Harley Benton HP-42 Signature TT Roasted Reviews

Best. Guitar. Ever. (probably not, but it's easily my favorite)

I own a limited number of guitars, such is my budget. I bought this shortly after it was released, I don't recall the price at the time. I do know that since its arrival I've put it to task on solid state amps and numerous modelers. It sounds great. Sure, the P90 hums but it's a single coil. Duh. The option of being out of phase and/or single coil on the humbucker? This thing is a tone variety master. I wish this guitar existed when I started playing, it solves a laundry list of problems by having simple hardware upgrades that make it just a superior product. Moreover, the Roswell pickups legit sound good. Absolutely would recommend to anyone, beginner or advanced. This is a great guitar.

Punches above and beyond.

This guitar resonates like crazy. The pick ups have to go, in favour of more grunt n groan. Beautiful neck lovely wood. Will be savage with a Tone Zone and some punchy p90 installed.

Exceptional quality

What a guitar! Fantastic build guitar. Neck is just brilliant and fret work is exceptional. After a quick setup guitar is really hard to beat under 1K. Guitar came setup up out from the box and fully playable so if you are not into doing a setup yourself it's very good right from the box. Very versatile pickups and sounds good but I will be changing these to Seymour Duncan's to have it truly phenomenal. nothing wrong with original pickups though just I feel that they could be better and this guitar is certainly worth putting an expensive set in to her.

Versatile quitar; good sounding and good looking; great value for money

I bought this guitar mainly for personal use. No gigs intended since playing guitar is only a hobby.

This is my second Harley Benton.

First was a T-Style kit I built with my son a few years ago. Good a DYI and for a beginner.

I was looking for a P90 equipped guitar and I came across Henning Pauly's signature model.

I liked besides the versatility - a bridge humbucker with single-coil option and a P90 neck pickup - the quality of the build and the components. And the story behind building it.

What I received exceeds my expectations. Sounds great - even for my (lack of) experience. And it looks much better than the pictures. Harley Benton products are no longer "cheap" but rather "affordable". Great products for their price range!

If I have to find a flow that was the action that was set a bit higher but other than this it was ready to go.

Going to buy again.

Most important is I got what was described, and speaking to customer service was a good experience. Price is perfect.

Love this guitar

I was going to write a long review but really I think all I need to say is that this guitar ticks all the boxes for me and I’d have to take some convincing to consider any of the more expensive brands in the future. The only minus for me is probably the humbucker, I don’t think it’s bad by any means, but there is maybe just that bit of edge lacking (probably exacerbated a bit by the fact the P90 sounds so good). Overall feel like I made a great choice.

For they money a steal

I was looking for something different and something that was versatile and this guitar sure delievers.

It has many options sound wise with coil spliting and also out of phase options and the pickups especially the P90 sounds very good. This is by no means a metal axe, the clean tones are lovely if you are into blues and funk, for rock the P90 and humbucker sounds great driven and gives you a lot of classic rock and punk rock/alternative rock vibes.The locking tuners are also a huge plus as this guitar when the strings are stretched will hold tune very well.

The fit and finish is good for this price point . There is very little to complain about,a few flaws here and there but for the price can be forgiven. The maple top and maple neck and fretboard feel and look wonderful, all I needed to do was adjust the intonation and it plays very well.

Overall this is a great guitar and I adore it, Harley Benton and Henning Pauly did a great job on this model and for the money the fit and finish, sound and features are insane

Great features with a few issues

This guitar looks fantastic and has incredible specifications. My favorite features are the neck and the P90. This is the first guitar I have owned with a roasted maple neck and I was really surprised by how slick it feels.

Unfortunately, I had issues with both the nut and the saddles. The original nut had a double trough in the G string slot that would cause the string to jump between troughs when bending the string which produced a horrible sound. In addition, the action at the nut was twice as high as your typical spec which caused intonation issues at the first three frets. To make matters worse, I had to replace the nut twice because I'm not exactly a luthier. I finally got the nut sorted out and realized I had a bad sitar sound coming from several strings. I added a graphtec string tree on the D and G strings because there was literally no break angle between the nut and tuners. The B string was a different issue. The sitar sound on the B string was caused by metal burrs on the saddle just behind the string break point.

After several months of fighting, It works!

Great Guitar!

This is a really good guitar. You get high end specs at a fraction of the cost. The roasted maple neck is super comfortable to play. The stainless steel frets are buttery smooth and well rounded at the edges. I love the push-push pot and the ability to go out of phase. The pickups sound great (especially the P90S). Great tuning stability. Strongly recommended.

very good

beautiful looking

plays very nicely.

great variety of sounds (with the p90 neck, humbucker bridge, and coil taps on both control knobs)

I've had this for 6 months and it is my most played guitar (also have gibson les paul, fender strat and others).

stays in tune well.

fretboard feels nice

bridge is great.

I can't honestly fault this guitar.

Good Guitar for a Great Price

Overall really decent guitar, I had some issues with the nut on mine but the neck is pretty good and the Roswell pickups sounded a lot better than I imagined based on several youtube reviews.

I would highly recommend this as a beginner guitar but I would not necessarily put it in the same realm as Ibanez AZ or Suhr as many other reviewers have done. With a roasted maple neck and stainless still frets it may also be a good base for upgrading if that is what you are looking for.

Another outstanding guitar at an incredible price!

This is my second Harley Benton guitar. My first was the Harley Benton Fusion-II HH FR Roasted FBB, which I was very impressed with. I wrote a review for it, as well, which you can read on the product page. I was hoping that this guitar would be as good as that one. It definitely is.

