SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — Cort Guitars introduces the X500 Menace, a reimagined flagship electric that’s now even darker and more aggressive than its predecessor. Highly suitable for metal and extreme music with high access frets, the X500 Menace has been reborn with a modern aesthetic and feature upgrades, including new tonewood selections, a reverse headstock, compound radius fingerboard, Floyd Rose® 1000 Series tremolo, and a Seymour Duncan® Nazgûl™ and Sentient humbucker set. 

The X500 Menace is the latest addition to Cort’s X Series, which was revamped with a more modern, ergonomic design and new finishes that capture today’s metal guitar trends. The X500 Menace offers timely innovation with the popular tonewood combination of a solid maple top on mahogany body. Together, these classic woods are thick and cutting, yet warm and rich. The sustain and tone transfer is limitless thanks to the X Series signature neck-thru construction, which offers focused midrange punch and cut.

The 25.5-inch-scale X500 Menace is rock-solid stable and built for speed across the entire range of its sleek ebony fingerboard. The 7-piece maple/purple heart/panga panga neck likewise provides a smooth surface that enables high-speed riffing and soloing with unfettered access to the highest frets for utmost playability. Aesthetically, the striped design of the neck provides visual intrigue against the Black Satin finish.

The compound radius fingerboard (12 to 16 inches) is a deluxe feature that facilitates easier playability when transitioning from easy chording on the low frets to high-speed soloing and string-bending on the upper register. As a finishing touch, Cort has designed an exclusive reverse headstock for the X500 Menace, presenting an unconventional and meaner look over the original design. Black hardware and die-cast tuners complete the look.

The addition of the Seymour Duncan Nazgûl & Sentient high-output passive humbucker pickup set takes the X500 Menace to the center of the earth, if not straight to the underworld. The Nazgûl combines a large ceramic magnet with custom winding specs, resulting in an ideal blend of note articulation, saturation, pick attack, and one of the most brutal “chugs” available from a humbucker. The Sentient neck delivers a balanced, versatile tone with pristine cleans and fluid leads under high gain. One volume pot and one tone pot with 3-pickup selector keeps the controls clean and simple, allowing the player to focus on making music. 

The X500 Menace hardware includes a FloydRose 1000 Series tremolo system that gives players the confidence to express their musical ideas without tuning worries. With this upgrade, the X500 Menace is ready to handle anything the player throws down, from dive-bombing and extreme harmonic squeal pull-ups to subtle chord coloration.

Sleek yet robust, the X500 Menace was designed and built for metal but is versatile enough to cover a wide range of musical genres and styles such as fusion, prog, and classic rock, making this beast much more than a one-trick-pony.

MSRP US$1349.99

Street US$849.99