TE-30 BE Standard Series : You get what you pay for

It's a great value guitar if you keep in mind how much you paid for it and are willing to put in some work to bring it up to scratch or have low standards in general.

I originally purchased it as a cheap guinea pig for practicing 'relic' work. It turned out to be worth keeping with a few changes and while it doesn't compare to a real Fender it's still fun to have around.

PROS

+ decent finish

+ nice chunky neck and body with good tone and sustain

+ plays decent

+ straight neck, surprisingly decent fret work

+ reasonable platform for basic modification

CONS

+ near useless tuners

+ non-standard design despite the 'Telecaster' look. For example if you wanted to swap out the neck, the routing is not compatible with a proper Fender neck. Fair enough, but then it's also not even compatible with other Harley Benton necks, having tried with both a TE-70 (fits with some effort but would need holes redrilled) and a Fusion-T neck (just forget about it).

MIXED

+ electronics are cheap but serviceable. Pots, pickup switch etc are not exactly the smoothest but at least don't sound crackly.

+ pickups are heavily microphonic. This is generally considered undesirable but I think can actually be a nice thing as long as you're not playing with heavy distortion to get some more natural playing sound. They do a decent enough job at imitating the Telecaster tone as long as you're going through a decent amp. If you're just playing at home or jamming out some blues in your garage, these do the job. If you're ever going to play live or record anything, or like to throw in anything more than a very mild overdrive, they need to be replaced.

+ tuners are junk as expected As long as you're not doing any string bending they're OK for the price though.

WHAT WOULD I CHANGE?

If you consider this as a cheap basis for modifying into a better insrument:

* better pickups (Fender Tex Mex are a great budget option here, I ended up with some Fralins when I decided I'd actually keep the guitar)

* replace the tuners with locking tuners (you may need to widen the tuner holes depending on which ones you buy)

* replace the nut with a Graph Tech nut

* copper tape shielding around the pickup cavities and under pickguard

* add string trees (genuine Fender roller trees are really cheap so don't skimp)

The price of the guitar just doubled but these are all pretty easy changes and you're left with a gig-worthy instrument instead of a collection of compromises.