After watching a number of youtube reviews of harley benton guitars,i finally decided to pull the trigger and see if the HB hype is justified. As I am big fan of T-style guitars,the choice has fallen to this cabronita style telly.
The guitar came in almost perfect condition with decent setup. Only thing that required work was output jack which was loose. No biggy, it was 5 minute job to fix this.
I was pleasantly surprised with the built quality; this feels and looks like much more expensive guitar. All the parts and switches ( tuners excluded) are the real deal. Playability is also great ; it is light guitar (which i prefer) and the neck feels amazing.
As for the sound, filtertrone style pickups were perhaps the most positive surprise for me as i thougth i would swap them for sure, given the price of the guitar. Boy i was wrong. Pickups have their own character with a lot of single-coilly chaim and snap to them,but also at the same time having paf-like humbucker characteristics. They work great both clean and with overdrive.
As a last point i would like to mention perhaps the only weak point of the guitar- the tuners.
They are inprecise and feel cheap which leaves a bad afrertaste in,what is otherwise, a great guitar.Of course these can easily enough be swapped out,so it is not a deal-breaker,but i think this guitar is good enough to deserve much better quality tuners as a standard feature.To recap if you like the looks of it and are looking to add telly-style model with filtertrons to your collection, i would highly recommend to give this model a try. You will not be disapointed.