Harley Benton ST-20 WH Standard Series 5-stars Reviews

An excellent guitar for both a beginner and an experienced guitarist, it sounds very decent. Nice build. An excellent strat for the money.

Wow

I'm in shock at how well made the guitar is. Here is an example of "you get more than you pay for". My plan was to relicing this guitar but now i am not so sure anymore.

best guitar for this money

very good for this money! straight neck, frets rolled up perfectly and do not scratch, the strings are low over the neck. this guitar is ideal not only for the beginner but also for home practice.

Good beginner guitar

My first guitar, looks, feels and sounds great. I never owned any other guitar however I believe the tone knobs should be more responsive, other than that its aweseome.

Fuckin' bonza Bouncer

Awesome bit of kit, spent an hour or so adjusting the action and pick up heights and its well worth twice the dollar. Get one you mothafuckers!!

beautiful

the guitar is beautiful for that price that is the cheapest the quality of sound is incredible i think that you don't need more of that especially as a beginner

Always wanted one

Always wanted a single coil platform that I could make my own. Love how this plays right away, but I look forward to many years of mods. Well built! The neck in particular exceed expectations.

I'm a complete noob, but I like to learn

I have never played guitar, but I decided to give it a try. I had a very limited budget, but I wanted to play it, so I got this beauty.

I like it so much, first of all - appearance, second of all - sound. I'm using Guitar Rig 5 and just having fun while I'm playing it, but the guitar picks up radio frequencies on bridge, middle, and neck, because of bad wiring and I need to fix it. In my opinion the guitar a bit heavy, but I'm a girl, so don't pay much attention to this factor. Guitar tuning was good initially and I really like to hold it in my hands. If you are a complete noob and wanna learn guitar, I would recommend this to you, but if you have an opportunity to play it before buy, try it.

Cannot believe this guitar is well under $100.00

I purchased this guitar a while ago for well under $100.00. I own many strat style guitars and built a few myself and this guitar is incredible for the price. First, If you are a beginner this guitar is PERFECT. If you are a seasoned player all you have to do is exchange the pickups and you have an awesome strat style guitar. I put a set of new Tex Mex Fender pickups (which was not that expensive) and it keeps up with the more expensive guitars. Quality is incredible and for the price it's amazing!

HB - White - Decent Quality

Well, sound is good, but unexpectedly neck quality is really good. Well matte finish and fret ends are amazing. Keyboard material is not like we used to but you dont feel uncomfortable.

The annoying thing is, its not just white, its a bit cream-like color on the body.

Btw: Quick delivery to Turkey. Thnx

My first strat

This is my second guitar. The first one was a single cut style guitar from a higher price range, but I really wanted to try a classical strat without spending all of my savings. And I actually got what I expected!

The exact tone I wanted to hear from a stratocaster (I'm not an expert, but it sounds glassy enough to me). And what surprised me the most is that it's not noisy at all! I have a problem with receiving radio signal in my apartment, but I cannot hear it at all when two pickups are used. Even on the high gain! That's very impressive to me because my single cut receives radio even with its two humbuckers.

The only two things I didn't like is the color of the fretboard (it was too pink, not like on the pictures) and the smell, but the second problem solved itself over time.

Great for the money, it could use some upgrades like better tuners/saddle set, but overal it quite good

Harley Benton ST-20 WH Standard Series

Surprised at the quality of this guitar. Very good for the cost. Strings arent the best . Changed the strings and the guitar sounds and performs brilliant. Highly recommend if you dont have a lot to spend on a guitar

good

overall very impressed frets are good came set up well and with little editing (removing trem back plate/cover and the plastic shim under the neck plate I think it is a great guitar definitely worth £70

Very nice guitar

Compare to price this is a very nice guitar with good sound quality. I love it! The body color is great. The tone is amazing. Finishing of this product is also great! Didn't expected this much considering the price. It is a very nice guitar.

It can be used for practicing, home recording and even if you want you can do some gigs with it too.

The body wood is great. Build quality is very good.

I highly recommend it.

HARLEY ROCK

This Guitar did not have any issue to deal with .I plug it and I play it.

What a surprise!

I bought this guitar to have more set-up experience on different guitars but the second i started to play it i fell in love. This one is most definitely not going in the "mess up and repair" pile.

And for stuff that actualy relates to the guitar:

It is very nice and comfy to play.

The sound is surprisingly good.

Couldn't find any defects or flaws in the overall finishing.

The only thing i did change was the tuners because it wasn't 100% stable(could have been the strings but i just felt like changing it non the less).

So... I would recommend this guitar to anybody who never owned a st style guitar and just wants to check out if he/she is in to it. Or beginners looking to buy their first axe. Or just people who wants another guitar without having to justify it to the spouse :)

Cheers!!

