THE INSTRUMENT.

50 years of heavy metal, distilled into one bass guitar to rule them all.

When the Toontrack sound design team had their eyes set on a bass with its roots in traditional heavy metal but that still offered the detail, the clarity and the articulate expression of a modern instrument, whittling down the choices to one winning ticket ended up being fairly simple: Ian Hill’s (Judas Priest) limited edition, signature Spector Euro4.* This bass was designed to celebrate the band’s five decades at the pantheon of metal and has all the traits of a classic ‘80s-era Spector – the solid maple body wings, the three-piece maple neck and the rosewood fingerboard – but also offers tons of features that takes it into the new millennium and beyond. One of the standout details of the lot is the onboard TonePump, an active preamp with an internal boost trim pot. The specifics of the circuitry in this preamp offers lots of tube-like characteristics, enabling you to really crank the output of the bass without the tone cracking up – it just gets warmer, beefier and, frankly, more heavy metal.