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Dingwall Owners Club
- Thread starter FroggyOne2
- Start date
It's clearly a Z, but they also refer to it as a Combustion. Regardless, that is definitely the lowest priced Z I've seen in recent memory. Understated but still fancy AF.
Probably. All the other elements of the ad correctly address it as a Z. Too bad it isn't priced like a Combustion.
Ha, saw your post George, and thought I was in the Thunderbird Club Thread!
On my D-Bird, I just switched the leads of the bridge and neck pickups. That gave me a deep P bass sound on #1, the MM sound on #2 which I don’t use. The aggressive P bass on #3 which is my favorite, and the all on in #4, but maybe a slightly different configuration than the stock wiring.
FWIW, I’m more of a one pickup kinda guy.
LOL - I do spend most of my time in the Tbird club.
Interesting mod you did on the switch.
So, if I understand your mod correctly your D-Bird in position one uses the neck pup soloed, position two the neck and center, position three the center alone and position four for all on. That would explain the nice deep tone at position one. And probably thicken up position two as well. Positions three and four would be largely unchanged, except at four the neck and center would be parallel and the bridge would be added in series. Very interesting, that mod would give me the solo neck pup I’m looking for and thicken up the stingray position as well. All without losing the great middle pup or P bass sound. Excellent!
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Holy crap why didn't I think of doing that. I know what I'm doing to my Droc first thing in the morning
Okay, so basically the fusion control lets you dial in a little bit more zing and snap to your sound if I got this right.
Is that only available to the super P?
As far as I know, yes, it's only available on the Super P and only on the single-pickup model (not on the PJ configuration). I think I read the Tone Fusion could work in a double-pickup configuration, or in other models, but I'm not sure why Dingwall doesn't offer that.
In the tone direction (counter-clockwise), starting from the neutral point, it's a normal tone roll-off knob. In what I called the fusion direction (clockwise) it's a mid-cut, which leaves you more apparent highs and lows, I think. To my ears, it takes out the harshest part of the P-bass tone but adds some bite, if that makes any sense. It'd be good for slapping, if I could slap better.
I'm not sure if it's zingy or snappy, LOL, but it's a nice range of different sounds from one knob. 
I'm not familiar with those, but it looks pretty similar! Half the range of the TBX is a standard tone control and the other half gives you "more bass, treble, presence and output" according to Fender. Definitely the same idea, but I'm not a good enough electrical engineer to say how close it is to being the same.
I’ve got a beautiful combustion 6 in the classifieds. 2100 shipped for anyone in the Dingwall club just put dingwall club as the message subject
Ok that settles it then !
I know exactly what you mean
Also you do have a great collection, I didn't mean to say you were boasting although you could certainly post some more pics from time to time haha
Just made the change this morning and did a quick low volume sound check to ensure everything was hooked up correctly. All seems to work. At low volume (didn’t want to wake anyone else in the household up at 7:00 this morning) it sounds pretty good, can’t wait to try it at normal volumes and in a mix later today.
I did notice that my pickups appear to be wired in series (red wire from each pup into the first three lugs of the rotary switch and all pups have their green and black wires twisted together and taped off). This is different than the D-Roc wiring diagram from Dingwall. I’m not the first owner so it might have been changed by someone else.
Regardless, it sounded great before I made the wire reassignment, but just not the combo of pups I would typically use (never been a fan of the Jaco Jazz bridge burp sound, and frequently like to use neck solo settings on my other basses). Now that it has a combo of options more in line with my playing style and sound goals it should be even better.
The challenge going forward will be getting used to the new switch positions, which are completely counter intuitive. Positions 1-for neck solo, 2-for neck+mid, 3-for mid solo, 4-all on. If it all works and holds up well over time I might spring for a custom built 4 or 6 way rotary switch with a more intuitive layout.
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Ok, finally got a chance to run it through its paces after the rewire. Overall, definitely an improvement!
On the plus side:
- I have a neck pickup again! I have a pretty sizable and eclectic collection of thunderbird basses and in most of them I solo the neck pickup the majority of the time. I was missing that option in the D-Bird, but I have it now and it works great for that slightly scooped sound.
- the Musicman position is a closer fit to my Stingray basses and the volume level is right in line with the other switch settings.
- the P bass position is a convincing P bass sound with plenty of balls.
- the all on setting volume difference is not as drastic as it used to be, still louder but easily managed with right hand technique vs having to mess with the volume knobs.
- all the switch settings sat well in numerous mixes and responded very well to tone knob adjustments.
On the minus side:
- the switch layout is a bit counter intuitive but I’ll get used to it.
Thanks for posting the mod!
