Okay so this is my first Harley Benton guitar, years of seeing them on YouTube and I finally decided to give one a shot and I am really glad I did.
I wanted a left handed tele for ages and this one blew me away for the price.
PRO's
1: Built quality on the unit I received was top notch, feels like a much more premium instrument then the €159 price would suggest. If you had a blindfold on you would think just by feel its a far more pricey unit then it is which is a credit to Harley Benton.
2: Neck and fretwork is great and feels and plays beautifully. No rough edges or dead frets. The intonation needed a bit of adjustment but that is common and took 5 minutes, the truss rod was fine and didnt need any adjustment.
3: Finish is lovely and the seafoam green is a nice colour and there were no imperfections in the paint work or body on the guitar I got. Pickguard and fit and finish was perfect for such an affordable guitar.
CONS:
1: Tuners are not the best, the usual G string issues and this is after I restrung the instrument with my preferred gauge strings. Its far from terrible but definitely an upgrade I will be making soon. For this price though I think you have to make sacrifices and if its on replaceable parts then I am fine with that. (I own a Les Paul Custom that doesnt stay in tune and it was more than €159 ha ha).
2: Hardware is also cheaper feeling but again perfect useable, the volume/tone pots and selector switch are fine but feel cheap and the switch in particular wouldnt hold up if you were gigging often. Again this was all stuff I expected at this price point.
3: Pickups are fine for clean tones and slight crunchy stuff but dont expect to play your pantera riffs on this guitar, I bought it for playing Police tunes and some Andy Summer's stuff so its fine for that but it doesnt take distortion too well. Again I wasnt expecting to play high gain stuff so Im not disappointed. Bridge pickup is decent but a bit too bright overall and you really need to roll off the tone to like 2-3 to really reduce the harshness of the treble. The neck is a bit muddy or wooly sounding on more higher gain tones but again still useable.
CONCLUSION:
Thoroughly happy with my purchase and any of the downsides are to be expected at this price point and all of them can be fixed/improved with a couple of upgrades but this doesnt stop the guitar from being playable out of the box which is important as a lot of new players will buy these affordable instruments and have a perfectly good guitat to get started on and if they fancy a few improvements they can do that too in time.
