles from gradually lowering, the way they do on some bridges.
Sometimes I encounter a bass that I just can't set up the way I like it, no matter how much I monkey with the frets, the bridge and the truss rod. This is not such a bass. It took me about 5 minutes to achieve the playing action of my dreams (low enough to be relatively nimble, but high enough that I can dig in).
I think Leo really knew what he was doing when he laid out the controls. Once you get used to them, you have ready access to a very wide range of sounds. A couple of very quick switch flicks can take you from "passive P-bass" to "active J-bass".
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Speaking of which, it's nice to have just one master volume knob. It works nice and smooth for volume swells, and it's easy to back it off a bit to keep a bit of extra reserve, onstage.
The series/parallel switch is a gas. Parallel mode sounds nice, but series mode is a monster! The tone becomes much thicker and ballsier, with pumping lows and higher output. For recording, there might be the odd occasion where parallel mode sits better in the mix, but onstage, I pretty much leave it in series. (I've tried other G&Ls where the difference isn't quite as lopsided)
I like the preamp concept. It's quick and simple, and it enhances (rather than dominates) the character of the passive signal. The switch has 3 different positions: bypass, on and treble boost. It's nice to have that bypass for those occasions that call for the classic passive bass sound (and to save your bacon if the battery goes dead). Active mode wakes up the sound with more bandwidth (lows, mids & highs) and slightly more output. The treble boost is very handy for slapping. It's common for me to use all 3 settings within a set.
Finally, there's two passive tone knobs. (They work, even with the battery disconnected.) The "treble" knob (somewhat counter intuitively placed closer to the neck) acts more or less like a conventional passive tone control, bleeding off the highs. It's nice to have for that vintage "all bass, no treble" sound. The "bass" knob seems to bleed off the lows; this can be useful in a really boomy room. Most of the time, I leave both knobs cranked open.
I've tried a lot of different basses, and I've got to tell you: the L-2000 is mighty impressive. The neck pickup run passive in series gives a very hefty P-bass thump. Both pickups with treble boost give a very tasty scooped-out funk sound, good for fingerstyle and slapping. The bridge pickup has more upper midrange "honk", without getting too thin. (I seldom use it but then, I've never been much one for soloed bridge pickups.) The G&L doesn't precisely mimic the previous Fender designs. It does successfully combine most of their better aspects and emerge with a subtle new character all it's own. Overall, the L-2000 sounds refined, thick and punchy as it covers all the various sonic bases. Leo Fender seemed to have had a real knack for designing instruments with sounds working cats could actually use, and this instrument is definitely no exception.
My theory is that the L-2000 is not widely worshipped and imitated because by the time it was introduced, it's predecessors were very firmly established, and other companies like Alembic, Ken Smith and Steinberger (to name but a few...) were making big waves with their more flashy modern innovations. Although the ads never fail to mention the great Fender legacy, the G&L product line seems to remain somewhat of a well-kept secret. That's fine by me; it keeps the G&Ls just the way Leo Fender always intended his instruments to be: pretty-looking, great-sounding and financially accessible. What more could a working player ask for?