SC-450Plus LD Vintage Series : Pretty excellent for the money

As many others have noted, Harley Benton guitars usually greatly outperform their price points. I'm a hobbyist so I don't see a world where I'd ever feel the need to buy a real Gibson, but I have never owned any kind of Les Paul copy and this one was an attractive, affordable way to dip my toes into those waters.

Pros:

- Great finish. Very attractive guitar, no two ways about it.

- Playability is great. The action was pretty much perfect for my taste out of the box. I made some small adjustments to fix intonation and gave the truss rod a quarter turn to address some high E buzzing, but that's all that really needed to be done to make the guitar very playable.

- Sound is very good. The "Roswell" humbuckers have a nice clean tone and work well with a driven amp or any variety of distortion pedals. The tone and volume pots are both smooth and seemed to have a pretty good range to my ears.

Cons:

- Tuning stability could be better. At first, I thought this was mainly a problem that could be fixed with upgraded tuning machines, but now I'm thinking it's probably more of a nut issue. I did develop some high E buzz after owning this for about half a year and I was able to mitigate that with a truss rod adjustment, but I still can't seem to totally get rid of it. Combined with the rather poor tuning stability, I think maybe all of my issues could be fixed with a better-constructed nut.

- The coil split option for the pickups is cool, but not very useful to me in the end. I don't know if this is just because I've mostly been a single-coil player in the past and I've never played a more expensive guitar with coil splitting, but to my ear there was not much of an effect other than reduced volume/increased hum when splitting this guitar's humbuckers. Tonal quality was not really close to the platonic single coil sound that I think of. I probably would have been just as well off saving a few bucks and going with a Harley Benton with standard humbuckers.