Harley Benton CST-24 Paradise Flame

This review is for the previously made in Vietnam model I bought in November 2019. Can't say if the current Indonesian build is similar or as I would imagine better based on the other Indonesian made guitars I use & love. Very keen to try out this new model & see if it's better than the last, because the one I have is awesome & a steal at the price! If you're thinking about it, do it. You can always return it if you don't like it. Thomann is great like that!

Like I said above, it's an awesome guitar for the price. Well worth a look as a beginner or an established player.

Pros:
The price!
Great looking guitar! In some lighting angles it dazzles.
Came reasonably well setup in standard tuning & handled being dropped into C# DADGAD with not too many intonation issues.
Pickups handle some nice cleans & heavy tones through my amp & amp sims in the studio, split sounds good too.
Frets were of a reasonable finish, no cut fingers or other issues.
Comfort cuts & shape of the body are really nice.
Great mod platform but also really fun to riff on as it is.

Cons:
For a guitar in this price range you have to adjust your expectations despite it looking incredible on the website it probably won't come as nice as you see it here. The one I received is a looker don't get me wrong, but not as good as the one pictured. So keep that in mind & you will be very happy when yours arrives.
The overall finish is a bit rough.
Binding is not super neat. Painting on headstock was poorly taped in places. To be expected in some instruments in this price range.
There are a few marks & dust spots in the wood under the finish in 3-4 places. These cosmetic flaws are only obvious if you look really closely.
Frets were good but needed a little polish to play optimally, an easy fix.
Single coil sounds are a bit weak, but sound great with a volume boost in the mix.
Tuners aren't great, you can get by with them but worth looking at a replacement set at some stage.

Overall a solid instrument for the price. One of my favourite guitars despite it being one of my cheapest! Has some cosmetic flaws & needed a little love to get it to my liking but very happy with it. Most new guitars will need a setup to your liking, worth the time if you know how to do it yourself or spend a little extra at your local guitar tech to get it running nicely. As always with a Harley Benton, get your hands on one & see for yourself

Where to start.... There is not a single bad thing I can say about this guitar , but I will go over what I found on unpacking the guitar. First off it arrived here in NZ just a little over a week , customs took a few days because I had duty to pay, but still got the guitar in a good time frame. Right out of the box it was pretty much in tune which tells me someone checked out this guitar at Thomann before it was sent, top marks for that Thomann. The pup's are great for me I love the bite they have and the sound is awesome, they were also set at perfect height and no adjustment was needed. The action was a little high for my taste but it took just a few seconds to adjust it to my liking and retune. The frets are perfectly level and there is no choking or dead spots what so ever and I have the action set pretty low , If I could point to anything at all I would say the frets need a quick polish to make them perfect or I could just play it for a week or two and that would also do the job..... The tuners work OK but at this price point you can't expect perfection and there not perfect but hold the tune and iv'e had no problem with them. The nut is placed and cut perfectly and alignment with the bridge and pickups is spot on all strings pass directly over the center of the pickup ploes ( it bugs the hell out of me when they don't) The binding looks great and I can't report any color blead over that some others have reported. There is no body flaws at all no dings or scratches or any imperfections for that matter, it looks the way a new instrument should. All praise to Thomann for there quality control. I only have 2 other guitars to compare to, one is a 1991 PRS SE EG which is a really nice guitar and my goto for pretty much all my playing , the other is a fender strat made in the USA that cost $3500 that I never play because it is crap and does not feel right ...at least to me ...... This Harley Benton is far better and more playable in every way...... Price is NOT a good indication of if the instrument is a good one (I learned that the hard way) I would definately recommend a harley benton to any guitarist and for this kind of money you would be an idiot not to at least try one, sure you might have to do some minor work to make it your own and get the setup you like but you have to do that with every guitar....... all I can say is go for it and buy one today.