Just like with my Fusion-II, I could find no finish flaws at all. The color of this guitar looks very green on the product page, but in person, it truly is a turquoise color. That shouldn't have been a surprise, but it was. Just a little bit, anyway. It wasn't a bad surprise, though. It's a beautiful guitar and I'm still very pleased with the way it looks.

The neck is a very fast, satin-finished, delicious-looking caramelized color. The soft V profile makes chording an absolute joy and the moderately flat radius also allows for easy string bending. I've owned dozens of guitars over the past 31 years and this guitar has one of the best necks I've ever played. Yeah, it's really that good.

The pickups were a bit of a surprise, too. I own a somewhat similar guitar, a Yamaha Pacifica 611HFM, which is also a hard-tail guitar with a bridge humbucker and a P90 neck pickup, too. That guitar has Seymour Duncan pickups in it, so it obviously sounds great. To my ears, though, the Roswell pickups in this guitar sound just as good, if not better. Perhaps they're not top quality, but these pickups just seem to match the tonewoods used in this guitar so well that I have no plans to change them.

The coil tap and phase switching makes this guitar very versatile. It can sound bright, warm, loud, soft, and sort of odd with the phase inversion switched on, but all of the sounds are nice and usable. I wish I could say the same for some of my other, more expensive guitars.

The GraphTech nut and locking tuners are very nice touches, as well, and completely unheard of in this price range. My Pacifica has both of these features, too, but it also cost almost double what this guitar did. Kudos to Harley Benton for caring enough to install such quality parts, because the tuning stability is very solid as a result and sometimes that's all a good guitar needs to become a great guitar, like this one is.

Overall, this is an excellent guitar that looks sharp, plays smoothly, sounds sweet, and stays in tune very well. I'm very happy with it.

If you're thinking that this somewhat unusual guitar might be right for you, then you're probably 100% right and I highly recommend it without a doubt.

Extremely Well Built For Price

I had seen Harley Benton guitars on you tube a few months ago,

At first I just watched, thinking they can not be that good at the price point that everyone was saying, At that time there wasn't a thought in my mind of purchasing one for any reason.

I own 30 plus guitars with a majority of those being Gibson so all though these looked good I was just a sideline watcher.

Knowing that Henning Pauly knows a good guitar when he gets his hands on one, I decided to give has signature Harley Benton a shot, paid the expedited shipping and three days it arrived.

( Now the packing was RIDICULOUS for a package sent around the block let alone half way across the world, Okay, it wasn't that damaged other than a mark on the headstock where the inter box with nothing else around it had flew around in the larger box and wiped out the styrofoam at the end of the box and the headstock ripped through the cardboard).

Pure luck, back to the guitar, simply put its a very beautiful guitar and plays great ,fit and finish are spot on it stays tuned up and sounds great.

Don't know if i will be a repeat customer over the packaging issues.

couldn't imagine buying a top of the line Les Paul and it arriving that way.

In conclusion if you decide to get this guitar you won't be disappointed, ROCK ON

Good guid

It's a really good guitar. Great sound (with lot of options), well made, good hardware, good balance, not heavy. The neck is definitely thicker than on Ibanezes.

It would be great if there was a product guide with a description of all its functions (the Push-Push knobs) - now, players have to guess what does what or search it on YouTube.

Great idea behind a guitar

First thing first - technical idea behind the guitar is great. P90 and split humbucker that can go to single coil. With an "out-of-phase" push=push selector. The amount of sound you can take from this guitar are incredible. Then we have the guitar itself. Silver hardware, locking tuners. Neck with tiger stripes. And mapled top green like Ireland. With matching headstock. Guitar is keeping in tune for a long time (after 10 hours/5 days drop half a semi).

And aboe that it fit perfectly in the hand. The neck is nice to run up and down, there is no problem with access to all frets.

Amazing neck, sounds terrific

This guitar has the best neck and fretwork that I have seen on any roasted maple neck guitar

Incredibly good

I bought this guitar after watching the YouTube videos from EytschPi42.

I have a lot of faith in the opinion of Henning Pauly, the inventor, and despite that, this guitar has exceeded my expectations. It is my first HB.

This guitar is definitely a keeper. The sounds are great and multi and the feel of the guitar speaks to me , I directly bonded with it.

My advice, buy this guitar while you can!

Tremendous value

I now have two, I believe they are an awesome guitar for the money. If this was not EytschPi42's signature model it would be my signature mode! The neck feels like an old friend in my hands. The pickups are surprisingly good and they cover a lot of tonal territory with all the switching. The fretwork is very good for this price of guitar and the bridge is beefy and solid. I several other more expensive guitars that are not going to get played for a while as these two are the ones I will practice with the most. I look forward to them releasing this in more colors.

Cracking looking guitar - great value

So, probably like many I bought this after seeing the YouTube videos from EytschPi42.

It was an impulse purchase that I don't regret in any way.

The guitar looks fantastic front and back, I love the roasted maple effect flamed neck. Like some I would probably have gone for the purple pickups and would have rather liked the fretboard logo too - but hey, I can live with out them as the guitar still looks great.

In regard to playability - its lovely - the neck feels great - action is nice out of the box and overall sound is great too. Neck pickup seems particularly nice, warm and quite punch - I'm not sure about the rear - it seems little weak.

It's early days and I'm still trying to work out the push mechanism of the coil tapping, and phase control. in single coil mode the rear pickup seems particularly weak.

It comes with a warning note around the pots to stop you pulling on them so take note before you find the knob in your hand !

Overall though very pleased with my purchase.