Harley Benton SC-550 II PAF

HB SC 550II PAF. Beyond my expectations!

The guitar is beautiful. Not a scratch on it. Shipping was very fast. The guitar was set-up right out of the box. Frets are great. No neck-dive. Feels great to play. I'm very impressed and will be buying more Harley Benton guitars. You can't beat the 'quality for the price'. This is a much higher-end guitar than you would expect.

Beyond 'Bang for the Buck'

This thing is raw. The Tesla pickups with my Marshall, straight up and with moderate high gain and some reverb, suits me fine. RAW and powerful. So much so that I am picking up the wine red version. Best value of anything I've ever seen - no joke.

Great budget single-cut

Very impressed with this one. Quality wise I couldn't find any blemishes on the finish, no sharp fret ends no dings or something else. Only one pot had some slight discoloration but very minor. Strings were dead and need changing but I always change my strings even on new guitars. Massive positive this only weighs 3.4kg! Sound wise it's far sounding. The neck is more bassy and "pafy" and the bridge more gnarly. Overall really happy with this guitar and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a single cut!

Perfect for begginers

It is a really really good guitar. Sound is for this price point really nice. Overall for begginers its awesome but it may vary a bit in build quality i had a problem the first one i ordered had scrached frets but i returned it and the other one was amazing.

It arrived quick and was exactly what I wanted

Amazing guitar!

I've been playing guitar for almost 40 years now and I've played plenty of them, from cheap and terrible to expensive and great. I'll skip the whole "for the price" thing because even if comparing this guitar with 800 and 1000 $, this one wins by ko.

With so many good reviews flooding the internet, I was expecting a lot ; but skeptical at the same time. It sounded to good to be true. Either I'm really lucky or this is one of the best guitars out there.

Sounds great and plays great. Makes me want to play non stop. The finishing is excellent. I've looked at it with a magnifying glass and this is simply great.

It is lighter than my Les Paul, but I'm fine with that.

One thing everyone says is trash are the tuners. The color could be better (not a deal breaker for me though) but they work and stay in tune. I've seen worse tuners on epiphones (special series II ebony deluxe comes to mind) or the cheaper squires.

Checked intonation - perfect.

This guitsr was pretty much tune and play out of the box.

A must have!

Simply beautiful, a steal!!!

I've been playing for over 3 decades. This instrument really impressed me.

It looks fantastic. The Tesla pickups will never need an upgrade. Action and playability were good right out of the box.

Even if you're rich enough to afford a high end Gibson, add this to your collection as well. For the price, this instrument is a stage winning, great-sounding, head-turner that you can gig with and not sweat over some clown damaging it.

I'm definitely considering buying a second (in another color) for good measure...

Nice guitar. Solid, good feel and sound.

I now own 5 Harley Benton guitar's. And I have to say they are all great !! They all played and sounded great right out of the box. Some of them required very slight tweaking, but for the price, I don't think they can be beat. They are certainly better quality than the fender squire's. And they cost less. I do not need multiple guitar's, but I might buy more just because the price is great and they are that good. I own the ST-62BK Hotrod, the SC-550II PAF, the HB-35 Plus, the TE-62DB LPB, and the HB-JA60 OW. My wife thinks I am crazy but who cares ?

My favourite double cut

Superb guitar , looks and plays brilliant . For the cost of a Epi you getting a much much better guitar. I've owned loads of guitars from GSO's to Squiers ,Yamaha's , Loads of Epiphones and £ for £ this is only bettered by my Epiphone Casino , a very much more expensive guitar.

Awesome Guitar, but...

I don't want to ramble. I purchased this guitar, one of HB's most expensive, expecting to have to fine-tune it. I'm skilled at doing my own set-ups, geometry, etc. I didn't expect a perfect guitar at this price point. I expected some finish issues, fret issues, tuner issues, possible pickup issues. Here's what I found when it arrived, most important to least, (at least for me):

1) I love the stainless frets and they were polished/finished pretty good except for 2 or 3 frets. They had obvious tool marks on the frets that caught the strings. I had to clean them up and polish them. While I was at it, I did some additional buffing on all the frets since I was already working on it. If not for those two frets or 3 frets, it would have been nearly ready to go.

2) Output balance was off between pickups. I assumed one of the pickups was bad and had planned on replacing them anyway. I put a pair of Gibson '57 Classic's in it, (two-wire, so the wiring was pretty much drop-in), but the neck put out nearly twice the power of the bridge pickup. It was odd. I had the the neck pickup below the surface and the bridge almost touching the strings and they still weren't balanced. "

Long story short, I did a complete rewire using standard H-H wiring with one toggle switch and everything balanced out and the TONE changed. I honestly don't know if they were drunk when they wired it or what but rewiring it turned into the guitar I expected!

3) I don't like, "Kluson" tuners, period. But, I figured, if I have to live with them, then I'm putting good ones on it. I installed Grover vintage-style, "Deluxe" tuners, simply because the gear ratio was higher. Did it matter? Not too much. The stock tuners were about the same.

Finish-wise, I only found one issue and it was hard to spot. When the light is shining just right on the neck, there's a fine line that runs from the back of the nut to the edge of the fingerboard, at a diagonal. It's just a finish crack and it took me a while to find it.

I would have given this 5 stars for sound if it had been wired correctly but I couldn't find a wiring diagram online that matched this mess. And when I rewired it to a more conventional H-H wiring, everything worked!

It was well worth the work and effort. I wouldn't change a thing. It's now my #1!