Good Guitar on a budget

I purchased this guitar to act as an upgrade platform for my American Stratocaster, to act as a sounding board for upgrades. I figured for this price that there would be some work to do, but was hoping that it wouldn't be too bad. To make a long story short, I think the guitar met but did not greatly exceed my expectations.

Out of the box, the guitar was quite playable, but unexceptional.

The action wasn't the worst, but was too high for any ones style of playing. A truss rod adjustment helped, but only slightly. A number of frets were too high. I could hammer some of them down, but had to file 5 frets, two of them heavily, to get the frets flat. The truss rod was set up a little weird, the bend created by relief was too high on the neck, so I couldn't get the action as low as I wanted (I like very low action), but at least it was much better and definitely playable.

Tuning stability was kinda meh. I've seen worse, but it wouldn't hold tune for extended periods. Replaced the tuners with Fender American standard tunes and it now has great tuning stability. I also replaced the nut with a graph tech nut, mostly because I it was on a guitar I was selling, so I figured what the heck. The tuning stability using the trem isn't great, but I figure if I put on a heavier trem block and possibly new bridge saddles, then it might be able to hold tune with heavy trem use.

The stock pickups were okay. Not great, but not terrible either, and definitely a surprise in a guitar at this price point(in a good way). I put GFS single coils in it to see if that would help the sound, and it definitely did. I measured the resistance of the stock pickups (ceramics btw), they all measured in at around 4.5k ohms, so I am guessing they all came out of the same bushel basket. The pickups I originally installed were a Texas Special set I had lying around, and although I liked the neck and middle, I just couldn't live with the bridge. Strong for a single coil, but too harsh and trebley. I opted to go HSS with over-wound GFS singles and a Dimarzio 36th Anniversary PAF in the Bridge. Really liking this configuration. The problem I had with it, was the screw holes didn't line out with a standard strat HSS pick-guard. I managed to get 5 screws to line up. I haven't decided if I want to drill new holes or not. The routing is actually set up for HSH, very neatly done too, another surprise. I have worked on numerous Squires, and the routing on this guitar was much better than most of those.

The paint looks good, but is on the thin side, not as heavily painted as Squires. But it is very evenly applied and overall looks like some attention was paid to it.

Roseacer. I havn't decided if I like this or not yet. I did clean the fretboard when I replaced the factory strings (mandatory of course) and it was very dirty (common with new budget guitars). At first it felt kinda chalk-boardy and perhaps a little fake. But the more I play it, the more I kinda like it. Categorizing it is the hardest part. It is not like ebony, rosewood, or maple. It is really its own thing. The neck is kinda a medium width C shape, I would say somewhere in the middle between slim and chunky.

My overall impression of this guitar is that it is a good out of the box guitar, with some good but limited upgrade potential. I keep up on the Squires they are making nowadays, and would have to say that overall this is a bit better than a Bullet Squire, and would compete nicely with Affinity Squire in regards to sound and play-ability. However I would give the Affinity the nod in regards to overall finish work. those guitars have a thicker, higher quality finish to them. I always thought they were designed to look good first, and play/sound good second. This guitar seems to be designed the other way around.

Incredible quality for price

Buying the Harley Benton ST 20 WH Standard Series was one of the best things I did ever! Why I am saying this? Because the quality of the guitar is really good, the shape is really ergonomic, light but not too light to be easily move when holding and not being able to move on the neck correctly.

Visually it is also on par with much more expensive guitars from other brands, but much cheaper. I have to say I couldn't recommend it to a professional guitar player, mainly because of the guitar pickups, but for a beginner guitar player, the guitar could be the perfect guitar due to its versatility, being an SSS pickup formation style guitar and also because of the many types of music someone can play on it. Also even though the tremolo block doesn't seem to thick, I didn't had any problems with not staying in tune, while using the tremolo bar for light to medium pulls and pushes.

The wood is basswood but it's a solid guitar and the reverb that it creates can last quite a while.

Pros:

The overall quality is great for a beginner guitar player that wants a guitar to learn to play on it various styles of music.

The sound and tone of the pickups is really good! Of course it can be improved modifying parts on it, but it is unnecessary for someone that is a beginner.

The guitar stays in tune, taking into consideration that the tremolo is not used excessively and with excessive force.

Cons:

There is a bit of humming, maybe more than expected on a guitar, but at this price and for a beginner, I think it is excusable.

I would have liked the tuning keys to be more precise, but fortunately I do not have to tune it often.

Good Pickups.

I bought this with the intention of upgrading the pickups.

But after 30 minutes of trying to get a "bad" sound out of the

guitar I gave up and decided that the whole sound was

as good as any of my other single coil pickups !!

They have a character of their own but all the sounds are useable and indeed Strat-u-like !! Amazing quality and sound

at this price point.