Hey guys, how you doing? We're here with the awesome Sheldon Dingwall, who is the man behind, obviously, Dingwall basses, and he's been cool enough to come down here and hang out in the studio. And what we're going to talk about, obviously, is his basses. But I actually want to know how you got into this racket in the first place. Like, were you a guitar builder first? Were you a bass player?

Were you a guitar player first?

I was a drummer first.

Oh, no.

Then guitar player.

And then, and then fell in love with bass, but never got good at bass.

Were you, like just playing as a kid, yeah?

Well, that was my career from 15 on.

I taught music all through high school and after that and then went out and toured.

So for the most part, I've made my living with music.

Oh, really?

So you're actually like a pro musician?

Yeah, yeah.

So when did decide to put the instruments down and start making them?

At 12, I started designing guitars. And they. They were terrible. They were, you know, a little kid's drawing of guitars. Yeah, yeah. But I was hooked, and at 16, I sent a letter off to Ibanez, thinking that they would see this letter and go, oh, my God, a 16-year-old wants to design guitars for us.

This is awesome. You know, let's call them up. And it's funny because now I get letters from 16-year-olds who want to design bassists. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you kind of feel sorry for them? You're like, I've been there. No, no, I go, good for you. Good for you. And it's a funny thing about the guitar industry, about the manufacturing side, is it's not like building cars where you can have a race and the guy that wins is like, and the rest of the suck.

With guitars, there is no best guitar or with bass guitars.

And so all of the builders are friends. Yeah, I know you all know each other, don't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're all fans of each other's work because they do something that is brilliant and you can appreciate how hard it was for them to do it. Yeah, you're all geeking out over the same stuff. Exactly, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's like bass players, isn't it?

Same thing.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so you've been sort of like into wanting to make instruments from like a super young age. Would that be correct? Really, really young. And I would have been just as happy, I think, if I would have been able to work for another company and been in the design department.

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