Harley Benton Baritone CLG-414BCE NT

I was looking for an affordable yet good quality baritone acoustic guitar looking to play some Pat Metheny esque experimental tunes, and came across this gem of an instrument.
The build is brilliant, a solid well constructed body with a strong neck to deal with the high tensions involved in the heavy gauge strings. The sound that comes from the body acoustically, is very rich, deep and resonant. The sound coming from the output jack does well to replicate this but no less sounds a bit thinner and to be expected from a DI recording. A bit of EQ and this guitar will sound amazing. The actual inbuilt pre-amp has a very clear, easy to use tuner and the EQ controls onboard are very simple and easy to use.
I have since restrung this guitar with my own custom gauge strings and, despite being wildly different gauges to normal baritones, the guitar still brings out the life of the strings and tone.

Overall a very well built, great sounding, easy to use guitar. Would highly recommend to anyone wishing to branch out into baritone guitars.

Tl;Dr The bad news is, this is, by far, the worst Harley Benton guitar I've ever purchased. The good news is, even with problems, this guitar is still an amazing value and a really nice guitar. I would buy it again.

So, now I'll explain. When I got the guitar, from Thomann, it had some fretwork that needed to be done. Probably nothing the average person would have cared about, but, I'm picky that way. I spent about an hour dressing the fret edges. They were not smooth, like I like them to be. I also fixed a fret that was a tiny bit too high - not so high that it buzzed, but, high enough that it felt off, to me. That hour would likely have cost me an additional $90, if I had sent the work to my favorite guitar tech. Luckily, it was something I could handle myself. Still, even adding that hypothetical cost to the purchase price of the guitar, it remains an amazing bargain!

Next, I am super picky about tuners. I don't care for the tuners that came with this guitar. They just feel wrong, to me. As a result, I'll likely replace them, at some point, with Grover tuners. So let's see, that's probably an additional $50 for that.

So, even with the Luthier costs, and the replacement tuner costs, the guitar is still cheaper than the Guild baritone acoustic I was going to purchase, before I discovered this one. Not bad!

Now let's talk about what's good with this guitar. The finish is absolutely beautiful! I've purchased 5 instruments from Harley Benton, so far, and they have all been a joy to look at. The sound of the guitar is every bit as dark and emotional as one might expect, from a baritone guitar. I do think an 8 string option, for this guitar, might be good, as it might brighten up the overall sound. That's not a knock on the instrument, it's just the reality of baritone guitars. The fishman electronics are perfect. The instruments sounds very natural when playing through my PA.

All in all, I'm very happy with my purchase. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars were the two small issues with the frets. Overall, it's a lovely, playable, enjoyable guitar that I plan to spend many happy hours with.

Thank you, Harley Benton, for making a quality guitar within my price range. Thank you Thomann, for shipping it to me, from Germany, to Oklahoma, USA, in two days - that's not a typo, two days. Crazy!

I’ve been trying for ages to find an instrument that works with my voice (slightly lower than a tenor) because standard acoustics don’t quite sit right. Finding baritones to try out is tricky, so I took a punt and without ever playing one, ordered this with a view to trying it out and sending it back if I didn’t like it. Not a chance!

The low B string offers fabulous tone and resonance whilst at the other end, the cutaway allows easy access to higher notes, well into the range of a standard acoustic that just serve to emphasise the strength of the lows. This is why the guitar makes sense to me; Capo on 5 and it’s a standard guitar. When many acoustic players never go past the 5th fret anyway, the cutaway takes this guitar past that point in addition to giving you the lows.

Out of the box, the guitar was generally well set up, but I think the nut needs a small amount of modification and the strings would benefit from an upgrade - the F# had a kink in it. The machine heads are adequate and make sense at this price point, but the otherwise excellent build quality makes upgrading these really worthwhile. The tuner is very accurate, which it needs to be - the dark tones mean that being just a fraction out of tune sounds really weird. The long scale length definitely suits longer fingers, but I haven’t found the heavier strings harder to play - you don’t need to press to hard on the strings; that just makes them go sharp. Finger style is a joy due to the slightly wider string placement, whilst strumming adds real weight and strength, giving a great dynamic range unplugged.

The frets probably need a small tweak - there’s a tiny amount of buzz on the low B string at the A, but by the time this thing has been put through a full setup, I think it will be unputdownable. Overall, sits well with my top end mahogany Tanglewood, midrange Taylor and Mex Fender Tele - at a third of the price of any of them.

I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting, but this HB guitar exceeded all my expectations by a mile. The build quality and finish are superb, the volume and projection achieved by the slightly deeper body are excellent, with the increased space inside the guitar allowing for the lower notes (down to low B) to really ring, and the neck's slightly longer scale length and slim profile make it extremely playable. This guitar encourages you to try things you may not have thought of before, and does not disappoint in any way. The Fishman pickup is also suprisingly accurate at rendering an authentic acoustic sound, and that's the icing on the cake. Five stars all round!