If you know me, you know I like my metal. I’m talking musical genres here. But, what if the best thing to play metal on was metal—now we’re talking the material used to construct guitars from. Well then, this is where the Aristides 060 starts to look and sound very appealing.
Irrelevant fact: There’s very little difference in the spelling of appealing and appalling. Their definitions differ drastically though.
I distract easily. Where was I?
Appealing! Damn straight the Aristides 060 is appealing! If you need visual proof of that, I strongly suggest checking out the official Aristides gallery and playing with their filters. Even with my limited colour palette—or lack thereof—I can view eight variations of black or white in the 060 range alone. If you like colour a lot more more than I do, then I hope you can count to some number over 50. I stopped counting after I saw the first 50 options.
If I was to list all of the variations that the 060 offered, I’d be here all day and you’d stop reading before the end of the article. Have you even made it this far? I guess I’ll never know.
From the standard feature list though, here are some things I’d love to say I had in a guitar that I currently can’t lay claim to.
- One piece construction (that’s body and neck)
- That’s not wood either
- Hipshot hardtail bridge
- Hipshot Griplock machine heads
- Richlite fretboard
I would love to play a guitar with a Richlite fretboard. I have a couple of guitars with ebony fretboards and I do love them—not just for their blackness either.
I really love the concept of a non-wood electric guitar. Of the people I’ve seen playing this brand, I’ve always thought these guitars appear to be made for people who are serious about their guitar playing and tone. For example, Mark Vollelunga from Nothing More and Mike Stringer from Spiritbox both play Aristides Instruments.
A player I wasn’t familiar with until researching this article is Timo Somers. He has a video where he plays an Aristides 060. I’ll just let you watch and listen.
I love a good guitar instrumental that is beautifully written and then, after making you think “I might be able to play this if I practiced a bit more”, it delivers that jaw dropping moment when you instead say “Nope. I’ll keep my guitars hanging on the wall so I can look at them instead”.
Seriously though, those string bends look effortless on that fretboard. The 060 looks incredibly comfortable and a delight to play.
Maybe if I start saving now.