Aria Pro II RG-680B Rickenbacker 620 copy

[Voidoid56]

Here's a fairly unusual one, in more than one sense, an Aria Pro II RG-680B. It's the only Japanese copy of a Rickenbacker 620, a solid-body model that might well have fallen through the cracks of history hadn't Tom Petty seen fit to sport a 12-string version of it on the cover photo of the 1979 Heartbreakers album "**** The Torpedoes". This guitar is difficult date exactly, but 1977-78 seems likely, so it's not produced to cash in on any interest in the 620 that that might have generated. Just one more case of "why on earth did they copy that?", I guess.

Either way, it's an excellent guitar, a solid Matsumoku build, surprisingly hefty for such a small guitar, weighing in at just over 3.8 kg. It's all-maple construction, like the original. It's a really close copy generally, featuring the double mono/stereo outputs and that weird fifth knob, which is a pretty counterintuitive pickup balance control. Sure, the neck pickup is significantly louder than the bridge and there is very little pickup height adjustment range, but it does have separate volume and tone controls to begin with. The fifth knob lets you lower the output of the neck pickup by turning it to the right (i e "up")... but not all the way down. I don't really get it, but Rickenbacker is not really know for doing things in a conventional way, and Aria seem to have copied the feature faithfully.
Btw, I love how the P in "Pro" in the logo has been incorporated into the string anchor design.

This one arrived in quite good condition... except for having dead pickups. The bridge pickup turned out to have a coil break, while the neck pickups was just an empty bobbin with no wire at all. I've no idea what happened there, but after I got the original resistance value for the pickups from a fellow collector, a local pickup winder (LB Pickups of Västerås, Sweden) did an excellent job of rewinding them to around 8k with the correct 44AWG wire. Apart from that it basically just needed a cleanup and some solder joint refloating.

It turned out playing and sounding great, with a lot of semi-random resonances from the bridge and string anchor going on. Might drive some players nuts, but I personally love it, it gives the guitar a character of its own. Nice guitar, highly recommended if you can find one.

 

[Homer J. Simpson]

Kudos for bringing it back to life, that sure is an oddball guitar! On top of this it's certainly rare, looks like they made those only around 1977-1978? duh, you wrote that above.

It seems to appear first in this "ca.1977" Vol.5 catalog (1976 doesn't have it):




1978 catalog:


The same image appears once again in the 1979 Vol.10 catalog but 1980 it's gone (together with all the copy guitars).

 

[Homer J. Simpson]

Here's a thread discussing the 680 sold in this Reverb offer, with a lovely little detail not shown on Reverb:

BTW, that RG-680 seems to have a (hard to read) serial number, here's an image showing another 680 on a Japanese store site with a serial:

 

[Voidoid56]

Hah! Completely missed the serial, but there actually is one there, 73023, so pretty close to the Fireglo one above. I'm not sure to what extent Aria serials from this era have been deciphered, but the initial 7 could be 1977, of course. Which would leave room for just 9999 guitars during one year, which doesn't seem like a lot, given that Matsumoku was one of the world's largest guitar manufacturers at the time? Maybe they added digits as needed?
Nope, not up to speed with Aria Pro IIs at all...

 

[Homer J. Simpson]

The Matsumoku.org serial number site is quite old, vague and (luckily) careful with claims on deciphering the serials , one of the things they deem safe to say is that in 1976 or '77 a number scheme was introduced with the first digit indicating the year, rarely the first two and a letter (both can be seen e.g. on the Vorg by Pearl and Aria Pro II F-style guitars, with strong indications that the letter stands for the production month).

Whether or not the following numbers indicate a sequential or random production number is not known but it seems sensible to assume that - sequential or not - they were used per customer/brand/label, given that the overall output of Matsumoku was certainly exceeding 10,000 guitars/year.

If we knew how many guitars Aria sold per year (which we'll probably never know) we could draw more safe conclusions but my observation/guesswork is that at least in 1977 they seem to have used independent (and plausible) production numbers for set-neck guitars (5-digit numbers with the last 4 reaching as high as e.g. 78nnn) and bolt-on neck guitars (letter+6-digit, with examples indicating that they may have used production numbers per month, like K770276. K=November, 77, #0276). Here's a LP model #7309x, so quite close to your RG-680 indicating that the numbers were very likely not used per-model.

While the scheme remains the same for bolt-on Arias in 1978, something happened with the set-neck guitars that year. There are a few guitars seemingly having 8nnnn serials but most of them dated "1978" have 5- and 6-digit serials starting with a zero, and 1980 these models are not in the catalog anymore. This doesn't necessarily mean they didn't make any of those in 1980, maybe they were just trying to make it hard to date them in reaction to the Norlin vs. Elger incident, at any rate the numbers stop making sense (to me) and send us off to speculation country.

 

[Voidoid56]

Thanks for the quick rundown of Matsu serials! I haven't really had enough Arias et al to really delve into the subject before. I've had a handful of APII strats from the late 70s into 1980-81, and as I recall (no access to my records right now) they all had Greco-style MYYxxxx serials.

And on the subject of weird serials with possible obfuscatory (is that a word?) intent, there's the strange case of the very late Greco Fender copies with four-digit neckplate serials. I have one of them, an odd Schecter Dream Machine-inspired strat with tappable SE-1T pups and push-pull pots. The thing is that I also have another one just like it (in another finish, though) with an April 1982 (D82) serial? A friend of mine has had two basses with four-digit serials, also apparently very late pre-JV instruments, and I've seen one or two more through the years.

Going firmly into the realm of speculation: is it possible that they were manufactured after April 1982, which seems to be the cutoff date for Greco Fender copy production? Maybe they had orders to fill and production delays due to the change-over to JV, and wanted/needed to hide the fact that they were formally in breach of contract? Using an undated serial format would help, I guess. Might merit a separate post, actually.

Oh, and one more thing: I have this persistent memory of once seeing an SE-380 with an E82 serial, many years ago, before I really got my research **** together and started saving pics. Might be the Mandela Effect at work,. though. B-)