The Guitar Gallery Forums - The Guitar Legacy of Matsumoku

Hi to everybody,

I have one red ARIA RS SPIRIT , I looked in the matsumoku website and I saw that it was indicated ACT I
instead of ACT 5 like on mine, the problem I have is this one : on this vibrato there is the fine tuner
on the saddle, very good idea indeed, but my son has taken one of the six put on the guitar, I'm looking
for another one but I don't find it anymore. (not my son but the sixth part of my fine tuner on the saddle.

This guitar is a great guitar in clean tone, acoustic and very well made, no noise so , with every pedals
it's sounds great, never disappointed, thank to ARIA and mister matsumoku. You can see that this model
have single coil pickups but not like a Stratocaster like this / | | but like this | / |, the pickup in the middle
is put in the same way than the bridge pickup on a STRAT, but this pickup in the middle is called ghost cose
the two pickups bridge or neck can be helped by harmonics of the middle pickups, to get bass mid treeble,
and the power of this pickups is very high and with no noise in the 80's , they are as strong as humbuckers
with always a clean tone even with overdrive or distorsion, these pickups are so good that you could get
tones like Mike Oldfield in Tubular Bells Album or King Crimson in Discipline or Beat Albums.

The sound was realy magic and in the 80's do you know that Yngwie Malmsteen of Alcatraz had this model of ARIA,
yes of course, his one was white (3 oclours were available white red Blue), Ingwie liked this guitar for its
neck and its frets, and the magic clean tones going out of this kind of guitar.

When you listen to a string you can hear the sound from the head to the body I think there is something
of magic in the neck, like the sound very special.

I joined a picture of the vibrato ACT 5 on my own guitar bought in France, cose on the ARIA catalog of 1983-1985
it's indicated ACT-1 but perhaps it depended on what Mr Matsumoku wanted to perform, this ACT-5 had parts of carbone.
And MISSING : one fine tuner on one saddle (grrrrrrr!!!)

Last problem, if you want to change the tremolos, don't forget that the two studs have a distance of 73 cm, and the tremolos
like Kahler Schaller Gotoh Floyd Rose have not this distance it's 73 but 74 now. So what to do ?

ARIA RS Wildcat had this kind of tremolo a little time, but the tremolo changed after with a model like Floyd Rose

I red that ACT 5 and ACT 3 were swapable between them (but I can't verify cose none in my hands)

After looking for information in matsumoku models , the real name of this kind of tremolo is ACT-PLUS, where to find it or pieces ?

1So you can visit mr Matstumoku ARIA models on his site.