Jacob Umansky’s High-performance Dingwall Signature Bass
Dingwall Guitars’ Jacob Umansky Signature bass delivers the superior ergonomics, playability, and sound that professional touring and studio bassists demand. Meticulously crafted with top-shelf tonewoods by the experienced luthiers of the Dingwall Custom Shop, this 6-string multi-scale bass provides the pitch accuracy and ergonomic advantages of fanned frets combined with a supremely comfortable, sleekly contoured body, premium FDV pickups, and a Darkglass Tone Capsule preamp for world-class performance with the tonal flexibility you need to ace any live gig or recording session. Designed to the exacting specifications of acclaimed progressive metal bassist Jacob Umansky, this instrument facilitates the execution of demanding technical passages and aggressive slap techniques. But given its off-the-charts playability and remarkable sonic versatility, you’ll find it an invaluable asset in any genre.
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A power trio of FDV humbuckers
At the behest of the artist, Dingwall Guitars loaded the Jacob Umansky Signature with top-drawer electronics that pack a mighty punch. A power trio of FDV humbuckers serves up a massive sonic payload characterized by a huge, fat bottom-end and high-end sparkle, offering the transparency that many other bass pickups lack. Having access to three of these beasts feeding Dingwall’s acclaimed Quad-Tone pickup selector affords you tremendous tonal latitude to accommodate the music at hand. The Quad-Tone lets you select the bridge pickup alone, the bridge plus middle, the bridge plus neck, or the neck pickup alone. With these four distinct voicings, plus passive master volume and tone controls, you have an endless palette of tonal colors — and that’s before you even engage the onboard Darkglass Tone Capsule preamp!
Darkglass Tone Capsule onboard
As formidable as the Jacob Umansky Signature model is in passive mode, activating its onboard Darkglass Tone Capsule preamp unleashes another level of tone-sculpting capability. Instead of a typical 3-band LF/MF/HF configuration, Darkglass Electronics engineered the Tone Capsule system with low, mid, and high-mid bands optimized for bass guitar, each with a +/-12dB range. The low-frequency control is centered at 70Hz for maximal low-end punch, while the mid control peaks at 500Hz, which is perfect for midrange contouring. The high-mid control is centered at 2.8kHz, letting you dial in presence, articulation, and aggressive growl without adding hiss and unwelcome high-frequency content that does nothing but degrade your tone. Like all great preamps, the Tone Capsule effortlessly drives long cable runs and buffers complex processing chains without a hint of noise, onstage and in the studio.
The well-tempered bass
On multi-scale instruments such as pianos, harps, or fanned-fret guitars, each string has its own individual scale length. The lower the string’s pitch, the longer it is — this is in keeping with the laws of physics, because lower frequencies generate longer wavelengths. If you’ve played a short-scale bass with conventional frets, you undoubtedly noticed how flaccid the lower strings feel (and sound) compared to a bass with a standard 34-inch scale length. The advantage of a multi-scale bass is that the tension of each string is optimized for its pitch, so you have an evenness of feel across all registers. This well-tempered characteristic not only improves playability and tone, but also provides superior ergonomics in that the frets fan out in a way corresponding to the shape of your hand and the reach of your fingers. If you’ve never played a bass with fanned frets before, you’ll soon discover it’s nothing short of a revelation.
Dingwall Guitars: innovative designs for innovative players
Sheldon Dingwall’s affinity for crafting custom-built guitars dates back to working in his uncle’s workshop during his pre-adolescent years. By age 19, he had formed a record company, after which he toured with his own band. Returning to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1987, he founded Dingwall Guitars with a specific purpose: design and build the most versatile instruments the industry has ever seen. Among the company’s revered achievements are its exquisite electric bass guitars, which are replete with Novax’s Fanned-Fret system, proprietary pickups, innovative electronics, and tailor-made hardware. Appropriately, Dingwall’s artist roster comprises a succession of acclaimed bassists across a gamut of genres, including John Taylor, Leland Sklar, Adam “Nolly” Getgood, Jacob Umansky, Stefan Lessard, Tony Levin, Pete Griffin, Mason Nagy, and Jean-Michel Labadie. Here at Sweetwater, we’re confident that high-caliber players searching for a high-performance axe will find their perfect match in a Dingwall Guitars instrument.
Dingwall Guitars Jacob Umansky Signature Features:
- High-performance, boutique-grade 6-string multi-scale bass guitar
- Sleekly sculpted 2-piece alder body
- Highly figured bookmatched ash top
- 5-piece bolt-on maple neck
- Compound-radius wenge fingerboard with 24 fanned frets
- 3 Dingwall FDV humbucking pickups
- Darkglass Tone Capsule with 3-band EQ
- Modified control layout accommodates aggressive slap techniques
- Dingwall Minimalist bridge; Graph Tech Black TUSQ nut
- Hipshot Ultralite tuning machines
- Dingwall long-scale nickel-plated strings
