Harley Benton Bass Guitar Kit P-Style Reviews

I love it!!

A beautiful bass, cant wait to use it!

Surprisingly good P bass

Fun to assemble and easy too! The pickups do not even need soldered, they just clip straight in.

You'll be left with a basic but perfectly playable and reasonable sounding P-bass. Its not amazing but its not dreadful either.

Neck too weak

I assembled the kit I received.

That was really easy to do, but when I put strings on it, the strings warped the neck, making it unplayable.

Brilliant and Fun!

Im a full time bass player for 14 years. i have more thand 15 bass guitars ( Fender, Epiphone, hibson, custom mades).

if you can setup your guitar this is for you. For me the most important two things on bass is neck and pickup. Neck is after a little touch becomes perfect (even after unpacking it was really really good). I cant say pick up was amazing but it was as good as squier. I replace the pickup with EMG Geezer Butler PJHZ. There is not much differance between my 97 Usa Fender P bass.

After some adjusting, some sanding and painting and little upgrades it can be really serious bass.

Bass Guitar Kit P Style

Quick delivery so started building straight away. Found that you need to follow instructions in correct order. As the wood body looked good naturally I decided not to spray it but instead used a beeswax with stain in. Good decision as now it looks the "Bees knees" - pardon the pun. Easy to build all parts present and correct. Electrics work perfectly and it sounds beautiful. Really enjoyed the build and it did not need any adjustments made. Basically played straight out of the box. Would recommend this kit to anyone considering a self build bass guitar. Think that I may try a normal guitar next..

Great Cheap P Bass

/Bought this kit as a DIY guitar appeals to me greatly. I was not disappointed, kit went together well, and has produced an amazing bass, my most played, especially as its under £75.

Pros: Cheap starting point to modify your own bass.

Great sounding P Bass

Cons: Some components seem a bit cheap, however, its a £75 bass, what do you expect?

Would recommend to anyone.

Very easy, very cheapo

It is just like any cheapest possible bass available but you have to build it up yourself.

Next time I'll rather paint something else for crafts, maybe my kitchen table.

For an instrument this is not good quality, but for training crafts it is ok...

Maybe more for fun...

I got this more for the sake of putting it together and have something to have fun with, rather than to use as a "real instrument". There was no problem building it, but my first find was that the strings that came with it was of really poor quality.

I also need to adjust the neck as soon as there is a major change of weather.

However, it's quite playable and sounds reasonably OK. Big plus in that you - and only you - are fully responsible for the painting (my bed frame and the body now have the same color) and the Head Design (pun intended). I've had it for 7 years now and it still does its thing. I even had it on some small gigs without shame.

Good, then you know what to expect

I bought this for just trying to assemble and finish guitar. Well just as figured wood lump for experimentation. Kit arrived well packed. The body had blemishes, but since I was not into clear finish I accepted it. Shaped the headstock (hardest part). Painted body and neck with Montana spray cans (most time consuming part) in racing stripe fashion. And assembled it (tricky part): although everything is premade - some holes on pickguard are misaligned. I managed to screw those in, but had to use sharp knive to carve some plastic near neck pocket. Tuning keys looks (and are) cheap, but holds tuning. No soldering was required with clip on connections inside. Pots are cheap, but does the trick. Tried to play through our bassists' (I am guitarist) Hartke amp at practice and it sounded OK, but not great. Has some punk attitude to me. But I did not manage to get perfect action as a result it buzzes quite a lot - need to spend more time on this. As our bassist noted "it looks better than it feels, I'll keep my Yamaha RBX". In essence that sums up it can be as good as you will make and setup it. I enjoyed painting it and now it hangs on my wall more as decoration than instrument. So if you after good woodwork project go for it, if you want your first instrument - go for squier bass or something.

A good base to work from if it's a BASS Guitar you want.

I have just completed: The Harley Benton Bass Guitar Kit P-Style. The chap who I helped make it, made it with a theme of eagles. We carved an eagle in flight on the front in the lower left hand bout. On the back we carved a large eagles head, above which we inset a large tibetan silver eagle with it's wings spread open. We changed the Pickguard in favour of a white pearloid one. We swapped the chrome dome topped volume & tone control knobs for flat tops, (1 gold & 1 Chrome) & fitted a gold & silver eagle on top of them. We also added a few other pieces of tibetan silver ornamentation onto the neck plate & headstock. It was given a blue paint job, fitted with a wide black leather strap, secured with beer bottle washers, before finishing it off with a personalised nameplate on the headstock. I don't know much about bass guitars - but the action seems a bit high, I'll take the neck off & re-seat it when I get chance - a guy who plays the base has tried it out & it sounds O.K. The components generally fitted together well & the alternative parts we fitted were compatible. All in all, as value for money I give it a thumbs up.

"Rock On", mddwoody.

Real value for money if you have some skills

I ended up with quite a nice bass guitar. Woody tone, nice to play and stunning.