It is a bang for the buck instrument, without a doubt. The body looks just stunning, it's got binding, a maple cap, coil splitting and other things that you won't find on any simmilarly priced instruments. There is however a catch...
I bought this as a "disposable" guitar for my studies abroad. When it arrived, i was quite surprised how different the veneer was to the ones on the photos. It was a lot darker, almost looked like a zebra pattern but nonetheless it was an interesting and appealing finish. Having played for a while, I was pleasantly surprised that the action was quite low, but soon I discovered a strong buzz on the first two frets, which meant that the first fret was lower than the others (which is a serious issue involving a lot of work as it needs to be replaced). Fortunately, Thomann took it back although it was unclear wheter to reapair it or replace it. Later they've sent me a new one which I didn't expect, but hey, as long as it works...
The second guitar had a very different looking veneer (more like the one from the photos) and played a bit different too (probablly better). There were also painting imperfections on the first one, which were now not present. All in all, it is a significantly better instrument and after a quick setup it was ready to go.
Later I had to put some graphite on the nut, as it was not very well cut and one string was going out of tune. After that everything was ok, but the tuning stability is still not the greatest (it might get better in the future, but having played the guitar for over a month I don't give it many chances).
The pickups are very, very bright compared to your standard Les Paul humbuckers which is nice for distorted sounds, but you won't get as much chunk and overall, I think I'll put in an SH4 from my other guitar as I prefer the sound a lot more (which is fine since the pickup costs about half as much as the entire guitar). When coil-split, the neck pickup actually sounds quite nice but the bridge one is a disaster... It's just too bright and bity, not very usable. I suggest you to try to rewire it to use the coil further from the bridge or just disconnect it from the split switch and not use it that way at all.
Speaking of coil splits, you get some pretty nice metal pot knobs on this guitar, which are easy to spin even with swetty fingers but pulling out the coil-split switch is very hard. The knobs are very smooth and slippery when moving up and down and it makes quick coil splitting (something I like to do a lot) almost impossible.
Now let's talk about the wood. The first guitars body was made out of about 3-4 pieces of wood. The second one was made out of two, like any other better-quality guitar. The maple cap is quite weird, It seems to be only about 5mm thick and some of the arch seems to be carved into the mahogany itself.
All in all, its a very nice guitar, very playable, maybe not the best-sounding but very good for the money anyway. What concerns me is the consistency of the craftsmanship. Having had two of these guitars, they felt and looked very different, so hopefully you'll get lucky and get one which looks and plays well. If something is wrong, then I'm sure that Thomann will help you out, so don't worry.

I had some problems with my first HB guitar and had to return it - but this one is staying with me.

Pros:
Looks great.
Stupidly inexpensive.
Sounds good.
And... (almost) everything is straight and level.

Cons:
A couple (well, 4) pretty damn minor cosmetic flaws - which I'm more than happy to live with.
The fretboard is dirty & dry - no big deal there.
And... the action at the first fret is high (i.e. the nut needs adjusting.)

The first fret string height is the only really troubling matter, but it's not out by a huge amount - I have guitars I've paid ten times this amount for and had exactly the same issue with. Lots of players don't ever check the nut end - which is weird because it's easy to do (play first fret both e-strings - both should get an F on your tuner - if the note is high, so is slot in the nut.)

The guitar has been delivered with a decent degree of neck relief, and an entirely playable action (2.5mm at 12th fret I'd say) and there are no buzzing frets. Bends don't choke out and sustain is good. I haven't done a full set-up yet so the intonation is off, but I can't see that offering me any large problems either, so all in all - it's a keeper.

Well done HB - I'll buy more from you in the furture, based on this one.

UPDATE: I found another quite significant cosmetic flaw - dirty brown mark along half the length of neck - all along the binding - it's under the finish so I can't clean it off. If it was on top of the neck and therefore visible to me while I was playing, and not underneath it, this one would be going back too - dropped from 4 stars to 3 - sorry HB. You keep making silly little mistakes that should be getting picked up in Quality Control checks - I didn't order or pay for a B-Stock item, so please don't deliver me one.

The tuners are bad, while they hold tune reasonably well, they are very inaccurate and they have some wiggle room before they start turning the gears, fine tuning is quite difficult. The strong part of the guitar is the build quality (body and wood), I bought this knowing that I was going to use it as a build platform so that was quite important, the finish is beautiful, the finish was not perfect though (there was some fine scratches when it arrived) I was able to forgive those flaws given the price, and the beautiful veneer made up for those tiny imperfections.
The weakest part of the guitar is easily the fretwork, I had to spend quite a lot of time leveling, and crowning the frets, there where some high frets, quite a lot of buzzing, the action was high and the intonation was very off. Not a big deal if you have experience fixing these issues. If not, be aware that you are going to have to pay a guitar tech to fix these for you, or bite the bullet and do it yourself like I did. The pickups are not great, again I knew I was going to switch them, I put an Air Norton on Neck and The Tone Zone on bridge and it made a Huge Difference. It is definitely one of the best sounding guitars I have after this modification (I have a USA PRS, a USA Gibson Standard, a USA CS Fender Strat and some other low to mid range guitars).
-Comparing directly this to my PRS: I equally enjoy both guitars, The PRS came set up and in perfect condition, no flaws at all and there is no thinkering needed, you can litteraly take it out of the box and it feels and sound awesome. The sound is surprisingly very similar (after HB pickup change obviously), a little warmer on the HB CST-24, the big advantage of the PRS is the coil split is much superior, losing little to no volume at all; I'm not sure if this can be solved by putting a better Split Coil Pot on the HB, my guess is not, USA PRS guitars are famous for their awesome Split Coil sounds. If I was going to do it all over again I would have added thomann's Plek service at checkout, since it was quite hard to fix the frets for a novice on fretwork like me. After all the modifications, fretwork and setup it became one of my favorite guitars. So overall out of the box the guitar needs some work, I wouldn't mind if it was a little more expensive and there was better fretwork and setup when i took it out of the box. Keep this in mind before you buy, don't believe the countless youtube hype videos, don't get me wrong this guitar has huge potential after some work (It's easily my second favorite guitar, up against guitars costing 10+ times).

