This review concludes our look at the new range of Westone instruments. In the May '85 IM we looked at the Super headless bass and the SX guitar from the Spectrum range. This month we take a closer look at two more instruments from the Spectrum range which certainly seem to be doing very well on the market.

Westone are into style at the moment and it's about time too. This GT bass is the best looking in the range for my money despite being a mid-priced model. The re-vamped Westone body is a definite improvement and my sample was thickly covered in a Candy Apple red lacquer with a mirror-like finish. With a body thickness of approx 45mm, the GT is quite a chunky bass but it is contoured in the usual places and has large radius curves in the sides.

The bolt-on neck fitted here is lacquered in matt black which disguises the maple from which it's made. Still as far as necks go this one's pretty good with a shallow curved profile that is immediately comfortable. With a full 34" scale and 22 frets the neck seems extremely long especially as the top horn is a little on the short side. This results in a long stretch to first position when you're playing this bass sitting down and a slightly unbalanced feel when it's strapped on.

On the Spectrum instruments that I've seen so far, every one has had this stained Rosewood fingerboard. What's wrong with unstained Rosewood I hear you say. Well it's not black so it doesn't fit into the colour scheme — the strange thing is that while the face of the board has been stained black the sides are left natural brown. Still, the fretting is okay on this sample, a 2.5mm wire is used which has been nicely profiled and polished but being hyper-critical the fret ends could be smoother. Another feature of the Spectrum range is the small radius dot markers used on the face of the boards. On the bass, the dots 'disappear' behind the A string if you glance at the board from a typical playing angle, so you only have the even smaller side dots to guide you which I suppose is adequate.

The Westone headstock is quite a fine example of the Fender-head-meets-french-curve-on-the drawing-board syndrome. The result is a one-sided headstock with bits missing. Still, the head serves an important function — apart from the obvious — and that's to advertise the product and also provide a distinguishing feature when used on the TV or promo video... "Oh look he's playing a Westone... you can tell by the bits missing on the headstock!" Access to the truss rod is not at the headstock end of the neck but at the body end via a small hole in the face of the body.

Hardware

Apart from the cheapest Spectrum bass — the ST — all the basses have satin black coated hardware for that High Tech look and very smart it is too. The machines are Schaller M4 copies with a little Westone eagle logo on the housing and a tension adjustment screw. They seem very stable and very smooth in action certainly in the time I had the bass I encountered no problems at all with stability of tuning.

The bridge is a straightforward affair with four individual saddles adjustable for height and intonation but not string spacing. The L shaped saddles are mounted into the back of a hefty bridge base which has raised sides. An interesting feature of the bridge is the dual position string anchors. The strings pass through the back of the bridge in the usual fashion but there are also four anchor points in the base of the bridge to facilitate easy installation, presumably when you have to quickly replace a string onstage — a very handy idea.

I mentioned the fact that the bridge is not adjustable for string spacing which is fairly common. However, the back pickup is not aligned properly, the top two strings don't pass exactly over the pole pieces and while this isn't a great problem it just shows how useful a string spacing adjustment could be, like on the Schaller 3D type.

The neck plate which anchors the four 'bolts' that hold the neck to body has yet another Westone logo, this time embossed into the metal and certainly the actual joint here is tight and I couldn't detect any movement.

A very sensible feature of the bass is the serial number placement which is embossed into the back of the headstock and made easily visible with gold paint.

Pickups and Electronics

Unlike many Japanese companies Westone design and manufacture their own pickups and rumours abound of how they take the most expensive American pickups, analyse them and closely reproduce the sound. Unethical? No, not at all, what do you think all the replacement pickup companies do? Anyway the units fitted here despite being of the same physical design are, in fact, different. In the bridge position we have a Magnabass IV which has eight visible, but non-adjustable pole pieces while the Magnabass III fitted in the mid position has pole pieces which match those of a Precision. Each unit is encased in plastic and mounts directly into the body via four cross head screws which take care of height and tilt adjustment.

The control function is typical, neat and economical. We have a master volume and two tone controls, the master volume is a push/pull pot which doubles as a phase reversal switch when both pickups are selected via the three position toggle. There is no active circuitry in this bass — that only comes with the top of the range LX and probably explains the rather large control compartment and cover plate. The actual wiring looks clean although the circuit is only screened with foil on the back of the cover plate. I think a good lick of conductive paint in the control compartment wouldn't have gone amiss, even the old Thunder basses had that and they were cheaper!

Knobs always deserve a mention, the ones fitted here are smart, black and made from lightweight metal, easy to handle, especially in the push/pull mode.

Sounds and Playability

The set up on this sample was okay with standard gauge strings fitted, although the action could be taken down a bit for a faster feel. Mark Ray at FCN, did say however, that the action on this sample is exactly how the guitars arrived from Japan and unless requested they are left untouched. Certainly there were no audible buzzes anywhere on the neck and both relief and intonation were perfectly okay.

The bass certainly has a good tonal range and good sustain. Both the pickups sound excellent with a good combination of clarity, depth and punch. The circuit used here, however, doesn't really make full use of the potential sounds. I think having two tone controls is unnecessary whereas two volumes or a master volume, pan-pot and master tone would be more useful. The phase option offered by the push/pull function on the master volume is an interesting facility and quite useful. The reduction in low frequencies in this setting suits the use of FX namely, chorus and flange, but I was left thinking that a dual sound facility on both the pickups would also have been extremely useful.

Because of the positioning of the top pickup the bass is easy to 'slap and ping' but because of the wide tone range this really is a bass for the all-rounder.

Although it's good to see Westone providing a good originally shaped pickup it does stop one option previously open to the owners of cheaper basses — the facility to replace pickups with other makes following the Precision or Jazz bass designs. Of course it's in Westone's interest to make people want to upgrade their whole guitar or buy another Westone, but the possibility of upgrading just the pickups is one that many musicians on a tight budget would consider when purchasing a guitar. However, as it stands the GT sounds fine but I must admit if I owned this one I'd do a bit of 'surgery' on the circuit.

Conclusions

Well it certainly looks good and plays very well. A greater attention to detail, ie pickup alignment wouldn't go amiss, however, as certainly part of Westone's reputation has been built on this fact. For the semi-pro musician who prefers playing as opposed to working overtime to pay off his bank loan, this Spectrum is just the job.

GT BASS
For: Finish, style and looks. Overall sound quality is good.
Against: Unfulfilled potential in the circuit.

WESTONE SPECTRUM GT BASS - RRP: £245