I have a B-2 that I bought new in like 85 (the SN indicates its an 86 but I am pretty sure I bought in the summer of 85 for by b-day, July baby)
Anyway, Someone mentioned the thin neck and tight string placement. That and actually as much as everyone poo poo'd the sound online of all of the basses in that store at the time, maybe 20 including a few US Fenders I liked this one the absolute most sonically. I will agree the sound was not heavy in the bass frequency department but as I discovered with the right strings nothing can growl like that can. Something interesting that I can't really understand, the p style pickups (washburn branded EMG Selects I am told) were wired one to each side of the switch on the gain pot. With that you could switch between bass and treble pickups but not have both running at any given time. A little unorthodox. I recently decided it was time to take it off of the wall and mess with it. I put a set of 1/4 Pounders wired in series to one side of the switch only. Now it is a mute switch and the bass is still a passive setup for the moment. I took it to one of my bands rehearsals (I am a talent developer/manager) to get some thoughts on it. These guys are all decent players doing a John Meyer'esque thing. The bass player has a US P with both the bridge pickup (aguilar twin coil) and the main (60's Fender) (all passive). He played mine for the whole rehearsal and in the end he wanted to buy mine. He liked it more. Everything else on my bass is for the moment stock. Including the laminate plywood body. He he. From what I read depending on the rest of the guitar not only can that become mostly a moot point you can also use that to your advantage in the tone department. HMM... Actually that is where I am going with this . It would seem Washburn knew what they were doing. It has a brass bridge stock that to me looks ugly, string thru body design and Grover machine heads. I think they were trying to get more growl! I would say they succeeded, ya?
The pickups I put on it (1/4 pounders) are known for their "drive tone" (growl??) and that is what it does even better than it did before, only with much better bottom end. In my readings about bass design I came to find out that with active the body almost doesn't matter at all. Look at Steinbergers. there is almost no body. We all think about active as being active pickups but that is not how they were done originally. They couldn't as the electronics couldn't be made small enough to put them in the pickup housings. We can now because of IC chips. They were all passive pickups wired to an active pre amp inside the insturment hence the passive/active by pass switch. Yes, you could have both sounds out of an active bass as it was in fact both. I didn't know that and thought I was being brilliant with my idea. Damn, I'm only 30 or so years too late with that invention. The good news is that the current pre amps available will wire directly to my pickups without any mods at all, Hurray. The other thing is the ugly brass bridge. My friend who is a touring guitar tech took a look at it and yelled "no, don't change the bridge" at me because it is brass. I still hate what it looks like so I went online to see what is available. Needs to be brass and needs to be String Thru body (its an important tone thing I'm thinking, Washburn certainly knows more than me there). Luckily, there is one available from our friends at Hipshot (the A bridge) and it comes in a variety of string displacement configurations (how far apart the strings are) which is important to me as I don't want to drill any more holes in the body. I'm sure I will end up with a bit of ugliness from the two bridges being different shapes but I shouldn't see any holes at least. Going to have that done pro anyway. If that is not done right the whole thing would become firewood. If we can't find a bridge to fit I guess I won't do that then. I also want to see what happens when we put a brass nut on it. My guitar tech friend mentioned that as a good upgrade. What do we think Aguilar pre or Seymore Duncan. I want to keep it to the two pots but I can use concentric pots for the tone (bass, treble). Those two are the only ones I have found in only two tone. OK hit me. I know, I deserve it.
