Harley Benton R-458BK Fanfret 3-stars Reviews

Good budget guitar

Simple guitar, nothing special. Throw in some good pickups and it may sound great. Playability is quite good. Materials are cheap, not a surprise for this budget.

Nice and beauty guitar

Well balance, good weight. Excellent platform for upgrade parts. The neck is comfortable and the "Blackwood" fretboard is beautiful.

it's a reasonable starter guitar

this is okay for beginning to learn how to play an 8 string guitar, and don't get me wrong it does sound pretty good for the price.

but the hum of the pickups and overall quality of the tuning heads isn't really worth it if you're looking to use this for long term use.

the tuning heads themselves go out of tune very quickly, i find myself having to re-tune the bottom string to F# quite a lot when i'm recording with this.

it is a very nice looking guitar, but just doesn't operate quite as well as i would have hoped, which should be expected of such an inexpensive product.

Sounds good, doesn't quite arrive ready to play

I ordered this and after a weeks wait it came with at least 4 frets that hadn't just popped out but the fret was actually broken off from the tang / fret anchor on the high e string causing horrible buzzing for the top 3 strings, something that should have been caught before shipping. The tang / anchors were incredibly thin, thinner than an Ibanez Gio or any of my other guitars.

That aside the guitar sounded pretty good, a little muddy in the low end. I actually like the 'smoother' sound of the higher strings.

The build quality was ok but it did not come ready to play. The fret board was visibly dry and the frets were unpolished or not well sanded so bending and vibrato created scratchy sounds. Tuners and saddles were okay but the nut didn't look cleanly glued and it seemed almost as if the fret board had been sanded to slope down on the high e string.

Overall I would go with something else unless you're okay with the possibility of having to wait to return it and get a replacement. The fret problem is also a major concern for longevity.

good luck hearing the entire range

For the price, really, I couldn't ask for very much more. Thing plays better than I was expecting, tuning stability is deceptively good, pots are quiet, neck has zero dead spots, etc.

Basically, the thing is great EXCEPT for the fact that, for whatever reason, the pickups frequency response is pretty much zero in the high end. Mushy, muddy tone down low on the 7th and 8th string (again, better than i was expecting for under 200$), and you cant even hear the 1st string about 80% of the time you're playing it. No clue if i got bad pickups or not, but damn did that kill my enjoyment of it. Could always drop new pickups in it, but this thing being routed slanted and for soapbars leaves me very little choice in what i can put in there, all of which being more expensive than the rest of the guitar.

In short, it's good for the price, and for once, a HB sounds like its price.