Aria MAC- 30 Finally Done

I got this one back in 2006 or 2007 and I love the slim neck.
But the original tone was pretty much unusable for me - loved the feel of guitar, couldn't stand the sound of it.

I always wanted to redo the pickups and pots and see if I could get some improvement.
Now I finally finished this project and I'm very happy how it turned out.

Original specs:

Alder body
Maple neck with rosewood fretboard
(Awful) black no name pickups with mini switch to coil - split the humbucker
Standard five way switching
Master volume and master tone
Hardware in brushed aluminium with a well - working vibrato which I set up quite stiff no up- bending

Changes:

New wiring and pots
DiMarzio DP184 "The Chopper" Humbucker in neck position
DiMarzio ISCV2 "Evolution" Single Coil in middle position
DiMarzio DP207 "D Sonic" Humbucker in bridge position


Changed the switching too:

• Neck humbucker alone
• Neck humbucker automatically split (north coil active) to work in conjunction with middle single coil
• Middle single coil alone
• Middle single coil and bridge pickup together
• Bridge pickup alone

There is a DiMArzio EP1108 mini switch which that allows parallel / single coil / series switching on the bridge pickup.

So in the "in between position" the middle pickup can work with the bridge humbucker in all threee variants.

Eventually I got a very usable and versatile instrument after all these years!

Now, should you buy this guitar if you're looking for a new one?

I guess it depends what you are looking for.

It's a well built beginner's axe (at least my specific model was) easily up there with all the "cheaper" series of the big name manufacturers.

Best of all, it's very playable so you don't have to fight the guitar whilst just learning your way around the instrument.

But if you want good sound coming out of it, you WILL have to perform some modifications.

By the way - the "Aria" - logo doesn't mean it has anything in common with the "Aria Pro" instruments, at least as far as I know.

I love the Aria Pro instruments of old but i quite distrust this new Aria labelling.


D'Addario Super Light Gauge on this one, .042 to .009, bright, round wound.