TWO MORE guitars with spikes and funny angles and wiggly bridges, this time from the Aria Pro II drawing boards. Guitars that look like these can only mean one thing — HEAVY METAL RRROOOOAAAAARRGGGHHHH.

Ahem. Given the plethora of peculiarly shaped guitars about at the moment, it's good to see Aria making an effort to adapt their basic designs to the genre for which they are intended. As we shall see, Aria have built these axes (HM term) with the hard-rockin' fingerboard merchant in mind...

IRONMAN STANDARD

The cheaper of the two, retailing at around £270 in expensive emporia, is a lop-sided Flying V, with a short lower horn. In keeping with the traditional view of the HM brain, science is kept to a minimum on these guitars: the Ironman comes with two regular Aria humbucking pickups (purportedly similar to those in the Wildcat range), a tone control, a volume, and a three-way selector. Even the jack socket is nice and obvious in its location on the front of the machine.

The most complicated element is without doubt the tremolo, an Aria Act model with fine tuners and accompanying locking nut. This largish piece of machinery incorporates the bulkiest fine tuning knobs yet seen on any guitar, protruding at an angle of 45° from the rear of the bridge. While these metallic outcrops are undoubtedly accurate, they are easy to rest your picking hand on. This can be bad as it tilts the bridge back, putting the Ironman out of tune. It is possible to incorporate this into your playing technique (who needs a tremelo arm?), but it can be a nuisance.

The strings pass over smooth saddles on their way into the one-piece bridge and tail assembly, though the lack of any notches on the saddles does make it easy for the wires to slip sideways and stick out of tune.

These saddles are mounted on slides with large chromed cowlings that conceal the fine tuning mechanism. The big black tuners thrust manfully through the upper angle of the cowling and down, down, down onto a metal strip. This metal strip tensions the concealed length of string between bridge and tail, enabling a limited degree of fine tuning (if you start with the tuner in a central position, the string can be either sharpened or flattened). It's not necessary to embark on major mechanical exploration when changing strings, as the ball-end locators are exposed. Thankfully.

Standing back from the minutiae of the Act bridge, we may observe a familiar Aria one-sided head, with a gloss black surface and white logo, and six Aria-made machine heads (cf Schaller M6Ls). A graphite nut, 22 frets, and a rosewood fingerboard grace the maple neck, which is — but we'll come to that later.

ZZ BLADERUNNER

Called ZZ in honour of its skinny, Explorer-style, psychedelic, parallelogram shape, and Bladerunner by virtue of its Hot Blades pickups (also seen on the Knight Warrior). Around £400 of ash-bodied (as is the Ironman) rip-roaring hog-snortin', musical violence which will sit (unlike the Ironman) happily on your knee.

The extra expense is accounted for by a Kahler fine tuning Flyer tremolo and lock nut, and the more powerful pickups, which come with a coil-tap activated by the push/pull tone knob. Although the neck on the Bladerunner feels longer, it shares the same 25¾in scale and 22 frets with graphite nut, four-bolted onto the body at the 17th fret. Now about that neck...

THE NECK

This is the flattest and widest neck I have seen on any electric guitar, flaring from 42mm (Les Paul Deluxe is 40mm) at the nut, to 52mm at the twelfth fret. The strings lurk somewhere in the middle of this vast area of wood, usually in the region of 3mm or 4mm in from the edge of the fingerboard. The camber across the neck is negligible, yet present in a sufficient degree (pun) to prevent barre chords from breaking your index finger.

Presumably this design is intended to permit complex twiddling in the upper reaches of the guitar, places where most fingers are Too Fat To Fiddle. While it does take a little time to adapt to the new wide string spacing, it certainly helps the less ept (cf inept) of us to play with new definition and clarity.

But this rosewood highway sits on another innovation: the finish of the maple on the back of the neck is matt. Varnished, but not shiny. The intention behind this rare (but not unheard of) lack of gloss is to permit the hand easier movement up and down the neck. As the man at Aria said, "Heavy metal guitar players play up and down the neck a lot, so they need to move their hands around fast." Sounds daft, but it works. Given the extra width of its flatfish U-profile, the neck fits comfortably into the hand. A big tick.

THE REST

But all of the above is as nothing if the guitars don't work. Suffice to say that they do. The Ironman is, with the exception of that odd bridge, and the neck, the proverbial UJG (Universal Japanese Guitar). It's very well finished, not faulty, plays comfortably, stays reasonably in tune, and sounds OK. It works, no problems; but it doesn't drive the imagination to flights of adjectival fantasy.

The Bladerunner, by virtue of its more expensive hardware, is a little more interesting. The coil tap, which affects both pickups, gives a Telecasterish quality to the bridge setting when in single coil mode. In full humbucking mood, the Bladerunner is warmer and louder than its cheaper cousin — credit there to the Hot Blade pickups.

The tremolos for both — de rigeur for an HM axe — were prone to a little detuning (new strings, perhaps?), but considering the extremes to which they were tugged and wrenched, this wasn't surprising. The only complaint I can offer here is that the chrome on the Kahler was peeling off.

However, it is the neck on these two Arias that stops them being run-of-the-mill machines. An effort seems to have been made to assess the needs of a particular guitar style (suitable for jazzers too?), and to adapt the instruments accordingly. And while the noises that the Ironman and the Bladerunner make are adequate for the job, it will be the neck that makes people buy them. What they lack in character, they make up in their potential effect on your playing. Adapt and exploit.

ARIA
Ironman standard: £270
ZZ Bladerunner: £410

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