Aria Mahogany Ukulele - 1970’s Made in Japan 🇯🇵! - Matsumoku Factory! - Beautiful Uke! -

This is a charming and beautiful little vintage uke! It has soothing and chill uke vibes and it’s a totally professional instrument with beautiful tone and playability. Love it!

The Matsumoku Factory in Nagoya, Japan, made an insane quantity of high quality instruments that went on to be in the hands of some iconic players across every music genre of the time. Pro players from the beginning of punk at CBGS’s were getting up on the stage with Univox Hi-Fliers just as much as the Troubadour stage was being filled up with early Ibanez acoustics (the awesome ones). There was a huge debate at the time as to the import vs. domestic guitars situation, but setting aside the politics of all that, you really can’t blame them for just doing a good job. Their instruments were awesome. A lot of them weren’t thought of as such at the time for stupid reasons and were abused and fallen by the wayside, but when you find a survivor here and there you can totally see how much effort they put into making killer instruments at a large scale. That was way harder to do back in the day than it is now with computerized machinery, you’re still talking about rows of people with chisels doing things by hand that all need to be on literally exactly the same page rather than a person programming a CNC machine. Message me if you would like to discuss this further lol.

As an instrument, this uke rips. The action is low and beautiful, the tone is wonderful, it’s attractive to look at, and it’s got 45-50 years of history under it’s belt. It’s awesome, it totally shreds and has all the vibes. It’s obviously a little Martin uke copy, just the same way that the Lyles, Arias, and Morris guitars that came out the Matsumoku factory were Martin guitar copies. I took the bridge off and lowered it to get the action buttery low, there’s a little bit of scarring around where it came off but nothing too crazy. It had to be done though, and now this thing totally rips. Love this little uke!