Harley Benton SC-450Plus HB Vintage Series Reviews

Amazing!

I've been playing over 30 years and have purchased 25 guitars and this is the best bang for the buck I've ever had. I was expecting to need to do some fret work and a complete setup, but none of that was needed. The frets were all level, smooth on top and sides, and ready for a final polishing. The neck is straight, C shaped and a chunky (which I wanted), no visible flaws in the fit and finish. The overall fit and finish of the guitar is beautiful. I can't find anything wrong with it. It has a nice solid weight to it and feels nice in any position. The only thing that isn't great are the pickups, but I almost always change those in my guitars anyway. They are fine for a new player or if you want to use this to practice, but they can't handle much distortion without getting a muffled sound. Their clean sound has too much of a hollow sound to it. But I didn't expect a guitar at such an incredibly low price to have great pickups anyway. All and all this is an amazing guitar at an amazing price. Congrats Harley Benton, you have a new customer that will be buying many more of your products.

HB SC-450PLUS HB VINTAGE SERIES REVIEW

- NICE FAT HUMBACKING TONES FROM PICK-UPS

- EXCELLENT FINISH AND OVERALL APPEARANCE

- PICKGUARD, TUNERS & SWITCHES/TOGGLES NEED A LOT OF IMPROVEMENT

- ACCEPTABLE WEIGHT & FRET FINISH

- GOOD VALUE FOR MONEY/PRICE

- HIGH ACTION (REQUIRES QA/QC SET-UP IMPROVEMENT)

Great Guitar

Started using using this guitar for stage use - at the price - not too bothered if it gets bash about a bit. BUT for the price it is an amazing guitar! Just needed to tweak the setup of the truss rod and the bridge height and the guitar is great to play. Some excellent features like push pull Volume pots for coil tap on BOTH pickups. Guitar was well packed and arrived in excellent condition. One thing I might do is change the machine heads, they do feel a bit cheap but a new set of grovers or schallers still mean you have a great guitar at a very cheap price. Can't go wrong.

Great Guitar But Needs Work

The shipping was fast. About a week to get from Germany to Texas. I ordered 2 other instruments and honestly, I was not impressed with how it was packaged but thankfully everything survived in fact the body on this guitar looked perfect. No dings or dents or marks that others have said to have. The main issue was the frets, strings, and tuners. The frets were rough and had some grime on them. I immediately took the strings off and polished the fretboard. I then put on a new set of Ernie Ball strings. Readjusted the pickup placement and knob placement. I then set up Intonation as best I could which honestly was pretty hard. Although it has a the tunomatic style bridge I never could get the intonation that close. This might be due to the tuners which are the worst part of this guitar. If you don't plan on ever using this live. It is not an issue. Overall it is an amazing guitar. Beautiful finish and a good feeling neck. Feels like a instrument 3 times its price after the small work I put into it. Out of the box it's fine but not its best.

Good experience.

This is my second Harley Benton guitar.

I am an amateur, I play at home, for myself, for pleasure.

I cannot make a professional assessment. The assessment is subjective.

The workmanship is good. There are small defects in wood processing, but they are not very noticeable. There is a scratch on the pickup frame. No more comments. The guitar looks very nice.

The neck is comfortable. The string height above the neck is normal. But I don't like the glossy varnish on the fretboard, I used to get used to the matt varnish earlier.

The sound is good, but I will then screen all cavities, with overload there is a small background. Maybe it is related to Alnico-5, there is less phoning on the DC-580 guitar.

Summary: very good value for money. A very good guitar for both beginner and amateur musicians.

Amazing guitar!

Strongly recommended for those who love LP sound.

Perfect for beginners

As a beginner I found this guitar to be the perfect match. The price for what you get is astounding. After doing some basic setting up, this guitar plays great, even my more experienced friends were surprised by how great the guitar looks and feels. The tuners stay in tune and the guitar sounds great, enough for any beginner. Only drawback is that a good setup is important as the guitar didnt play well out of the box. I recommend this product for anyone who wants to learn to play guitar.

I had high hopes and they were justified

I had heard great things about the SC-450 Plus from all around the internet and finally bit the bullet. I was concerned that there might be problems as the price was less than it costs me to make a guitar myself.

Delivery

After some issues with PayPal the order was successfully placed and arrived in about a week. Packed in two boxes with no obvious or hidden damage. Nice to see individual protection for the pickup selector switch. One of the little bags of silica gel had torn in the packing process, but caused no issues.

Fit and Finish

The finish is perfect. I held off reviewing this for three weeks expecting that I would find some scratch or flaw somewhere, but I really cannot find anything. Really, the (presumably polyurethane) finish has been exceptionally well applied. The same applies to the paint job over the flame maple veneer (or photo-transfer). The colour is definitely closer to cherryburst than honeyburst, which is great and exactly what I wanted. The frets are well-fitted and neatly finished at their ends, though a little more polish (or playing in) will make bends even easier. The setup is excellent, perfectly intonated and the action perhaps even a shade too low for me. I will fiddle with the bridge height/truss rod when I fit my preferred Super Slinkys (008s).

Pickups, Hardware and Sounds

I fully expected to be changing out the pickups for a set of Irongears almost as soon as this arrived, but the Wilkinson Roswell humbuckers fitted as standard are perfectly good. They are slightly higher output than I would normally choose, but they have great articulation and still sound fine when the push-pull pots are used to select single coil mode. The pickups are wired such that the middle position is out of phase.

