Harley Benton TE-52 NA Vintage Series Reviews

Ehm just wow.

Honestly i don't know what to say i just love this guitar, it is pretty much perfect for me any way and the finish is superb i haven't found a single flaw.

Ok for the price it obviously isn't a custom shop item but god damn it is good or maybe i am just lucky. This thing sustains for ever and feels quality. The frets aren't perfect a bit rough not terrible but could be better.

Hardware seems fine but i have changed the pots, tuners and bridge saddles to compensated brass ones. This is more to do with personal preference than anything else.

At the end of the day i love this thing it just feels right and sounds fantastic for me it's perfect.

Excellent for the price

Very nice instrument as expected after reading so many good reviews. Just a few of things to consider:

1. It comes with 10-46 strings (not 9-42 as advertised)

2. Rather high intonation. Managed to go as low as 2mm(12th fret) on the high E before the saddle screw pops out. I guess new saddles may allow lower string hight.

3. Fret edges are good. Some frets would be better off with polishing but after a few hours of bending they feel good already.

4. Guitar is kinda heavy.

Overall looks and sounds great. Good choice not only for beginners but those who are not brand snobs.

Incredible guitar regardless of price

I ordered this TE-52 and two other Harley Bentons. I had watched many reviews online about these guitars and thought i would give them a shot. Due to the Covid 19 outbreak it took forever to get here but they finally arrived today. I couldn't believe my eyes when I unboxed this guitar. The fit and finish are flawless. The chunky satin neck feels awesome in my hands. I expected the weakness of this guitar would be the pickups. But not the case at all. It sounds amazing! Just like a Tele should. I can's be happier with my purchase. Easily smokes any Squier I have owned, and it's not even close. A quick tune and a minor tweak to the high E string and this thing is good to go.

AMAZED!

very good guitar for the price

For the price, the sound is very good. I am blown away.

A Work Of Art

I received my Harley Benton TE-52 today. I am so pleased. It is beautiful. Thank you so much.

Overall great. minor finish issues.

I got this guitar because I needed a tele but I didn't have alot of money. this guitar is amazing it sounds very good. there's a guitar store I go to monthly and every time I go I play the fender player telecaster and tbh this sounds just as good! there are some small finish issues next to the bridge and one of the tuners appears to be scratched but everything else is good!

Dreams comes true

For a long time I wanted a fender telecaster with a texas pick-ups, I fell in love with this sound, but the funds did not allow me to buy it.

When I bought the TE-52, I thought it would be an easy consolation compared to the fender telecaster, but I liked this sound even more.

Pros:

-Great sound of a real Telecaster

-Low price even for my country of residence

-The build quality and fittings are at a decent level

-Incredible sound on the hi-gain for single pick-ups

Cons:

-It is quite heavy, someone may not be used to it(I'm not)

-The default value is the 9th string gauge. It's too subtle for me personally

I am not a serious musician with serious musical thoughts. I just do what I like and I definitely like this guitar :)

Tele-tastic

So this was my first foray into the world of Harley Benton.. in short I will and did order more!! It is stupid not to buy this guitar at the price it is at.. it is amazing value and it’s not good for the money it’s great in general I would be happy paying more than double.. beautiful heavy body with that unmistakable Tele sound that you don’t even get with cheap fenders.. and the playability is just like butter was set up and intimated perfectly straight out of the box which again is awesome for the small price of this guitar..

Great Looking Guitar

I was impressed with how this guitar looked when I unpacked it. I really gave it the once over and couldn't find anything wrong with it cosmetically. As far as the set-up, it needed a little work to get her up to speed but nothing that the average player couldn't handle.

Pros

Great sound and you can really get that Tele twang out of it.

Cons

This thing is heavy, mine weighed in over 10 pounds. So be ready for a long night if it's the only guitar you have for your gig.

It's a really nice guitar for the price but it's a little stiffer now that shipping rates to the US have gone up.

