Dingwall Dingwall Lee Sklar Signature 5 Tangerine

Dingwall Lee Sklar Signature 5 — Tangerine

Lee Sklar’s discography reads like a session-bassist hall of fame — James Taylor, Phil Collins, Toto, Carole King, Jackson Browne. He’s played on more records than most bassists will ever hear. When he says a 5-string finally satisfies him, that means something.

This is the bass he chose, built around Dingwall’s multiscale architecture and set up to Lee’s preferences in every detail: pickup placement, control layout, and the order the rotary selector clicks through. Hand-built in Canada at the Dingwall custom shop, it’s as close as you get to playing what Lee plays.

Body, Neck & Woods

The body is the part of this bass most people get wrong. It isn’t an alder body with an ash top — Dingwall lays the two woods side by side, with denser Northern Ash sitting under the B and E strings and lighter Alder under the D and G. The result is built-in tonal balancing: weight and authority where the low strings need it, openness and warmth where the high strings sit. You hear it as soon as you pick the bass up — the B feels rooted, the G never goes harsh.

The neck is a 5-piece maple bolt-on capped with a wenge fingerboard. Wenge is dense, oily, and quick-responding, and it’s the right partner for a multiscale neck — it stays stable under uneven string tension better than rosewood would, and it adds a defined low-mid bark to the attack.

What really sets the fingerboard apart is the fretwire. Dingwall uses mandolin frets here, exclusively. They’re smaller than standard bass fretwire, which means less metal between your finger and the wood, more wood in contact with the string, and a more woody tone with a touch of fretless smoothness. Less material routed out for the slots also makes the neck structurally stiffer. The trade-off is virtually nothing — these frets last for years of heavy playing.

The multiscale itself runs from 37 inches at the low B to 34 inches at the high G. That extra three inches of scale on the B is the heart of the whole instrument: more tension at pitch means a tighter, more defined fundamental, with none of the muddy slop a short low B can have. Up at the G, the scale settles back to standard length so the high register stays musical instead of stiff.

Electronics, Sound & Feel

The pickups are two Dingwall Super Fatty II humbuckers, built with neodymium magnets and hardened steel pole pieces. Their construction is what Dingwall calls noise-symmetric and tone-asymmetric — a hum-cancelling layout that doesn’t give up clarity, voiced to keep the B and E tight and articulate while adding warmth and body to the D and G. They handle everything from clean session fingerstyle to plugged-into-a-tube-head growl without ever sounding thin.

Behind them sits Lee Sklar’s modified Glockenklang 3-band preamp. Bass, mid, treble — and a 4-position Quad-Tone rotary selector that walks you through front pickup soloed, both pickups in parallel, both in series, and neck pickup soloed. Lee has the rotary positions wired in his preferred order, which is worth knowing if you’re moving over from another Dingwall. The master volume push/pull engages passive mode, and in passive the treble knob transforms into a passive tone cut — so you get a useful, musical pull-back even when the battery’s not in play. There’s also a Hipshot Xtender on the B-string tuner that drops the string down to low A with a flick.

This is a session-pro’s tool, dressed up in a Tangerine finish that makes it impossible to miss on stage. If you need one 5-string that covers smooth Sklar-style ballads, modern pop, hard-driving rock and clean studio work without giving up its low-end definition, this is the one to put on your back. We think it’s the cleanest, tightest 5-string we stock — and Lee Sklar has been right about more basses than most of us will ever own.