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Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
My money is on it being a good guitar and maybe even a great guitar with a few upgrades in the future.
It'll never catch on
I've always liked Arias, ever since my first ever electric guitar, a 1984 Matsumoku-made RS Standard. They had a terrible bad patch all through the 90s, but have now recovered something of their former quality, if not quite the originality of design.
I'd like this one more if it didn't have a needlessly ugly headstock - it's a partial nod to the original RS/Cat series, but without the same grace and 'sleekness' - and if the bridge pickup wasn't mounted half on the body and half on the pickguard, which is just messy and will make maintenance difficult... a proper pickup mounting ring would be far better, or even just mount both sides to the body and leave a hole in the pickguard for access to adjust it on the treble side (which would be an easy mod). I quite like the angled jack, although it's no more or less practical than the normal position really.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson
Overall very nicely finished, binding not perfect but still very good, the veneer is nice, if not perfectly book matched.
- It sounds excellent acoustically : very loud ( possibly due to the swimming pool route acting as a resonator ), bright , defined.
- The neck is superb. Nicely built, nice wood, good colour, good shape, frets well dressed and smoothed ( though they could do with a bit more polishing, will be easy to sort out ). I could have done with higher profile frets, but they're fine.
- The pickups are really dreadful. The review say they are bright, they're not just bright, they have a huge nasty upper mid boost, really unpleasant. For the bin.
- The setup was very iffy. Neck was out of alignement ( easy fix ), action too high
- The humbucker wasn't parallel with the trem ... Now this is bothering. It didn't seem to affect playability though.
The ugly :
Contrary to claims, I can't see any maple cap under the veneer. I don't care all that much, it sounds good, and the weight is good, but false advertising is no good.
Overall it's a keeper despite the flaws.
Width measures a hair or two under 43mm, which is what I was hoping for ( it's not in the official specs )
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson