Is it a ‘bird? – 1978 Aria Pro II MK-1600

I love an old, late 70s B.C. Rich, don’t you? Those crazy shapes, those fancy neck-through building techniques, those mad kitchen-sink banks of switches… while they’ve settled into predominantly catering for extreme metallers since the late 80s, those desirable old hand-built models still stand as a testament to the class and genuine innovation BCR displayed when they were still a small shop in Los Angeles.

Of those early shapes, the Mockingbird is hands-down the coolest. The Bich is probably too much, the Eagle is possibly too little, but the Mock in its original form is still absolutely jaw-dropping today. Well… not quite its original form, perhaps – the earliest examples had a shorter bottom horn and the top point shifted upwards, and those “shorthorn” models look a bit gawky and weird now. But the re-designed model? You can definitely see how it became such an icon, most notably in the hands of one curly-haired young fella in a top hat… 

There is a price to pay for that iconic status nowadays though – and that price, if you can even find one in the UK, is probably somewhere well north of £3k. But fear not – if you want an old Mockingbird, I recently discovered that there is another way… well, if you’re prepared to spend some time on the chase.

Browsing eBay one day (how dangerous can that be? pfffft) I spotted a rare ‘bird indeed – a near-enough exact, Japanese-built copy of an early Mockingbird, indeed hailing from the exact period in which the Mockingbird first appeared, the late 1970s. 

The headstock displayed a classic seventies Japanese ‘lawsuit guitar’ trait – the logo designed to be JUST different enough from what it’s copying. A stylised mother-of-pearl ‘P’ inlay instead of the ‘R’ on a handcrafted Rich… that ‘P’ marks it out as an Aria Pro II, and the seller advertised it as having been built in 1978 (though he later added it may have been 1977 instead). As for the rest of the guitar… well, you’d have to be a *serious* nerd to really tell it apart from a kosher USA Mockingbird. Even the classic B.C. Rich “cloud” inlays have been copied wholesale. There’s only one noticeable difference – it gives away a single micro-switch from the smorgasbord of controls. That’s it.

That and the fact it was £750, rather than the thick end of four grand.

Seriously – what crazy value for money this seems, when it genuinely is pretty much the next-best thing to an original Mock. It even has the same pickups – vintage, early DiMarzio Dual Sounds, superbly 70s-sounding high output four-conductor humbuckers which are absolutely amazing. The guitar rings really nicely, despite appearing to be made from about 800 different pieces of maple – lots of pancake layering going on in this, which is possibly the only other clue as to its relative cheapness.

Wiring-wise… how long have you got? The controls:

Master volume (closest to bridge pickup)

3-way pickup selector

Preamp volume (with preamp on/off micro switch next to it)

Master tone

Master coil-split micro switch

Master phase-reversal micro switch

6-way varitone (the chickenhead knob)

You want to see the inside of the control cavity… it looks like the wiring loom of a Mercedes S-class. I may swap the black plastic cover for a transparent one to amuse house guests.

The varitone is next to useless, as is the preamp (I’ve taken the battery out and I’m wondering about changing the micro switch out for a non-latching one so I can use it as a kill switch…) But what with the splitter and phase switches, you still have a hell of a lot of sounds on tap. For a big old hunk of maple, it isn’t actually too heavy (9 lb?), and it plays great – notwithstanding the ergonomic… difficulty, shall we say, of the Mockingbird shape. That Medieval axe of a top horn is quite a bugger when you’re sitting down. You definitely suspect it was designed to look cool first, and be ergonomic second… scratch that – fourteenth or fifteenth. As a side note, it started out with black pickup rings but those have now been swapped for cream ones, as were more often seen on period B.C. Riches…

It’s been a long post, I know, but hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading about it. I thought it was worth doing since there seems to be so little information about these particular Aria models. Few people seem to even know they exist – not even my dad, an avowed nerd for rare-groove 70s and 80s Japanese guitars. Worth mentioning, too, that it seems Greco also built some copies of early BCR models at around the same time as this Aria was built. Those are also very rare, and due to the possibly more prestigious Greco brand name they’re a bit more expensive – though still nowhere near the price of a 70s Rich.

I’ve always, always wanted an old Mockingbird, and while this guitar is technically a ‘mock-Mockingbird’, it’s absolutely scratched that itch for me. Like all the best 70s Japanese copy guitars, it doesn’t leave me feeling short-changed in the slightest.