1980 Aria Pro II TS-500

The TS-500 is the mid-range model with all of the toys, but the regular grain woods. An extra 10,000 Yen would have got a choice of the premium woods, but still you needed 80,000 Yen to get the thru'neck version. Of course we all want one of these, but they are very rare and expensive now - the 500 with the set-neck gets all the functionality, and a pair of excellent Extra III (aka Protomatic III) humbuckers. These were evolutions of MMK53, and we know them the best from Westone Thunder II models. And Noel's Epiphone Riviera.

Many children of the 1970s will probably have drooled over these in a guitar shop, up there on a hook next to a Westone Prestige, and sadly way way out of our price range. Even though they were actually pretty affordable compared to the big US brands, most of us needed to slum it with a Westone Concord, or in my case, a Satellite G65 from Woolies. 40 years later, and that opportunity re-appears!

The specification on these is vast. The two humbuckers can be split into single coils with dedicated mini-switches; a third mini-switch will reverse the phase of the bridge pick-up when both are selected. A final mini-switch will activate an active booster circuit which has its own volume control. You'll make good use of this control as the boost is enormous. We have a master volume and a tone control; and the final control is a type of Varitone function with a variety of high and low passes to get some interesting tones.

There is an enormous array of tones once the switches, the varitone and the booster is configured - so much to play with, and lots of genuinely useful tones. It's a guitar to be creative with.

The neck is a double octave affair with a nice thick rosewood board on a maple neck. The body has a strip of maple flanked by wings of ash. The matching headstock gives this a real 80s look. This is an earlier 6 in a line model - the TS range became 3 by 3 as the earlier headstock migrated to the more expensive RS range.

While the general direction for most of the big guitar plants in Nagano was to emulate as closely as possible the Fenders and Gibsons, Matsumoku never lost the spirit of adventure and looked in more exciting directions such as Alembic for inspiration.

This example has just arrived from Japan, and has just been serviced, and now we can offer it for sale in excellent condition.