But it was not really a straight forward build. The body and the neck where finished in some kind af coating (was mentioned in the manual though) and since I decided on a stained and oiled finish I had to sand off all the coating. I did not bother about the neck, but the head had to be sanded due to the fact that you have to saw and sand the unfinished shape of the head to a p bass style, it leaves the edges unfinished and not decent looking.

The pickguard is easily scratched and not quite fitting. One pre drilled hole had to be filled and redrilled and I had to reshape the pickguard where it meets the neck in order to get it to fit.

But real value for money if you have some skills. You have to pay a lot more to get a finished bass that meets this one.

Bass guitar kit

This is never going to be as good an instrument as a Fender Jazz, but the fun and the pleasure I had building and finishing this instrument to my own liking was very self rewarding.

After some modifications, OH MY...

This kit was interesting for me, because I can see all naked parts... true about those. First thought for me was, that this is a good base for project. OK, I need little bit extra for it.

I got packet and OH MY... which kind of body, it is so beautiful and almost flawless. Only small fissure into lower horns upper area, but it was fixed with putty. Other hardware is OK, exept neck has some minor problems. I took body and gnawed hole for the other, extra bridge pickup (seymour duncan SJB-3), and drilled hole for wire. I needed also new vol pot for this new bridge pup and placed it an tone pots place. Tone moved to last hole, input jacks place. Then I made new hole into side of body between tone and vol pots and fixed input jack there with small plate. Lastly primer, grinding, white color, grinding again and finally hard coated lac... two heavy layer. In same time I vanishing neck (it was shaped before that), except fretboard.

Everything seems to be OK and next... place better pickup for neck (seymour duncan SPB-2) and wireing all parts together. I tried put neck into body... but it didn't sat so well. I needed to adjust bridge so up as possible and try some notes... hmm. I have best strings as ever in place, (in my thoughs, ELIXIR nanoweb .045 - .105) and acoustic sound was liveless. Pickups were too far about strings and the electric sound was poor also. Okay, the first fret was 0,5 mm lower than the others and I didn't get note at all this first position. I measured, that neck drops down so much in this area, and this part needed to change. Also those small tunerholes are made so, that tuners don't sit straight line at all?

OK, back to beginning. Pickguard was partly into neckpockets area and needed gnaw to same shape as neckpocket has. I gnawed also neckpocket 2 mm deeper, because the neck was way too high. I measured, that need to get about 1,5 mm metal plate between necks end and pockets end that screw holes matched exactly. Lastly I needed to do whole fretwork, and then I was ready to put parts together. Neck sit perfectly now. Some basic adjustments (including pup hights) and WHAT... acoustic sound is totally different and I know, that this instrument is alive now. I was excited to get it to my amp... OH MY...

Sound is so rich, powerfully articulated and boom same time. And there is so much alternatives... and all sounds are too perfect for my music (POP, ROCK, BALLAD and some REGGAE, even slapping). I can't stop playing in this instrument. It feels lighter, better and faster than my fender jaguar bass and sound is totally different... bang!

FINALLY CONCLUSION: This kit need some handcraft to be as player want. I made some expensive modifications and now, it is perfect for me. Easy to play, large scale of useful sounds and it is so pretty with white coating. As angel with strong heavenly voice.

Not bad! Better than alot...

Cool PBass kit, turns out good with proper mounting. Stock pickup weak and blant. Tuners okay, bridge works, fretwork unexistent. Basswood body great, maple neck wood does okay, not perfect. Great PBass for price.

Fairly good value, but you have to want to build your own bass

I bought this because I have always wanted to build my own guitars and I felt that starting with a kit would be a good first step.

The finish on the neck in my kit was (and remains) excellent. Unfortunately there are a number of machining scratches visible on the body. I could fix these easily with a little sanding, but that also removes the sealant coating which then needs to be re-applied before painting. I opted not to treat the scratches before painting because I will be using my bass for punk music.

Fitting the machine heads to the head of the guitar was reasonably easy once I realised that they were completely different to the ones described in the instruction book. Unfortunately the screws supplied with the kit for this purpose are quite weak; the head came off 2 of the 16 during installation (and I was being really careful after the first failure)

Fitting the neck to the body was simple, and did match the instructions.

In my kit, the machined slot in the faceplate to allow for the neck was approximately 1mm too narrow. I had to make it larger using cutting pliers to complete the build, with the result that my instrument is not quite as pretty as it could be.

Pickup installation was smooth.

The bridge is in the right place to allow all four strings to be adjusted for correct intonation, which was no more or less tedious on this than any other guitar or bass.

The sound is good once you get the action and the pickup positions set correctly.

If you want to build your own instruments in the future this is a good place to start: it is far easier that starting with a heap of wood and going from there, but not so easy that you will learn nothing from doing it. It took me about 2 hours to assemble (not including painting) and set-up.