Harley Benton Enhanced MP-4EB Lake Blue 3-stars Reviews

First dissapointed, then happy.

I got a flawed instrument, where the pickups and bridge was not aligned.

So i had to change the pickups to inlined magnet ones to fix the alignment with the strings. Because of the stringthru body i could not move the bridge, witch had been an easy fix.

Bought EMG P and EMG MMTW. And now i have a bass that is nice to play, and sounds awesome. The MMTW pickup can be used as both a single and a humbucker. And together with the P pickup, i now have 3 different sounding options that can be blended together. The EMGs are better than the stock ones. Because i was unfortunate to buy a flawed bass, the shop gave me a 35€ cut in the price, witch was to little. But i did not want to ship back the bass, so i took it. The new pickups had a price that made the bass more expensive, but the end product after the upgrade fix, is good.

It's a heavy bass. And i guess the weight, build materials, string thru body, high mass bridge and quality pickups makes the big sound it has. I took out the stock pre amp, and used the pots and wires that came with the EMGs.

The stock pre amp ain't bad, so i will use it in my Ibanez gio200 wich has a bad stock pre amp.

After the upgrade fix, i am now happy with this beautiful bass. It is very nice looking, and you can se the quality parts and work witch has made this a bass build like a much more expensive one.

And i find it an easy bass to play, much because of it's nice slim neck.

Great bass, except...

...the string spacing is really out of whack. The G string is very close to the edge of the fret board and the E has plenty space to spare, and the gap between the E and the A is much larger than between the other strings. Not bad enough for me to send it back (too much hassle from Norway, but if I had bought it locally I would have). I will have to get a new nut for sure. Since this is supposed to be an "enhanced" instrument, I'm a bit disappointed.

In all other respects it's a great bass for the price, but HB needs to pay attention to the small, but important details.

A mixed bag

This one went back because of a slightly misaligned bridge. Other impressions:

Beautiful looks (maybe apart from the huge headstock if you ask me).

Chunky neck made of lovely maple with a soft feel. It felt great to me apart from several sharp fret ends. These need attention and the frets need a polish as well. On the positive side the stainless frets were level and the neck was straight (which is after all more important). Strings came with a very high action but I was able to adjust them down to a more playable level without any buzz. I also like the zero fret which is a rare feature especially in this price range.

This bass is fairly heavy for a 4-string. Ergonomics and balance is good though.

The push pull volume knob had a lot of play (a dead zone) which made it feel cheap. I didn't play the bass enough to make a final judgement on the pickups and preamp but I'm pretty sure that the pots and preamp would have been replaced soon if I had kept it. Not sure about the pickups, they might be fine.

All in all it's a nice looking bass with some premium features but in this case it was let down by poor fit and finish in some areas. I personally don't mind giving the frets some love on bass in this price range but a misaligned bridge and inaccurately drilled string holes underneath it would be too much of a hassle to make perfect. It wasn't so bad that it influenced playability much but I like my strings to align nicely with the neck and the pole pieces of the pickups. They didn't on this sample.

In the end I decided not to have it replaced with an identic model since a perfect one would still be slightly heavier than I prefer and it would likely also require some mods to the electronics to make me 100% happy. If you can live with that it's a lot of bass for the money though. Just cross your fingers and hope that you get a good one since the finish and quality control does not seem to be better here compared to Harley Benton's cheaper models.