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NBD: Vintage G&L L2000 Series E, Lake Placid Blue-ish

4stringsjack

4stringsjack

Dec 5, 2002
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6,929
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#1
I picked this up in a trade with a fellow TBer. The G&L family sure is growing 'round here!

It's a 1981 L2000 Series E. It's a high quality refin. The color is pretty close to Lake Placid Blue, just a touch darker. I'd say it's somewhere between LPB and G&L's Midnight Blue Metallic, but definitely closer to LPB. At any rate it's beautiful in person. The neck is nicely yellowed after 36 years of low end bolsterhood, and it has some nice checking in the finish on the front of the headstock and the back of the neck.

It arrived Friday afternoon. A quick setup, and I was off to a gig with my new-to-me bass in hand. I brought along an '83 SB-2 as my backup/drop-tune bass, but, man, it was hard to put this one down.

Today I adjusted everything to my exact liking, with new strings, a fresh tweak of the truss rod, saddle height, intonation, pickup height, and pole pieces. It plays like half melted butter and sounds like thunder.

Of course, I adjusted the slotted poles so that they all face the same way. The bass sounds MUCH clearer with the slots in a horizontal orientation. :thumbsup: (No it doesn't. It sounds exactly the same regardless of slot orientation.)

I put it next to my '82 L2000 E and, unsurprisingly, they sound pretty darn similar. Pics!
GLblue1.jpg
GLblue2.jpg
GLblue3.jpg
 
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#8
El Tookay said:
Nice score! Even the knobs look really clean! Early Tookays are addictive....
Click to expand...

Yes. They are. So are the early SB-2s. I'm avoiding an L1000. I've convinced myself that the L2K covers that ground well enough... Right? Right??? ;) But then, El Toro...

Since this bass is not all original (just the refin, I mean- everything else is original) I feel good about doing the K switch mod to it for added versatility. My other L2Ke is bone stock, so now I can leave it that way. I may also add a switch (maybe a push-pull pot on the volume) to disarm the OMG caps and allow that switch position to be true series mode. I might add a resistor to balance the volume a little bit better between parallel and series/OMG modes. :bassist:
 
#11
RobBottom69 said:
That is a sweet G&L! I love my M-2000, but would to add an L-2000 to the stable.
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I bought a new-ish L2000 years ago but never bonded with it, so I sold it. Then a few years back I picked up my first "vintage" G&L, the '82 L2000 Series E in my avatar, and holy cow. It sounds soooo good! Since I've started gigging with that bass I've gotten more compliments on my tone than ever before. And the "new" blue one sounds every bit as good.

I haven't tried a late model G&L in a long time, so I have no idea how they compare with the old ones.
 
#13
4stringsjack said:
BTW, after disassembling this bass it appears that the original color may have been sort of an emerald green. Anyone ever seen a a very early G&L in that color?
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No, but never say never with Leo Fender. Trans-green was available then, though. Is the old paint metallic? If not. I'd expect that it was originally trans-green.

Looks nice. Ebony or rosewood?
 
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#16
Iridescentone said:
No, but never say never with Leo Fender. Trans-green was available then, though. Is the old paint metallic? If not. I'd expect that it was originally trans-green.

Looks nice. Ebony or rosewood?
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Definitely rosewood.

After searching through google images for "1981 G&L green" I found that the original paint looks like a perfect match for transparent green, based on a pic of an early L1000 that I found.
 
#19
4stringsjack said:
Definitely rosewood.

After searching through google images for "1981 G&L green" I found that the original paint looks like a perfect match for transparent green, based on a pic of an early L1000 that I found.
Click to expand...

Curious about the board....did you determine that it's rosewood by the coloring, or by the grain pattern of the wood?
 
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#20
Iridescentone said:
Curious about the board....did you determine that it's rosewood by the coloring, or by the grain pattern of the wood?
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Yes- both. It has the somewhat open grain you'd expect from rosewood, not the densely spaced, small pores of ebony. I've had some beautifully light reddish-colored ebony pass through my hands in the past, which people often mistook for rosewood. This fretboard, on the otherhand, has the grain structure (and color) of rosewood.
 

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