Harley Benton Slider II Vintage Series 4-stars Reviews

Best entry lapsteel

It does the job and use it sometimes for western cinematic type music. The single coil is crisp but amazingly the tone and volume knobs work like a high-end instrument and I use it for fine adjusting the sound. No issues so far. Maybe the design of the headstock is bad, because strings touch the lower inner part. Overall is good

Good Entry Level Slide Guitar

Pros: Cheap, easy to set up. Light but robust.

Cons: Slight ground hum, the silver screws on the fret board can be confuse with the fret markers (ideally, they need to Matt Black)

Good entry level instrument

Great introduction to slider guitars. The main con is tuners, they are just awful. After I changed these, tuning stability became much better. Also put Humbucker instead of SIngle coilm so no more hum.

But for the prise it is a steal, even with all the adjustments it's very affordable.

Great value

I think that some of the reviews here have been harsh. Yes, top-grade strings, tuners an electronics would improve this instrument, naturally. They would also treble the price. This is a perfect lap steel for a beginner who just wants to try one out. At the price, it's absolutely remarkable. When I fed the sound in through a decent setup at home, it was excellent. When I have mastered this one, I can always trade up...

Pretty good for the price.

It's pretty good for this price. I thought it had a bit loud single coil buzz but it turns out it was just picking up noise from other electronics. Plugging it in different wall socket helps.

Great entry point

Ordered with a gift card i received from a labelmate as thanks for some help with bass tracking. The build quality is impressive for this price, potentiometers are quite frictiony and the tuners jump around a little but the body itself is solid as a rock.

The lone single-coil sounds a bit dinky at first but once you get your pedals/amp dialed in to add some beef it sounds really nice, not microphonic at all and gets some lovely twang when you compress it a bit! Shockingly little hum as well.

This is my first dedicated lap steel but i've had quite a few guitars in my day and i can definitely say that most people will definitely get quite a bit of use out of this thing. I'll likely be upgrading the pickup and tuners at some point but it's definitely a very competent instrument as is.

New toy for my studio

I don"t play lap steel but I sometimes buy things to try to learn. It sounds good and the quality of the build seems good so I'm happy with my purchase.

Good sound and quality for a cheap price!

The Harley Benton Slider II Vintage Series - 6-string Lap Steel Guitar is a good instrument for a honest price. The pickups it's great, but the tunning machine would need to become better. The guitar has a good sound and is a great cost benefit.

I like it!

Its a great studio tool, very fun to play

Its pretty much perfect, with a couple of exceptions:

1. the tuners need to be put in the trash the moment you receive it. And its coming from someone who has nothing against cheap hardware. These are complete garbage for sure - very hard to use and feel like they would break in a week under this kind of stress

2. the pickup is... well its a ceramic single coil, so it sounds like one. I'm using my instrument mostly for the leads so I swapped it to a blade humbucker.

With those couple of improvements its a solid instrument. What more could you ask for at this price point?

Great quality for the price

I always wanted a lap steel to use on some home recordings. I bought this and I was delighted with what I got for money. The overall sound was pretty decent however I did find when tuning it to lower open tunings for slide, I had a hard time trying to keep in it tune and any pressure at all would put it out. Apart from that, the instrument is great. Great for anyone wanting to improve or learn slide guitar

A great first lap steel

After wanting to get into playing the instrument, I purchased this lap steel as my first. I own a few HB guitars, so I knew the quality would be very decent.

When the instrument arrived it needed some up with the saddles, I messed around with it in open Day/G for a while before I changed the strings for a C6 tuning set up.

I also changed the white plastic knobs for metal ones you'd find on a Tele, and I put a black pick up cover on.

After learning more about how it's played and how to get the sounds I wanted, I'm very happy with the sound, it has a nice time with some reverb and such.

Pros:Cheap, very good quality, tone bar comes with case.

Cons: Don't really care for how the white knobs/pickups look against the silver and black.

