G&L USA L-2500 CLF Research Series 750 Bass, Ruby Red Metallic

Music Store Live is proud to offer up this latest addition to the G&L CLF lineup. Perfect for the bass player looking for a bit more spacing between their strings (slappers will definitely love this) the new L-2500, which pays homage to Leo Fender’s original L-series design, is just simply awesome!

The tone is through and through everything you’d expect out of an L-2500. It’s can be an absolute bulldozer of a bass with a tone that is so mighty and so powerful that I don’t know if there’s anything else like it in the bass world. Mr. Fender was really onto something when he came up with these MFD humbuckers. They have a presence all of their own and are incredibly suitable for everything from vintage to more modern tones. The neck pickup soloed sounds like a p-bass on steroids. With series and parallel wiring options via one of the mini-toggles, you can also go from barky and growly to fat, massive, and thick with the flip of a switch.

The vintage tint gloss neck and fretboard feel incredibly smooth. Open-position grooves are easy, and the upper register is very forgiving on your playing hand. Tone-wise, this bass is a beast! It manages to provide seemingly unlimited sonic options and the pickups pump out some solid mid-range so you’ll never get lost in a mix. This balances really well with the powerful MFD pickups that have a lot of mid-range presence to them. But what makes the Series 750 so special is that it takes the same string spacing that you find on the L-2000 (the 4-string sibling of the L-2500) and lets you have it on this 5-string. It feels incredibly comfortable and immediately natural as so many 5-string basses these days sport that 19mm string spacing. For those that prefer the more narrow string spacing, a standard L-2500 will always still be available. But we really love the addition of the Series 750 CLF.

The bass can be run in passive mode, active mode, or active with treble boost. The PBT circuit also provides a passive bass and passive treble (similar to a traditional tone knob) knob that allows for more detailed tone-shaping whether in passive or active mode. You can dial in your exact sound and be as specific as you want whether you play blues, metal, jazz, rock, or funk. This absolutely is a true swiss-army knife of a bass. Every tone that it produces is incredibly musical, useful, and can range from hitting with the power of a sledgehammer or with the subtlety of 

The new Wide•5 of Fender Avenue is the biggest thing since Leo’s L•2000 hit back in ’81. We call it the G&L L•2500 Series 750 and it’s packing everything that makes the L•2000 and L•2500 icons. So what’s new? The Series 750 is a fiver with a full 3/4-inch string spacing at the bridge, just like Leo’s four-string basses – that’s why we call it a Wide•5.

After all, it’s in the name: Leo’s four-strings have “three-quarter-inch” string spacing, so we’ve got 3/4″ > 0.750″ > 19.03mm. When someone says a five-string has “nineteen millimeter” string spacing, that’s just a metric conversion of Leo’s original four-string spec, so here on Fender Avenue it’s gotta be “Seven-Fifty.” The CLF Research L•2500 and other G&L fivers continue with narrower 11/16” string spacing at the bridge, as popularized on 1980s for fivers. The L•2500 Series 750 is for players who want the full three-quarter inch spacing on the most iconic of G&L designs.

Series 750 means there’s a new Wide-5 Saddle Lock bridge plate housing five of the same saddles you’ll find on an L•2000. This new bridge is all about maximizing string energy transfer to the body – especially that knockout B-string. The new body shape draws on classic Fender Avenue forms, melding them into a fresh hit for the ages. That’s a sweet story in itself, as Series 750 arrives exactly forty years after the G&L L•2000 did. And those big pickups are more than stretched out brutes: all the harmonic detail of the best MFD humbuckers speak in a clear voice over massive B-string energy.

Sure, Series 750 is a brand new model but classic Fender Avenue details are everywhere. That graceful early CLF/G&L headstock flows into a slim, rounded neck profile that’s rock solid thanks to a true dual-action truss rod and twin graphite reinforcement rods. And those big, beautiful machined CLF knobs popping against the sweeping chrome control plate that houses the Trig-Tone Preamp.* Even those little color-coded mini toggle switch tips have outsized mojo. This is retrofuturism of the very best kind.