Dingwall Afterburner II 5 Buckeye Burl

Afterburner II 5 — Buckeye Burl, Natural

This is a Dingwall Custom Shop bass, and it shows the moment you pick it up. The Afterburner II takes everything that makes a Dingwall a Dingwall — the fanned-fret low end, the lightweight chambered body, the no-nonsense engineering — and wraps it in a Buckeye Burl top over natural walnut. We spec’d this one as a three-pickup passive build, which is the configuration purists keep coming back to: nothing between the strings and your amp but pickups, switches, and wood.

Dingwall has been building these in Saskatchewan since the early ’90s, and the Custom Shop is where they let the woods do the talking. Walnut body, Buckeye Burl top, wenge through the neck and board — a darker, more articulate voice than the maple-necked production line, and a one-of-one piece of timber on the front.

Body, Neck & Woods

The body is walnut with internal tone chambers — semi-hollow, not for show but for sound. The chambers shed weight and add a real acoustic dimension, so the bass breathes a little before the pickups ever get involved. Walnut sits warmer and woodier than ash or alder, with a tight, focused midrange, and the chambering opens up the low end without turning it loose. On top sits the Buckeye Burl: a wildly figured cap finished natural, so the grain is the whole visual statement.

The neck is five-piece wenge, bolted on for stability and dead-simple serviceability, with a wenge fingerboard to match. Wenge is dense and oily, and it splits the difference between rosewood and ebony — the warmth and grain of one, the snap and attack of the other. It gives this bass a hard, articulate top end and a fast, slightly textured feel under the left hand that a glossy maple board never quite delivers.

Then there’s the reason Dingwalls look the way they do: the 37″–34″ multiscale. The low B runs three inches longer than the G, so the B-string carries enough tension to stay piano-tight and defined where most 5-strings go flubby, while the higher strings stay short and comfortable. The result is even tension and consistent tone right across the neck — the famous Dingwall B. The frets are Dingwall’s compact, low profile design: less metal on the board means more wood in contact with the string, a woodier note, and a stronger fingerboard with less material routed out for the slots.

Electronics, Sound & Feel

Three Dingwall FDV pickups do all the work here. Spread across the body they cover a genuinely wide tonal range on their own — fat and round toward the neck, aggressive and cutting toward the bridge, and everything in between when you blend them. These are passive pickups, voiced to be punchy and clear without needing a circuit to push them.

Switching is where a three-pickup passive Dingwall gets clever. A 4-position Quad-tone rotary selector steps you through the most useful pickup combinations, and individual mini-switches let you run each pickup in series or parallel — series for thickness and output, parallel for clarity and a more open top. No preamp, no battery, no EQ to dial in: a transparent, dynamic signal path that reacts to your hands and stays the same in tone whether the bass has been sitting for a week or a year. It’s a huge range of usable sounds pulled entirely from pickup placement and switching.

This one’s for the player who already knows they want a Dingwall low end and wants it pure — passive, immediate, and endlessly configurable from the switches alone. It’s a Custom Shop piece, so the walnut-and-burl combination and the three-FDV layout aren’t something you’ll trip over on the used market. If you’re chasing the tightest, most consistent B on a 5-string and you’d rather shape tone with your right hand than a knob, this is the conversation starter.