Harley Benton HB-35 CH Vintage Series 4-stars Reviews

Great for the price

Really fun to play, beautiful and sounds good. No it doesn't compare to a 3000 Gibson but you get a great guitar for the price you are paying . Recommend to anyone.

Good guitar, but bad electronic

Frankly speaking, I don't really share the general enthusiasm for this guitar. I agree that in terms of manufacturing, it is perfect: the strings lie low, do not buzzing, the neck is straight and comfortable, the frets do not protrude, the tuning pegs are smooth and doesn’t has any backlash, the guitar holds tune well, the pickup selection switch working distinctly, generally the appearance is impeccable, I would say that the instrument looks much more beautiful even than its original (Gibson- 335). But then the disadvantages became - mainly they are related to electronic, and more precisely - to pickups (humbuckers). They are bad. They generate background noise (how is that possible?!) It is well known that the biggest advantage of humbuckers is absence of background noise, but here they make buzzing noise like ordinary single coil pickups. Sound, which produced by these humbuckers are OK – it is suitable for performing saturated (“meat”) soloing with overdrive, or distortion, but these pickups absolutely inappropriate for any funk, rhythm-n-blues or any other “speed” styles – the sound is very muddiness and rumble. When I’ve tried to correct this sound with the help of EQ – sound became offensively harshness, and background noise became more. To summarizing: definitely this guitar needs customization - it's absolutely necessary to change pickups (as well, as appropriate potentiometers), but of course it will much increase the guitar cost/ price.

Great guitar and feel really nice

The frets need to be polish and condition the fretboard. The pickguard is really horrible and the pickups are a like high output, but do not feedback.

A very solid guitar for the price!

This guitar is a wonderful 335-style guitar that looks beautiful and sounds great. It's a great bedroom jammer, but could probably be used for smaller gigs as well. The combination of tone controls and pickup selector give great tonal flexibility, from a clean jazz tone to overdriven blues/rock tones. It came relatively well set up; the only issues on the guitar I received were small fit and finish issues, and the frets didn't come 100% leveled, although they were pretty close. The fret edges had some work done so that there were no burrs or really sharp ends, but there were some tooling marks on the binding as a result. Overall, I am very happy with this guitar, and you certainly can't beat the price for what you get!

A good modification platform

This guitar has a nice design for a 335, heavy body, awesome jumbo frets. Top hat knobs are beautiful! The pickups are nasty, midrangy, ugly sound ( I will certainly upgrade). Good value overall! If I buy again would try the plus version for sure!

Good little guitar for the price

I'd been looking for an inexpensive 335 copy, and I bought this after a youtube recommendation. For the price it's very good. It has a little trouble holding tune, but that's probably just the strings, which I'll replace soon. If I had to do this again, I'd probably spend a bit more and go with the 35Plus, and get the better pickups and prettier inlays. Still, hard to beat this deal, and a very good looking and decent sounding guitar for the price.

Great value

Way more guitar than you would expect for the money. Not perfect, but definitely playable once good strings were installed and the string height was adjusted adjusted. I would have given it five stars but there were a couple of small dents on the neck pickup and a few finish flaws that were reasonable for this level of guitar.

Good

The guitar felt good and played like it should but there were cons as well.

Pros:

- Guitar had 2 to no visible scratches or dings

- Amazing sexy red cherry colour

- Frets leveled and playable

Cons

- 1st to 2nd fret had white speckled dots that i see in other guitars, its basically the maple wood exposed by tiny dots

- One bridge screw was loose, took me 30mins to find the rattling noise when played

- Nut was too low and could see visible crack near headstock which im pretty scared of

- Tuning heads were tight and loose, inconsistent .

Overall I'm pretty happy with the guitar so, thank you :)

Nice versatile guitar

Can produce a nice raspy bluesy sound and also a strong rock sound. A little bit bright pickups. Unfortunately came with sharp frets, high action and a very ugly and badly cut pickguard which you can take out. A very solid guitar with a sound that competes with other guitar in double its price range.

Great sound - fantastic proce

This guitar is now a permanent fixture on my rack.

I bought it as an introduction to the 335 type of sound and it delivers in spades.

It is much better value than a guitar twice its price.

pros:

Price

Sound

build quality

con:

needed a setup (which i did)

needed new strings

Would buy this again in a heartbeat.

Cherry 335 copy

Very easy to play, lovely sustain and resonance due to the central block through the body of the instrument.

Mine arrived with minor faults but I decided to keep it.

Electrics appear fine and present no problems, but I'll look at getting the pots and wiring changed as it's commonly a point where savings in production are made.

Nice guitar and at this price, it's a no brainer. Get one and enjoy playing for the price of a boutique pickup.