Harley Benton HB-35 BK Vintage Series Reviews

Great for beginners and semi-professionals

To begin with, the product has great value for money. Design is decent, and as someone who is occasional guitar player I would definitely recommend this model. Also it is nice for beginners, I find it very convenient for playing and sound is good as well.

Ridiculously good quality

Absolutely cannot fault this guitar. Pickups sound great, neck is great, weight is nice, plays nicely unplugged, tuners are great. Just get it.

Great guitar for the price

Guitar looks nice, sounds nice and at a great price.

Beyoned expectations , Beautiful ,plays like butter (smooth) feels great.

Nothing bad to say , I f i had tons of money i,d but every finish of this HB-35, love it, I,m an old guy and have seen many guitars,

Good vintage guitar

Great bang for the buck and it looks awesome

A great 335 style guitar

The workmanship on this guitar is impeccable. The neck and fret work are perfect. The guitar arrived perfectly setup and in tune. It is now my favorite guitar in my collection. It sounds great unplugged and with amplification. Great job Harley Benton!

very good guitar

This is a good guitar,the only problem I saw is that is getting out of tune easyly

Best yet

I absolutely love this guitar. I own 7 Hb guitars and this HB 35 vintage is my go to guitar. Not a single flaw right out of the box. If you can only choose one new guitar please give the HB 35 vintage a try.

Well worth the price

Very good guitar, no problems encoutered, no regrets on purchase.

HB 35 vintage

Nice Guitar for the price. Well finished though the frets and nut needed a little work. Nice full rounded pickups. I would buy them for another guitar if they were available.

2.5 year evaluation

I bought this as my first electric guitar after playing 5/6 years acoustically. I had no experience with electric guitars and i was unfamiliar with the Harley Benton brand. After seeing some (video)reviews i thought: "well I might give this a go, considering the price and the good reviews".

This guitar has given me so much joy in the past years and still does. Its amazing that these quality guitars are being made in this price range. For playability i prefer it over my Epiphone PR-4E-NA.

Three minor details that i found after having the guitar for a while is that:

1. after the 16th fret the frets stick out a bit to the side, but its something that hasn't bothered me yet during playing. I might file them myself soon.

2. After 1.5 years or so, some of the volume/tone knobs sound scratchy in a certain range. I can fix this by using some contact spray (lubricant for electronic parts), but still havent gotten to it.

3. After getting familiar with electric guitars and my playing style i noticed that some strings had a higher output than others. The humbucker pickups are excellent for adjusting the height of the pickup and their individual polepieces yourself. Just consult some online videos and write down what you are doing in a diagram or something, so you can always adjust it back to how it came.

Overall a great guitar, which has convinced me to buy two more Harley Bentons!

Loved it so much, 2 more followed me home.

Great all-around fun guitar!!!!

Excellent!

I already owned an HB35 Plus Lemon Drop and that was so good I thought another HB35 would be a great idea, and at this price...... So, as I don't use the coil taps on the Plus, I saved a few Pounds and went for this. It's amazing for the price. Perfectly playable straight out of the box with no extra setting up. As usual, a little oil on the fretboard helps, as does a quick polish of the frets with some wire wool. Can't fault construction and finish. I may swap out the pickups for some P-90 types, but that's just me, there's nothing wrong with the stock ones. A lovely thing for much less money than you'd expect to pay for a lovely thing.

This is an excelent first electrical guitar!!

This is an excelent first electrical guitar!! It may need new and better strings, and some fixing on the strats, but it surves the purpose and its very versatile!!

I think it doesn't say on the description of the item, but it comes with a allen key and a small guitar cable.

what can you say for the price its exceptional, change the strings and your ready to go

Excellent for the price

Bought this to have a guitar to keep in C standard tuning (queens of the stone age fan). The quality is quite good, stays in tune well. Sounds good. Very nice looking and it's got that classic vibe.

Blues for beginners / Great Feel

Great for beginner who want a warm blues sound. Beautiful and fun to play. Just replaced control knobs to black & white. No serial number however I plan to keep this forever!

I change tunings machines and now keeps tones perfect. I play every day on it, good purchase

Great budget 335 emulation

I purchased this HB-35 BK to try to replace a (very) old Harmony hollow body that I decided to sell. I loved the style and tones of the Harmony, but didn't love the feedback, so I decided to try a semi-hollow instead. I've never had one, so I wasn't sure what to expect.

Disclaimer: This doesn't sound anything at all like the hollow body it was supposed to replace, but it has its own unique tones that will cover anything from jazz to (almost) metal. Very, very nice sound that cooperates very nicely with my amp set up as clean or crunch.

I'm disappointed that I'll still need to chase the tones I was originally looking for, but completely happy with the result that I got. This guitar is gorgeous and plays very nice.

The guitar gets 5 stars. Customer Service gets 5 stars. Shipping, not so much. I purchased this guitar with a case in a combo package, and also bought a SC-550 singlecut - again chasing tones. The two guitar boxes were packaged in another box with just enough paper padding on the top to fill the top portion of the outer box. No padding on the sides, and just a layer of paper at the bottom. The HB-35 arrived with the neck completely broken at the body. The only thing holding it together was the strings. The SC-550 had a crack all the way across the headstock. The case for the HB35 combo arrived about a week later. I'm not sure what happened there, or why the combo wasn't shipped together and the other guitar shipped separately.

Customer Service was great. I took pictures of the damage and sent them in. Within about a day they had a replacement HB35 ready to ship to me. ( The SC-550 was handled separately )

The replacement came in with not a great deal more packaging material, but it arrived in perfect condition.

It was set up well and like I mentioned above, the tones are incredible for a guitar at this price point.

At this price point, anyone looking to buy this model guitar will not be disappointed at all - assuming it arrives intact.

Surprisingly good **UPDATED**

I wanted to wait a little while until I could give this guitar a good review. So after having the guitar for 4 months, here it is.

Pros: Upon receiving it it was exactly as advertised. The finish in all black was perfect. As a luthier I had trouble finding more than a couple of imperfections in the paint and bindings. Well done.

Once I started playing it, of course it needed adjustments but at first was happy.

Cons: I did notice the guitar would go out of tune regularly. I tried to see what it was and after changing the strings to a better quality, doing some work on the nut, I was able to get the guitar to stay in tune for at least a couple of songs. I am not a hard picker or big string bender either. The tuners are on the cheap side and 2 of them have a lot of ‘play’ in them. Upgrading to locking tuners should help. The frets have started to sprout and because they weren’t cut back properly, they are causing the binding on the neck to crack.

Still, for the money not a bad buy.

UPDATE - I love everything about the guitar, and you can’t beat it for the price. I just updated the pickups by putting in a set of Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates in. Yeah I know the pickups cost more then the guitar, but I can always take them out and reinstall the old pickups if I sell or trade the guitar in. Also, I recorded the guitar before and after changing the pickups. WOW what a difference. Sounds as good as a vintage Gibson ES-335 a friend owns.