The machines are fine and work well, though the green plastic buttons do not look particularly genuine, I do not feel any pressing urge to change them. The bridge and tailpiece are both perfectly fine and do a competent job. The nut is plastic and well-cut and fitted. I might change it for a bone or Tusq model eventually.

Cons

Very minor issues. I will be replacing the tone pots as they have ALL their effect at the very end of their travel. This issue also occurs on much more expensive guitars, to be fair.

Some people might not like the Rosacea fingerboard. It is very light and looks nothing like what you would find on a Gibson. I might try a few coats of light finishing oil if I can be bothered. However the neck is really lovely to play and the trapezoid markers are well cut and fitted.

Now I need an SG....

review

Very good guitar, nice color and sound.

Poor tuners let down an otherwise excellent guitar.

Everything about this guitar screams excellent...except the tuners. They are just awful and need to be changed out. They jump all over the play, slip, and is impossible to tune the guitar up. Very disappointed with this guitar after having a great experience with the ST-62 DLX

First one

First guitar, but great already and easy to use. Only small note is that 5 strings was not set properly over vibrating but definitely good value for money!

Really good one

I'm a beginner guitarist, so I'm not sure whether my opinion is valid but I really love this guitar.

I'll try to focus more on it's looks as I'm not a proffesional player. It looks awesome, it's polished, so reflects all the light and looks super frickin cool to me.

I don't like the fact that you have to tune it every day as it doesn't stay in tune very well but I guess that's acceptable for the price and isn't that big of a deal anyway.

I won't call myself an expert in this but I like the sound of this guitar (obviously you have too change the strings when you get it) and on low gain it sounds to me just like an acoustic guitar.

All things summed up: an awesome piece of a guitar

An excellent guitar for the price

As I had read, the guitar has an excellent quality-price ratio. Visually is very beautiful (maybe, as said by other costumers, the fretboard is a bit dry but that's all). The knobs work great and has an beautiful sound. I totally recommend it.

Not bad...

I no longer play live or record so this guitar is for home use only. Nice body finish, very pretty. A heavyweight guitar - that's a large chunk of mahogany. A little setting up required: the fretboard was dry and needed oiling but fret ends were tidy. Holds tune and plays very well. Overall, I like this guitar, especially at this price.

Wow!

The quality of this guitar rivals most Gibsons I have played. What an insane value for money.

The finish is flawless, the flame maple veneer looks absolutely stunning and the guitar plays great. I know it can be pot luck with harley benton and one of my other harley bentons does have flaws... but this one is pretty much flawless.

The only area where it might fall slightly short of a gibson that is orders of magnitudes more expensive could be the pickups... but even then they sound great and really arent that far off.

The only other criticism would be that the frets could use a good polish and although they arent sharp, they could do with a tiny bit of attention... but you are talking an hour of polishing and restringing to rectify this.

The biggest problem I have is that I bought this for my brothers Christmas and now I really really want one for myself!

Id say you are getting 95% of a gibson for a fraction of the price...

good, juicy sound, great value for the price

Nice guitar overall, sounds great as well, very juicy sound with lots of sustain. The only drawbacks were that one of the small holding screws on the tuner was missing and one of the pots was of a weird height, but both things are ease to fix. Fretboard also had some glue remain. Overall the guitar still looks and sounds great.

Just a Superb Guitar for the money !!

Firstly, Guitar arrived on time and was well packaged. No damage during transit.

The guitar looks the part, in fact looks better than I thought it would for such a cheap price.

It needed some attention, minor adjustments to neck, bridge and annotation. I also decided to line all the cavities with copper foil to eliminate a minor hum.

It has a very good sound and the treble-rhythm switch had a positive feel to it, Volume/tone controls also worked well. The tuning knobs held the strings tightly and the guitar stayed in tune well. I may change the strings to a slightly lighter set in line with what I am used to.

I compared it to my Gibson LP standard and found very little difference in sound quality between them. The Gibson had a slightly fuller sound to it, so considering the price difference I was very happy with this purchase.

I recommend this for anyone wanting a good cheap guitar, you will not be disappointed with it.

Harley Benton SC-450 Plus

bought this guitar as present for my son who is a drummer but plays guitar,this guitar has been used regularly practicing and gigging ,the build quality and sound match guitars i have which i paid double the price .because this is a heavy guitar i changed the screws holding the strap buttons to longer thicker ones ,i cant fault this guitar for the price and would highly recommend to anyone thinking of purchasing one.

Unbelieveable guitar for the price, I am impressed.

I Ordered the Harley Benton SC-450plus HB Les Paul It arrived in a week and when I opened it I was very impressed with the looks and quality of construction, but when I plugged in and played it I was even more impressed. It sounds amazing and plays beautifully. The Roswell pickups sound great and the coil slitting capability opens up a whole range of possible tones, Every thing from metal to jazz is right at your fingertips. The action was perfect out of the box and other than a slight turn of the g string tuner it was in tune. The guitar is well balanced and the fit and finish are flawless. I highly recommend this guitar to anyone that is looking for a Les Paul standard but does not have a couple grand to pay for one, this is the ticket. I have just ordered the Harley Benton DC 580 SG model and it should be arriving in a few days, if I need another Guitar I will be buying it from them.

Betty Honey Burst

This guitar showed up in less than a week!! brilliant to play outta the box tho i did change the strings a few days after it arrived. Avery beautiful guitar and the coil taps are amazing , poor old Bianca Telecastrt, is having a well earned rest now!!!