Great guitar for the money

I was looking for a cheap guitar to practice on while living away from home for a few months and this one popped up one day.

It is my first Tele style guitar and this one exceeded my expectations. It looks really good and no setup was required after taking it out of the box.

The sound is pretty good considering the specs and the neck feels good in my hands, although the frets need a bit of polish as others have pointed out. They seem quite abrasive when bending the strings.

The resonance of the instrument when not plugged it is also quite good.

Before buying it, the plan was to donate it to someone before going back home but in the end I had to take it with me so I unscrewed the bolts on neck and put it in my luggage.

I would recommend this guitar to anyone who wants an extra practice guitar or even for doing gigs if it suits your style. You cannot go wrong for the money you pay for it.

Harley Benton TE-52 NA Vintage Series

For the price this was a well put together guitar which sounded good. Mine needed some fret level & crowning work plus a good setup though. I didn't keep it for long because I didn't like the feel of the neck on it. Nothing wrong with it, but just too fat & chunky for me personally.

Insanely good for the money

I've been playing Jazz and blues for 30+ years and have always wanted a telecaster. Bought this on impulse and was not disappointed, it sounds and looks fabulous. I can't leave it alone and am grinning from ear to ear.

My other guitars are a 1998 Gibson ES175 and a late 80s Tokai high end Strat copy with Seymour Duncan SSL1s installed. This guitar holds its own next to them. There's a clean country twang on the bridge, a lovely biting clear mid position and rich woody neck tones.

The setup was pretty good: decent neck relief and intonation, the frets are all smooth and level and bends are free and easy all over the neck. The pickups are really good and the pots smooth and responsive. The only slight area for improvement is the tuners but that's a cheap and easy fix. This is a really decent instrument in its own right - at £129 it's an insanely good deal. That's less than a set of replacement pickups! Thoroughly recommended and well worth the month wait.

Great guitar!

I bought TE-52 as my first HB guitar and after a year of use, I still enjoy playing the guitar.

My guitar was made 10/2018 and after receiving it I was really satisfied. Really great looking two-piece ash body with all the bells and whistles that a T style guitar should have. There are saddle differences in shape between the "real" T guitar, but they are barely noticeable. The ash body is heavy, but I like it.

Default strings (009 gauge) were a little rusty and the frets needed little polishing, but there was no buzzing - all frets and string were fine. I was able to lower the action to personally preferred ~1.5mm (high E)/ ~2mm (low E) at 12th fret without a buzzing at all. The fret ends were not sharp and were nicely filed.

The neck was set up fine and the shape is C (thicker), but that is fine for me. There was a lot of dust everywhere (bellow the tuners an also in the neck slot). The neck fit was tight (even after cleaning the dust) and was seated quite straight. The bridge feels good and does not look cheap, but If you want you can easily upgrade it to the Wilkinson bridge with brass saddles. Because of the classic bridge design without compensation, the intonation is a little bit challenging, but that is the deal with this type of bridge on all T guitars. The ferrules are loose and you have to keep them I check when changing strings, but that is also a normal thing. The dots on the fretboard seems to be printed (?), the skunk-stripe seems to be inserted wood, but the truss rod was inserted in a more modern way under the glued fretboard.

The tuners are leaving some space for perfection. They are holding tuning well, but each tuner feels differently (some loose, some tight), and generally, I would expect a little bit more. String trees do not bind the strings and the nut is plastic with a flat bottom. The string height at the first fret is ok and the guitar was nicely playable.

The wiring was fine and functional with small diameter pots. It was a little bit different from standard wiring but the sound was good. The pickups are fine - if you really want to get to the T sound as close as possible, you might consider an upgrade of the pickups and of the wiring, otherwise, they sound perfectly fine on their own.

Great guitar for the price.

Not bad

The TE-52 is all around not a bad instrument, I would however say that the one I received was incredibly heavy so for a live situation I would never use it.

