Warwick Basses Dolphin Pro I (pre-owned)

Warwick Dolphin Pro I — 1989

Long, swept body, a horn that reaches up the neck like a fin, and a row of little mother-of-pearl dolphins swimming up the fingerboard — the Dolphin was Warwick showing off, and it still looks like nothing else on the wall. The Pro I is the neck-through version, and the early ones are the ones collectors go looking for.

This one was handmade in West Germany in 1989, right at the start of the model’s life. That year matters for two reasons you can see straight away: the body is boire rosewood rather than the ovangkol Warwick moved to later, and the pickups are Bartolinis fitted at the factory. Warwick switched the Pro I over to MEC pickups shortly after, so a Bartolini-loaded boire Dolphin is a genuinely early, and rarely seen, example.

Body, Neck & Woods

The body is boire rosewood, and you can see why Warwick picked it — long dark streaks running through warm brown, all of it left open under a hand-rubbed oil finish. Rosewood is dense and hard, and that density gives you a strong, focused fundamental with a sweet, slightly scooped upper mid. The oil keeps the wood breathing, so the top end stays woody rather than glassy, and the bass feels alive against your body when you play it.

The neck runs straight through the body from the headstock to the bottom strap button — wenge, with light zebrano stripes you can follow all the way down the back. Neck-through means the string energy never has to cross a bolted joint, and you hear it as long, even sustain and a low end that stays tight and articulate right up the neck. Wenge is stiff and open-pored, and on the fingerboard it gives notes a fast, slightly gritty attack that suits both fingerstyle and slap.

The frets are Warwick’s bell brass, the in-house alloy they’ve used since 1987 — harder than the nickel silver most makers fit, so they wear slowly and add a bright, ringing edge to the attack. There are 26 of them on a standard 34″ scale, which makes the top octave properly usable, and the inlaid dolphins mark the positions with a triple at the 12th and a pair at the 24th.

Condition

Thirty-seven years old and in excellent condition. The oil finish on body and neck is in very good shape, the dolphin inlays are intact, and the fingerboard is clean. It’s an original instrument with its factory Bartolini pickups and MEC preamp still in place.

One nice thing about an oil finish: it’s the one finish you can keep looking its best at home. A little Warwick wax or a good oil now and then deepens the colour of the rosewood and keeps the wood fed. At 4.34 kg it’s a solid instrument, as you’d expect from a rosewood and wenge neck-through, but not a heavy one by Dolphin standards.

Electronics, Sound & Feel

Bartolini pickups were fitted at the factory: a J-style single coil at the neck and a humbucker at the bridge. On their own the Bartolinis are smooth and clear with a hi-fi top end, but the bridge humbucker is where this bass gets its character. Solo it and you get a nasal, vocal, Jaco-ish bark; blend in the neck pickup and the sound fills out into something big, round and very present in a mix.

The MEC 9 V 2-band active preamp gives you bass and treble on two stacked knobs, and the coil splitter lets you run the bridge humbucker as a single coil. That switch is the useful one: full humbucker for thick, quiet, punchy tones, split for a brighter, more open single-coil snap when you want the bass to sit like a Jazz in the track.

This is a bass for the player who wants something with a real story and a sound to match — an early, handmade West German neck-through in exotic woods, with a voice that sits somewhere between growling Warwick and smooth Bartolini. Boire Dolphins with factory Bartolinis don’t come up often, and one in this condition even less so.