When wearing the case on ones back, it would feel more comfortable if the straps were longer, I'm an average height/weight and the case feels like it was meant for a small child.

Overall, I'd encourage any beginner to give this lapsteel a go.

slider

for the price its quite brilliant, my first ever slide guitar and i'm impressed!

sounds good and looks good, cannot really fault it!

used for studio work

Great Choice for a Beginner!

I bought this as an introduction to slide guitar. I've always been curious and didn't have much money to spend on an experiment. This got solid reviews so I thought I'd give it a try. Without having any other experience with slide guitars, I can't really compare this to others. But it has worked well for me. The hardware and electronics all seem to work fine. (One small exception is that there is sometimes a slight buzzing on the 2nd string near the nut, but since I haven't changed strings yet, maybe this is something that will go away when I do. Anyway, when it's plugged in and I'm playing it, it doesn't seem to be a big problem.) There is some hum from the single coil pickup, which is to be expected. If I ever get proficient enough to justify it, I'll probably upgrade the single coil to a single coil-sized double coil pickup to solve the hum problem. But besides the hum, the pickup sounds good enough for me. All in all, for the price, and if you're a beginner just wanting to dabble in slide, I think this is an easy choice. (And it comes with all the accessories you need to get started, which is a nice bonus.)

Good cheap instrument

This lap steel is great for someone just starting off to Learn the instrument and who doesn't want to spend a fortune and then not getting hang of it.

Has great build and quality is good, and the sound is pretty good too.

A good buy

It is decent for a $70 wood plank with strings and pickup.

The sound is dull, and mid-range. The tuner goes out of tune easily, and is difficult to operate. Replace the tuner and pickup and you will have a $300 lapsteel.

The bullet steel is heavy, in a good way but I prefer to the shape of a soapbar steel more.

If you are looking to get a taste of an electric lapsteel, this is a cheap good start!

Lap steel

perfect for the price

Better than expected

I mean, for this price, you can never get an instrument like this. I didn't know how to play properly, but I've learned with this Pedal Steel. I've tuned in C6 (C-E-G-A-C-E) and first time when I've tuned the higher E, I've broke the string. So when you buy this, make sure that you are buying a spare strings too. In rest, sounds well, tonebar comes in a nice wooden box, the people who come to me said that looks like a lap steel guitar who cost more than 200 pounds and they were surprised when I've told them that cost less then 60 pounds. I'm very happy with it :)

Good slider!

I bought this to experiment with and record in a few country songs - and am really happy with it!

It's well built and easy to hold / lay on your lap, and overall has a really good and adjustable sound! You can get bluesy tones out of it, country sounds and tropical Hawaiian sounds too!

I'm never standing up again.

My friend bought me this for my birthday. It's awesome. The sound is great. It's very affordable, which was lucky for my cheap friend, and it looks great.

And you don't need to stand up. You can be that guy who's sitting down while everyone else is standing up, except drummer, they always have it so easy with their comfy seats, don't they, but know you can be even cooler because you can sit down rock-out at the same time, in a slider kind of way.

Another cool thing is the average person can't even figure out how the slider works, so you look like a musical genius for being able to play it, even though it is just a guitar with no frets.

It's a definite buy for anybody who likes slider guitar, and who is looking at one of their old Les Paul's and thinking of tearing all the frets off it to make a slider Les Paul, which i had already done before my friend bought me this as a gift, but i don't regret in the slightest.

I advice you put heavier strings on than the factory strings you get with it. I slapped some 13 gauge strings on her and she sings.

Oh, little warning- if you use 13 gauge on a normal electric guitar you have to down tune or you'll warp your neck.

For the price don't thin twice

For beginners or if you wanna test how much you're actually gonna play that instrument before buying one that's worth a little apartment. This slider sounds really good and can be optimized with a good amp + DAW. If you know how, no one could ever guess this is <100? piece of instrument you're playing here.