Dingwall NG-2

A great instrument, and just the entrance model of Dingwalls portfolio.

Ordering & Deliver
Ordering an NG2 can be difficult. The pre-order queue was about 7 month. Contact with Dingwall is excellent, Sheldon personally answered all questions asked regarding the instrument and shipping things. Eventually I ordered the bass through session.de, who deals with Dingwall instruments in europe. Because of the back-order it took some time but I was lucky that session.de was in first row for 2 new NG2s and one of them was still available, so instead of 7 month it took only 1,5 month. Sheldon personally took action to asure me of the NG2 at session.
The bass was delivered well packed and well set up

Sound
Yes, the NG2 has definetely an own thing going on. I was never a fan of the MusicMan pickup style, but this bass changed this entirely. There is so much clearity to the sound. There is no way to make it sound poopy, and believe me, I tried.
The bass can be used passively (no tone adjustment) or actively with the darkglass tone capsule. PUs can be selected in series, parallel or individually.
The Darkglass tone capsule is a very special thing and not really my cup of tea. I quite like it engaged and set to flat. Bass EQ is at ~70Hz, which really fits well with the NG2. The low-mids at 500Hz are extremely honkey and I dislike it. It is meant for metal bands where the bassist wants to cut the mix, and 500Hz really sounds like some strong ellbows bushing the guitars out of the way. But still, not my cup of tea. The high mids are at something above 2 kHz and I hardly use that band.
I experiemented with an 3band preamp from Charlie Escher (@Passinwind), which does great things in my ibanez basses, but the NG2 is too special for a different preamp.

I decided to couple the bass with a Darkglass B7K, which gives me all Frequency bands I'd ever need (especially the 1 kHz).

Playability
The fanned frets are no real problem, it takes about 5 minutes to get used to it. Only, the very lowest frets on E and B string are harder to reach and the highest frets can be tricky if you do not look carefully.

I come from an Ibanez SR605, which has a slim neck and narrow string spacing. The NG2 has a wider neck and wider spacing, so it took me some time to get used to that.