What it is and what it was built for
The L2 is a version of the Steinberger L-series bass, the best-known design from the maker. The first Steinberger basses were produced in 1979 in Brooklyn, New York, by Ned Steinberger alone. The L-series was initially a bass and was later made as a guitar too. Its shape has been compared to a broom, a boat oar or a cricket bat.
The reasoning was to eliminate unnecessary weight, above all the unbalanced headstock, and to use modern materials such as graphite for their advantages over wood. In 1990 the design won Ned Steinberger a Design of the Decade award from the Industrial Designers Society of America.
How it works, in terms a player would use
The headstock is gone. The tuning hardware sits on a tailpiece mounted on the face of the body, and the strings are double-ball ended. The tuners use a finer than normal 18:1 gear ratio with 40 threads per inch, which makes adjustment slower but more precise and helps reduce string slippage.
The L-series basses came with one or two pickups. The L2 is the two-pickup version, fitted with two EMGs.
What it does better than anything else
The whole instrument is made of Steinberger Blend, a proprietary graphite and carbon-fibre mix, in two pieces: the main body and a faceplate. With no headstock there is no unbalanced weight at the end of the neck, which was the point of the design.
What it does badly
The strings are the limit. The instrument needs double-ball end strings, and later models that used standard strings were different designs. The sound also divided listeners. Some found the all-synthetic instrument sonically clean and others described the sound as synthetic and unnatural. Steinberger turned the split into a slogan: “We don’t make ’em like they used to.”
What people made with it
Some L-series instruments were fitted with the TransTrem, a patented transposing vibrato that adjusts the string tensions proportionally so the whole instrument can be retuned at once. It worked like a capo as well as a vibrato, and it needed calibrated double-ball end strings. It came in bass and guitar versions, but it never became popular on basses: HAZ Labs built roughly two hundred TransTrem units for the bass in 1987, no further bass trems were made, and TransTrem basses are now rare collector’s items.
Who should use it, and who should not
It suits a player who wants a light, balanced bass and is ready to buy double-ball end strings. It does not suit someone who wants wood, or who wants to string the bass with ordinary sets.
Is it worth your time
Yes, if you are curious about what a bass looks like when the headstock and the wood are both removed. Newer Steinberger instruments share few commonalities with the original Newburgh designs, and the Spirit models have no carbon fiber at all, so treat the L2 as its own object.
