Okay, this one is for the future lurkers and others interested in a Wal Mk2.
Wal of text incoming.First impressions, clearly it looks amazing and the carefully chosen wood facings add to the charm of it. Nothing to it.
In most photos you've seen of an Mk2 the neck appears to be a huge, almost baseball bat type compared to the body. This in particular concerned me greatly, mainly because I developed an injury attempting to play an awfully enormous bass neck (I was a beginner at the time). I was afraid the Wal neck would bring upon the return of a more severe injury.
However, this neck feels absolutely comfortable and I believe, with time, you will grow to love it. For full disclosure, I loved it immediately. It feels large, indeed, but it's not the type to force you to rethink your technique. The neck fits the hand (like a glove in my case), where the empty space between the hand and neck is filled. Full contact. I believe this was behind the decision to build them with the soft V shape neck profile. My particular Wal has a gloss neck, which was a pleasant surprise and results in my playing being swift with it.
The body, as it appears, was also surprisingly to me because it is actually smaller than I envisioned. This allows very fast access to the top frets. In shape, it doesn't appear to look like such an easily playable bass but the feeling is indeed great.
While I don't have an issue with this, the neck joint is not ergonomic. The Wal hosts a standard 4 bolt neck connection to the body (On a standard built Mk2. Standard Mk3 Wals have a more ergonomic neck joint, and is also an option for Mk2 Wals.) Unless you're playing on higher frets more than usual, this will not be an issue. However thanks to the typical neck joint I was able to install my own temporary shim, and have achieved dangerously low action on this Wal. Probably not a good thing for the MIDI frets but I will be careful, I promise!
The pickups are much more adjustable than most, and actually does make a much bigger difference than most other bass guitars. It can be a deal breaker to not adjust the pickups even once! You've just got to do it. Major differences in tone can be heard instantly upon adjustment. This can be either pickup height or pole pieces heights. Either way, it's such a massive change. I couldn't believe how versatile doing only this can be. Be sure to check that out.
The filters are a lot of fun and can most definitely get you any tone you want. Extremely deep, like for reggae, middy and thick, or bright, snappy, and huge with no brittleness, a la Geddy Lee and Justin Chancellor. It's also basically a pair of "quick Wah" controls, so it's much more fun than I thought. There may be recordings out there that you'll never know were done on a Wal! It basically touches every sonic space a bass can achieve.
The bridge is actually one of my favorite things about the bass. Typically I'd have to turn the screws on the bridge for intonation, where the saddle is immobile and instead pushes the screw outward towards you, or you struggle to move the saddle further back. Not a huge deal, but I'm very lazy. With this one, the screws are stuck in place, sort of built into the bridge, while the saddles slide around easily. Absolutely zero struggles. Intonation can be done in 2 minutes at the most. I haven't come across another bass with a bridge of this type, at least not yet.
End of essay, Professor Trevor.
Oh also, I have known about the sticky thread on FB, I'm still messing around with all the sounds possible! The first one I tried was your Precision bass tone. It's a nice one for sure.
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