Harley Benton SC-1000 SBK Progressive Line Reviews

Very Impressed

I have been very impressed with the Harley Benton product line. I like the finish, the sound from the active pickups and the overall feel of this guitar. I also bought the white version.

My new favorite guitar

I bought this as my "Drop D" guitar and to cover Lamb of God songs and other bands I don't usually play with my "main" guitars.

It's my first guitar with active pickups, and also the cheapest guitar I've ever bought... so despite the glowing reviews it already has, I wasn't sure what to expect (I bought a Harley Benton bass many years ago and it was quite bad...).

Well I'm very impressed... despite a few cons listed below, this guitar is amazing, not just for the price I paid, but amazing in general! It looks great, it plays great and it even sounds great! I wish there were other colors so I could buy more of it (maybe a translucent black one, or glossy black... not interested in the white version).

Pros :

- Great pickups. So much better than the messy pickups in my Ibanez RG421. Aggressive, punchy, but detailed.

- Great action, neck and factory setup : of all my guitars, this is the easiest to play and it "feels" the most expensive.

- Looks great, but... (see cons)

Cons :

- Tuners are terrible and need to be replaced. You have to retune it every single time you pick it up.... and it's very hard to tune it right. They are the most imprecise I've ever seen. A joke !

- Inlays are made of cheap non-reflective plastic... It's a real shame because it's the only thing on the guitar that very clearly looks "cheap"... and it's also very noticeable even if you don't know much about guitars.

- The nut isn't glued properly on my guitar! It's not centered on the neck and sticks out slightly on one side. I will replace it with a bone nut.

- it's heavy and most of the weight is on the bottom of the body, with a tiny little arm in the front it's very hard to keep it balanced if you play sited.

Despite the cons it's possibly the greatest sounding guitar I own (my others are an Ibanez RG421-WK and a Schecter Damien 7). I love this guitar!

My main weapon

This is a great guitar from Harley Benton..really love the sound, appearence..the only con is the tuning machine, always need to retune after about 2-3 hours..but everything's perfect when its arrived, intonation, height and not to mention its equipped with daddario string..

Great guitar for the money

This is a lot of guitar for the money, and for that alone you can't go far wrong.

The first thing that surprised me was the weight of the guitar. It's certainly no featherweight, so I'd recommend purchasing a decent strap with it.

Construction is good and it certainly feels well built (although my guitar did have a small chip from the headstock).

The active pickups sound great and give a very pleasing tone. It sounds fantastic with plenty of distortion, giving a very clear and controlled crunch, but is equally suited to clean jazzy tones.

Harley Benton impressed me with this guitar and I can definitely see myself ordering another HB in the future.

The definition for "Bang for the buck!"

I was just a few weeks away from a show and needed a backup guitar desperately. Money was a bit tight but couldn't afford going to another show and risking breaking another string. (My main axe has a floyd rose, so you know how much it time is wasted changing a string on stage!) So I found this guitar and thought to myself, "how bad could it be"?

So I ordered the guitar, and after a few hours of jamming with it I ended up confirming this was some of the best €166 ever spent on an instrument. I ended up playing the show with this guitar (as opposed to leaving it for backup), and held up just fine! Very pleased with the guitar and would personally suggest it to anyone who needs a backup guitar or who is yet starting out!

A Very Good Copy

. . of the much more expensive other brand guitars with 1000 in the name.

These are my initial observations; I shall update the review over the coming months as I play it for more than a few minutes.

The set up out of the box was not bad at all: it was almost in tune. The action is set fairly low which suits me. The intonation is only marginally out, and I shall correct that when I go through set up after it has acclimatised for a few days. As it comes though it is perfectly playable.

The sound is acceptable rather than breathtaking. I am using a couple of Mustang 3s and a Zoom G3X pedal. No doubt a thicker sound would be obtainable with a valve amp, but I don't have one (maybe the next purchase?) There is a reasonable range of tones available, and there is very little noise from the active circuit, less, in fact than the noise from the Wilkinson passive pickups on a couple of my other guitars.

Playability: a very nice neck profile and a smooth silky matt finish. The frets are well set and there is not a trace of them straying past the neck edge binding. The fingerboard frets cleanly all the way up on every string. Truly impressive at this price point.

Finish: almost the fly in the ointment. It's not bad at all, but clearly not anything like the finish on a much more expensive instrument. There are a couple of traces of glue on the fingerboard (easy to remove), a smudge of paint that has not quite been cleaned off on one side of the nut, and the striping on the body edge binding is a bit hit and miss, with the lines breaking up in places. The matt finish on the body appears to be flawless. The gold plated hardware does look a touch delicate in places, and indeed the bridge is - care is needed adjusting the intonation.

I bought this because I wanted another guitar with a two octave neck to pair with the playing position of my Epiphone Prophesy, and it easily and impressively fills that role.

Overall, despite not being perfect, it is close. At this price point it is amazing value for money, hence the 5 star headline rating.

Update after six weeks of ownership: It is just outstanding - so glad I bought it. I really can't recommend it highly enough.

Great Guitar

Excellent guitar for the price. Feels great to play and it sounds excellent too. You'd have to look hard to find any problems with this guitar and to be honest I was expecting a few because it was so relatively cheap but overall it's a very good guitar.

Amazing guitar!!

Finish - proporcional to the price, really good - looking guitar

Sound - very amazing, strong signal but less noise, easy to use of volume knobs - can be used for fluent transition from "clean" to lead sound.

Cons are only not too firm tuning (maybe can be solved with new zero fret)

It's a good guitar for its price. I bought this guitar as my first electric guitar ever, and i'd say, im quite happy with it. The guitar sounds amazing when playing with heavy sounds and is also nice with cleaner sounds.

There some few minor problems what came with the guitar. The pickups weren't adjusted right (pickups were closer to lower strings than to the higher ones), the strings weren't on the same level and also one of the pickup frame in less than a month. The varnish on guitar comes off really easily. Also i checked the frets heights and noticed, they weren't on the same level either (only couple of them)

Anyways, i recommend this guitar to everyone, who are looking for an amazing but cheap guitar.

Amazing guitar!

Guitar very well made.just opened the box and started playing no tweaking was needed.sound and playability is great.It is worth every penny however it looks like it wont take good any hitting.

Harley Benton L-1000 Progressive Line VB

I bought this guitar because i liked the colors and it was cheap, but now that i have it, i am so happy i bought it, the active pickups are absolutely amazing, have a fantastic sound and are relatively less noisy than the pickups in my Gibson flying v. the matte black finish is amazing and the gold hardware that comes with it really makes it stand out on the guitar rack, the flag inlays are just another feature that make it look fantastic, i give this guitar 5 stars for the quality and price, defiantly recommend picking this one up, i will also be buying the white model.