Introduced in 1979, the Steinberger headless bass guitar was a revelation. So progressive was its design and composite construction that the fact it was headless seemed almost incidental.
Yet neither the headless concept nor the use of composite materials was entirely new: Les Paul had built a guitar with its tuners mounted on the body as early as the 1940s, while Modulus Guitars was already producing carbon-graphite necks.
Ned Steinberger, however, united the two ideas to create an instrument quite unlike anything that had gone before.
“I wasn’t aware of Les Paul’s guitar until we started to market the Steinberger bass,” he told Bass Guitar Magazine in July 2008. “It’s kind of a funny story. I was going around bragging, saying, ‘Look at this – the world’s first headless guitar!’ and Les said, ‘No, that’s wrong – I built the first headless guitar back in 1942.’
“Of course, he was right. I went to his house to see the guitar but he couldn’t find it! To Les, it was just something he did that went into the closet.”
Trained in sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Ned Steinberger came to instrument design through a chance meeting with Brooklyn bass builder Stuart Spector in the mid-1970s.
The pair would go on to develop the NS bass, later adopted by the likes of Doug Wimbish, Sting and Rex Brown, giving Steinberger his first serious experience in the world of guitar and bass design.
“At the time I was sharing space with Stuart in a Brooklyn woodworking co-op. He was building guitars with natural wood finishes and was getting feedback from dealers to the effect that these would be real cool if they were basses.
“He figured that they had a point and I became involved with him in designing what would become the Spector NS bass. Stuart taught me everything I knew about musical instruments at that time.”
It was while working on Spector basses that Steinberger began questioning one of the instrument’s most fundamental characteristics: its balance. His initial solution was to add a lead weight to the body to counteract the pull of the neck. But the experiment raised a more intriguing possibility.
Rather than adding weight, why not remove the source of the problem? That idea would ultimately lead Steinberger to dispense with the headstock altogether, and explore materials more commonly associated with aerospace and industrial design than musical instruments.
“I figured that, rather than put weights in the body, why not just move the tuners to the butt end of the guitar? From an ergonomic standpoint, I wanted to make the bass as light as possible, but I soon discovered the importance of weight and stiffness. Once I got the idea for a headless bass I became a true believer.”
A fortuitous meeting with boat designer Bob Young provided the solution.
“I was looking for someone capable of manufacturing composite instruments. Word got out and a local fiberglass supplier put me in contact with Bob.
“Bob was an amazing guy and a brilliant engineer. He knew all about composites. Remember this was back when graphite was still considered a space-age thing.”
Steinberger eventually settled on an epoxy resin reinforced with carbon graphite and glass fibre.
The resulting Steinberger L2 bass was elegantly simple. The body and neck were a one-piece moulding, with EMG pickups mounted on a removable ‘lid’ constructed from the same material. A separate fingerboard made of fibre-reinforced phenolic resin was fitted with conventional frets.
“Development of the L2 started somewhere around 1977. It was a product by 1980. The original had some practical and aesthetic issues and these were addressed with the introduction of the XL2 in 1983.”
Today, graphite reinforcement and phenolic nuts are commonplace, but Steinberger was among the first to demonstrate their practical benefits – and the benefits of headless designs in general.
