Harley Benton TE-52 NA Vintage Series 5-stars Reviews

A Work Of Art

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Unbelievable value!

This is one of my favorite guitars. It is simple and elegant. It plays great is a super value! Highly recommended!

Harley Benton TE-52 NA Vintage Series

Home, club and bigger live gigs using.

Amazing stuff! Neck and frets finished better as in Big F Player series!

Sound ( still sound checking, but every day more and more addictive).

As my first T Style guitar- great option.

Everything one expects from a T style guitar!

Just blown away. Fit and finish is top notch. Pickups are fantastic. Mine arrived in the USA in perfect condition. Its a beautiful guitar. In my honest opinion this guitar will blow other T-style guitars out of the water that cost 10x the amount.

FYI: It is fairly heavy but I expected it because 1. its ASH and 2. I own the Harley Benton ST-90SA Swamp Ash DLX Series which is kinda the same guitar but an S type.

I own 8 Harley Bentons and haven't been disappointed yet.

A Far Better Guitar Than it's Price Would Suggest

Having read the great reviews for this guitar, I decided to scratch the itch I had for a Telecaster style guitar. The main attributes for me are build quality and through-body stringing on a vintage-looking and feeling guitar. After-all. I have a very clear idea of how I need this thing to sound, so the pickups will be swapped eventually.

On arrival, it was found to be very well packed and had turned up in two days with the packaging undamaged. The guitar itself has survived the journey perfectly, so that is really great. It plays and feels much better than I thought it would and after it had acclimatised properly, I embarked on setting it up to my preference. The frets all needed a bit of polishing with 3500 wet and dry, micromesh and Autosol to rid the roughness on string bends. The frets are beautifully level anyhow, so it was an easy enough job, only to be expected on such an inexpensive guitar. I gave the neck a tiny bit more relief and was amazed how low I was able to take the action. Intonation was pretty much perfect out of the box. Plugging in, I found it pretty quiet for a single coil machine and to my utter surprise, once I'd found the best height, those Roswell pickups gave me exactly what I was looking for in heaps! I'm never going to change them as they want for nothing. The body is is absolutely beautiful, solid and a little, (but not too much) heavy. Cosmetically there were a couple of flaws: It had been damaged at the headstock and first fret with an indentation hehind the nut where the bottom E string had been knocked into it. The finish had also been removed on the edge of the neck and headstoch around it slightly. There was also an inch-long, fairly deep scratch through the finish on the front, which I ran a bead of clear poly lacquer into, flattened it back and polished it until it completely dissapeared. I didn't consider these things good enough reason to return such a great guitar, especially at that price-point. In summary, this really has exceded my expectations to the point that I'd consider it the perfect Tele-style guitar for me. It would stand up against any I've ever played before it and my Gretsch guitars aren't really getting a look in any more. So much guitar for so little money.

Сlassic sound

If you are looking for the classic sound of a telecaster - you found it, at least I definitely found.

A real quality and well-sounding Telecaster for a very small price.

A real quality and well-sounding Telecaster for a very small price! :) Looks and sounds like an expensive guitar! Very solid and heavy. Only a small polishing of frets is needed.

PROS: Absolutely amazing Tele!

CONS: personally for me - not found! :)

This is a great value for money.

feel and plays like a fender telecaster . i can't find a thing wrong with it.

Well, it's a solid body Tele, as good as any I've owned at 5 to 10 times the price. Plays great, sounds great (subjectively speaking), and has killer sustain. I love it.