TE-20HH SBK Standard Series : A Sleek Style Tele for an Affordable Price

The Harley Benton TE-20HH is a full matte black telecaster with two passive humbuckers.

For less than £100, this telecaster makes a nice edition to the collection. The build quality of the body and neck won’t be as perfect as any custom fender guitar, but it’s also leagues better than any off brand guitar for a similar price. It find that nice balance in between, with the body of the guitar being nicely contoured and finished. My only gripe would be with at neck. The whole neck and fingerboard has also been painted in the matte black finish. While the smooth finish on the back of the neck is quite nice, I found the fingerboard to be a bit harder to work with, as the paint covers the natural feel of the wood, and is harder for me to play. This doesn’t couple well with some rougher frets, although still playable and fine.

The humbuckers are my least favourite thing on the guitar, as a guitarist who focuses on distortion and metal. When put through high gains and distortion, the humbuckers become more fuzzy and static making it harsher sounding in more of a negative way, but some people may prefer this, and it’s not as bad when playing chord progression. However, if you want to use the guitar through clean settings then it’s pretty good. Because the humbuckers remain simple, then so do the clean sounds. This creates a gentle sound not akin to traditional tele pickups, but still nice nonetheless. If you want to sound good like this, then a pinch of reverb, delay and chorus works perfectly. (If your amp or pedals can do that)

But now for the other more individual reasons I myself like the guitar. Firstly while I don’t like the painted fretboard, I do absolutely adore matte black finish guitars with a minimalist design. The guitar in person looks just as good as it does in the review videos online, and it matches my personal style, similar to that of my Ibanez grg121dx. The matte finish can also be customised if you have an artistic mind, which was one of the reasons I thought about picking up this guitar, because this also moves into the second reason why I like it. It’s a good project guitar. Double humbuckers connected to one volume and tone pot with a five way selector switch are easy to switch out if you want. The hardware such as the bridge, machine heads and pickguard can all be switched out if you have the right parts and want to upgrade. Therefore, this makes the guitar good for either stripping down and rebuilding to test, or to even upgrade as you go. Especially for the low price cost, which is honestly great for what you get.

Overall, I believe for the low price point I would recommend this guitar if it’s your style and you like the initial impressions of it as it is reliable and cheap, while also playing and looking nice.