just painted 2 guitars with nason 1k base, under it is nason 2k primer...the pink one
took me a whole pint to do this one as dark as i wanted it & it took me 1/2 the amount to do the red one....
is this normal?

Not unusual. A lot depends on what tinters are in the colour. Quite a few maroons are fairly transparent.

The other thing is that you can save a significant amount of base coat by shading the primer. Saves paint, cost and time. It looks to me like that "pink" one might have called for a medium dark grey primer while the red would likely have been white or off-white.