NGD - Aria Pro II J-B'tone

[jhyang549]

I have been looking for a baritone guitar for a few months. This pretty much scratches that itch well below my budget.

This was priced at $499 at Rockshop Sylvia Park. I wasn't expecting much but I'm happy I was proved wrong. It plays on par as the Squier Affinity range in my experience. I called in as it was marked 'Low Stock' on the website. Turns out it was just sitting in their storage and I was the first to try it out. Out of the box in was fairly in tune.

Scale length is 30 inches and tuned to A Standard (7 steps below). Very happy with this as I thought 27 wasn't much of a meaningful difference compared to my other guitars.

Weight at a reasonable 3.4kg. The paint job is pretty bad (the see-through vintage white isn't doing it any favours).

Pickup selector switch is good. Volume and tone pots seem solid.

I am pleasantly surprised with the neck pickup (sounds good clean and dirty). Bridge is just a mudbucker and sounds horrible without high gain. I'll definitely swap out the pickups at some point.

I don't think the pickup cavity is shielded so I'm going to fix that with aluminum tape.

The tremolo is practically decked - this is fine as I wasn't planning to use it anyway.

Comes with .13-.62 strings which I'll replace with .12-.68 Elixirs at some point.

If you want an affordable 30 inch Baritone electric guitar mod project, I would recommend this. I would first try it out at the store though (I've read some not-so-good reviews online).

[dayl]

Nice one. Cheers for the review, I've often stopped and looked at these as I really like the shape... never knew they were barritone. Maybe there are the same shapes in the range that arent but good to know they play nice straight out of the box.

A Standard for the win!

Edit: yup didn't know this existed, was looking at the 24" scales.

[jhyang549]

Nice one. Cheers for the review, I've often stopped and looked at these as I really like the shape... never knew they were barritone. Maybe there are the same shapes in the range that arent but good to know they play nice straight out of the box.

A Standard for the win!

Edit: yup didn't know this existed, was looking at the 24" scales.

Happy to help. After spending a bit more time with the guitar:

Pickup cavity is not shielded. Pots are meh and small. I can't tell if they are 250K or 500K. Pickup selecter switch is a box-type made in Korea.

Nut is cut terribly. No issues regarding tuning stability as bridge is practically decked but you will need to clean or replace the nut entirely if you want to use the tremolo. Grub screws in bridge stick out a little bit and can poke your hand when palm muting. Short Intonation screws so you may need to replace the bridge entirely if the Intonation is wildly out. Putting new .13-.62 strings on, Intonation is only slightly out on a few strings.

Bridge humbucker is crud. Sounds muddy and horrible clean. Sounds okay with gain. Neck Pickup sounds good. I recommend replacing the bridge pickup at the very least. Made a huge difference in cutting out electromagnetic interference after shielding.

No uneven frets I can tell? They said they are medium jumbo but they are slightly smaller than my Artist Apricus6 (which also has Medium Jumbo).

Tuners are non locking and kinda crappy. But they do the job. I'll probably replace them later on.

This is a classic 'you kinda get what you pay for' guitar. I played the Squire Cabronita Baritone once and this guitar reminds me of that in terms of overall quality. Definitely a mod project guitar. I'd get the Gretsch G5260 if you want a 30 inch ish Baritone without needing to mod it.