Harley Benton DC-Custom Cherry 4-stars Reviews

AC/DC 1970's what a beauty

Love the guitar is really great for the money I have a range of top branded guitars and this bad boy matches them really well.

I had to change the string when it arrived as they were pretty dead and also a few screws loss of worn but I have sorted them.

over all for the money and comparing to the epiphope it is way better fro the money.

The sound is amazing I have been running it with my blackstar 6l6 and tone is smoking hot

Pretty good

Ordered this after spending 6 years on a 100 euro HSS strat from a unknown brand, as my first upgrade.

Wanted something with two humbuckers and 24 frets.

Out of the box, the guitar looks great. minor cosmetic flaws are a small chip-like thing right on the end of the binding on the corner, right after the end of the 24th fret, and some glue visible under the nut.

Build-wise, some screws on the pickguard and the screw that is on the truss rod are drilled at an angle. Again, only visual imperfections, doesn't affect playability.

Tuners and tuning stability after changing strings (the ones shipped were nothing special, I don' t think they were D'addario since they weren't mentioned in the product description. They were really thick, they might have been .11s, I now put on .09s since the guitar will be my E standard axe) are perfect, responsive and smooth, keeping it in tune nicely.

IMPORTANT, the guitar WILL neckdive if you have it on a regular nylon strap, but thankfully with my order I ordered a basic HB leather strap, and with it's raw leather inner layer it stays perfectly in place, so definetely buy a leather strap too if you don't have one.

Sound is great through my Katana 100 mkI, can play all the classic rock and bluesy stuff like Led Zep but can also dabble in playing some metal, as long as its not some ultra modern stuff like metalcore etc

NOW, the only giant flaw this guitar had was that, after a day of playing, the pickups (mostly the neck but it also affected the bridge a couple of times) and pickup selector suddenly decided they were not going to function. Actually, when you selected the neck pickup for example, it would be barely heard. Not completely off, just very very very quiet. And that is with my amps gain at max. The other one would be perfectly fine though. If I played with the selector a little, sometimes it would get fixed for a while, but then it would go quiet again. After two weeks, and not wanting to bother with returning it because it was perfect already, I brought it to my old guitar teacher who has a soldering iron. He didn't find any wires loose, everything was in place it seemed. With nothing else to do, he de-soldered and then re-soldered every single wire back, and that fixed it. The term he used was, literally translated from Greek, "it was probably a cold solder that caused it". I have no idea what the correct term is in english, that is what he said.

With new .09 gauge strings and a proper setup from my teacher, the action is now very low and very comfortable to play, no buzzing. With the old thick strings and the subpar setup job I gave it out of the box, I couldn't get it to stop buzzing on frets 0-5. Maybe it had to do with the strings, maybe it just needed a more experienced hand to do the adjustments, who knows.

Also, another remark from my teacher is that the nut is very high, ie it needs sanding. I don't want to bother with that right now though, the action is perfectly fine for now.

As a closing statement, coil split would be an excellent feature to add on this guitar, and definitely something I will do in the future, as the pickups sound great already, can't wait to hear how they sound split too.

tl;dr great guitar, just get it setup correctly, either by yourself or someone who knows what they're doing, and I hope you don't get a lemon in the wiring department like I did.

A very nice SG!

Amazing sound and playability after a little set up! The finish, pick ups tuners and bridge etc are perfectly fine! The only downside was that the guitar I received had a little rough fretboard binding that needed some serious cleaning and polishing.

Just a little head's up for those looking to buy the guitar: The guitar has the skinniest neck I've ever felt on a guitar. I've tried multiple models and it seems like they've all got the same extreme curvature to the neck. It's almost like there's not enough meat on the neck to support the string tension. So whereas you would usually aim for a certain amount of relief in the middle of the neck, I would find that you'd get way more relief on other places on the neck as well, making a low action nearly impossible to achieve.

Would buy another

Great guitar for price. Mine had two very minor cosmetic issues that took about 10 mins to fix. Other than that everything was pretty spot on and as expected for a new guitar.

Ok for its price

One thing I admire about Harley benton guitars and basses it's their weight. They are really light. In this guitar the neck is smooth and easy to play and the guitar feels good.

2 cons: 1)That's general. In cheap guitar/bass models the metal parts are garbage. So, I insist in changing them immediately.

2) The head is heavy so the guitar balances parallel to the ground (and slightly lower)

Heavy stuff

Pretty much everything about this guitar is heavy. From the not so good to the great:

- It's neck-heavy. Unless you play sitting down (and who would do that with an SG-type axe), you'll have to hold the neck up and push the body down, or else the headstock will dive.

- The whole thing is heavy like hell. It is massive mahogany all right: it weighs as much as my 59's spec'd Les Paul with no weight relief. Okay, the sustain is awesome, but man this guitar requires back muscle!

- The tone is brutally heavy. It punches right through my valves \m/. Amazing pick-ups, Roswell, well done! Crisp, articulate, bombastic, in your face... Competing big brands sell their comparable humbuckers for more than this whole guitar. Quite unbelievable.

What I modded:

- Since the pick-ups are 4-wire, I added a coil tap by replacing the tone pot with a push-pull pot (and the split humbuckers have a pristine chimey single coil sound too);

- I added a treble bleed capacitor to the volume pot to ensure that the tone remains bright even when I roll back to volume;

- as with all Harley Benton tune-o-matics, I replaced the stock bridge with a sturdy, reliable and high precision Gotoh T103B-N;

- and for good measure I levelled, dressed and polished the frets, filed away the two or three sharp ends I spottes, rubbed the fretboard with lemon oil, gave it a fresh action-trussrod-intonation setup, and...

OFF IT ROCKS! If only it were 1kg lighter...

Killer guitar

Never owned or played a SG style guitar before but this guitar by its own rights is fantastic. It has great sounds, I have not had to change anything on this. I live in Australia, I was a bit worried it being sent from Europe, packing was great no damage to the instrument. Profile on the neck was a lot slimmer than what I was use to, but I love it. Could not find any cosmetic defects with it. The pick ups are actually not to bad (I may change them in the future) and I have played this through several different brands and types of amps. For the price and quality you can't go wrong (unless you are a gear snob).

Great Guitar

This is an absolutely lovely guitar. Looks awesome too. It has great, playability and action. Sounds great through a quality amplifier. Well worth it..... And at such a reasonable price.