Excellent guitar

For the price I was a bit wary but thought that if it wasn’t very good then I could mod it in various ways

No need to,it was fine straight out of the box,a slight tune up and off we went

Both pickups are fine and sound really good clean or dirty,in fact my other guitars are gathering dust

For the money it is by far the best guitar I have owned,I thought about buying another one but if it’s this good then I’d play that one all the time instead of this one

Don’t hesitate if you are interested in this guitar,you won’t be disappointed

Excellent guitar for the price .

te 52

after reading and watching videos on this i couldnt believe it when i got this. just pure amazing. i couldnt believe it for this price point. well built sounds great and not one flaw at all. will be ordering again.

Easily compares to the Fender Player series

Having owned several Harley Benton guitars, the TE-52 is easily one of my favorites. The neck profile is very comfortable, and the guitar feels of much higher quality than the price would suggest! I played many Fender Player series Tele's, as well as more expensive ones, and there isn't a big difference in quality until you get to the Performer series and up.

Pro's

- Neck profile; it's deeper than Fender's "Deep C" but about the same width.

- Tone; the pickups sound pretty good; I think similar to how a Player series would sound.

Con's

- Weight; this is barely a con, but this guitar has some weight to it. It's definitely not "too heavy" but it's about a pound heavier than my Fender American Pro Strat. Worth mentioning for anyone who is sensitive about weight.

- Tone control; the volume and tone pots don't have a lot of range ... don't expect anything fancy like treble bleed, and the tone knob doesn't do much until it's almost completely rolled back.

Twang it is.

I'm just a home hobbiest when it comes to musical instruments. I played bass in high school in a couple of garage bands over 40 years ago and recently retired. So I saw these TE-52's and thought I'd give one a try as my old Squier Strat from the 90's was looking kinda lonesome over in the corner and some of the controls were needing some TLC but she doesn't look appealing enough for romance.

Well I watched a few reviews on the TE-52 and the price was right for me, so I pulled the trigger and bought one. I think it took about three weeks to make it to Texas from the time of purchase.

Pros

This guitar looked great our of the box. The overall finish was flawless. The wood grain was visually appealing, the neck had a satin finish on the back, which I like versus a sticky neck, and it didn't have any dings or blemishes.

Cons

This guitar was not gig ready out of the box. But for the price point, I fully expected to have to do a setup on it.

Fretwork. The frets had visible machine marks on the tops and were very scratchy out of the box. The ends were sharp and rough on the hands.

Neck. The neck arrived out of alignment. I had to loosen the screws on the back at the joint and realign the neck to correct the side to side alignment of the string track over the neck. There's a little excess play in the neck joint and if it shifts again, I may need to put a shim in it. As of now, six months later, it has not moved.

I also had to adjust the relief a little.

I changed the string trees to rollers and the saddles to brass, just because I wanted to. I don't think there was anything wrong with the original components.

Summation

All in all I am pleased with this purchase. Yeah, there's some time involved in setting up the instrument before it's ready to jam, but once it's properly setup, the frets are crowned and polished, it's fun to play. The only thing missing in the box was the man card, because this guitar has testoterone in its dna.

Great except high frets somewhere around 17-21 making fret buzz

The base is solid, but has some fret buzz problems if you want to play up to and past the 10-12th fret.

The guitar is a great feeling, chunky, solid base product. My only issue is that a fret or two high up the neck is buzzing. I don't want to send it back to Europe over that (import to US) but it is disappointing. I had to raise the action till it's about 4+ millimeters at least at the 12th fret to get it to stop. So this guitar has the worst action of all my guitars.

So it's hard to play, but it sounds much better than my $150ish Squier and feels close, maybe even better in construction than my $350ish Epiphone. I don't know if it's the pickups or the rest of the construction or what but it is the best single-coil sounding guitar I have ever had.

I'll take the opportunity buy some fret leveling tools and try to fix it myself. In the long run, I guess I might save money learning to fix this stuff myself but I wish could have just enjoyed playing this otherwise great guitar right out of the box.