I have had this CST 24 for a couple of months before doing this review, been playing 23 years but I?m not a pro and have had a lot of guitars over that time. When I started out I wish guitars of this quality at this price point existed as for this money you used to get an unplayable plank!
Firstly a little about Thommans service, I am in the UK and ordered this guitar on a Friday morning at about 10 am by 11 am I had an e-mail to say my guitar had been shipped and it arrived on the Tuesday which is incredible.
Straight out of the box this guitar required very little tweaking. The nut was cut absolutely perfectly which you don?t often see. The action was spot on and the intonation was only slightly out. Don?t let anyone tell you that you cant intonate a wrap around bridge, there are 2 screws on the bridge to adjust along with independent adjusters for the G and B string, 10 minutes fiddling and its spot on. The stock tuners are the closed type and do their job well. I have got the paradise flame and the finish is absolutely beautiful, far better than the photos suggest. The fingerboard is roseacre I think which just feels like rosewood to me although it was a little dry and had a couple of glue spots on it, no problem really as it took another 10 minutes to remove and oil up. This guitar is comfortable and plays really well. The stock Roswell pickups are good and the coil split is a nice feature giving a huge variety of tones, at this price it?s a great modding platform if you are looking for something different. Plugged in to my amp this guitar can really sing and I can get some great tones out of it. People keep asking is it a PRS? I don?t really think its fair to compare this guitar against a £2000 one when I paid about £160 delivered to my door. I can tell you that it is a very versatile guitar which feels more like a £500 model and I struggle to see how Harley Benton can even make a profit on a guitar of this cost and quality. Thomman have done a first class job with this guitar and at these prices it means we can all afford to have great guitars in lots of different models. All in all this is a very very good guitar and I will most definitely be buying more HB models.

For the money, it can't be beat. But expect to put some work into it if you want it to really be great.

Good:
1. Looks great. Aside from small asthetics, it's gorgeous.
2. Feels great. Action was set up nicely, no buzz, intonation good!
3. Arrive well packaged.
4. Sounds good! I was actually surprised by how well it sounds for a bargain instrument.

Bad:
1. Grey muck/grit all over my fingers after playing. Coming from the strings and fretboard. Wiped down several times with a quality cleaner/conditioner, and it's mostly gone now. But be aware, I should have done this right out of the box.
2. Fretwork/Nut leaves some to be desired. A couple of high spots, and the frets are rough on the crown near the upper register. Someone just rushed through it from appearance. I will be spending some time on leveling/dressing/polishing the frets and the nut, and fine tuning the setup. Just my standards, may be just fine as is for most, especially true beginners.
3. Asthetics, just some small finish globs at the neck joint, tiny chips at the nut end of the fretboard. Nothing major and barely noticable.
4. Mechanical, someone stripped the female threads on the High E tuning machine at assembly. The barrel nut will not tighten and the washer rattles. It just holds in place. This is probably my biggest issue, but I can see how it was missed. It was hard to find, but I noticed a slight rattle when playing and finally tracked it down. Depending on how Thomann handles it, may end up replacing all of the tuning machines anyway with higher ratio at some point. But it's annoying knowing it's there.

Overall, I would buy another one. Guitarist in my band owns three of these, and I bought on his recommendation, knowing the risks. I'm not disappointed for what I paid. With some effort and know-how, you can make this a superb instrument rivaling the one that inspired it's design. I don't own the original, but I've played them and this model is very dang close.

I can't say enough about this guitar. The finishes are perfect, the weight and balance of the guitar is great, and lemme tell you, I do a lot of mods on my guitars, especially with tuners and bridges but guess what? No need to change either on this one because the sustain is awesome and it stays in tune just fine. I will admit I got custom wound pickups swapped in, but that was due to personal preference as the stock Roswells can handle high gain and perform just fine. I love this guitar and can't stop playing it....so much so I take it to work every day! Do yourself a favor and purchase one. You will not regret it.

I am by no means an experienced guitarist, but this is a great guitar. I have an Epiphone Les Paul and a Squier Strat and this is by far the most comfortable guitar to play, so much that the other two are going. I play this all of the time. The finish on the guitar is great and it holds tuning perfectly. I haven't found any flaws and it sounds brilliant.
Secondly the customer service, the first guitar Thomann sent was used as a football by UPS who were awful. They initially lost the package and when it arrived it had been opened and the packing was so badly damaged it was held together by tape. When I checked the guitar it could hold any tuning, so had obviously been damaged in transit. Thomann were excellent, nothing was too much of a problem. The guitar was returned at their cost and a replacement was sent straight out. I couldn't be happier with this and wish all companies customer service was this good. I know this has been said before but Thomann ought to reconsider their working relationship with UPS who lied to me on more than one occasion. Overall, I would absolutely recommend this guitar and Thomann, both of whom are excellent!

My CST-24 is my fourth Harley Benton guitar that I have purchased and for me, everyone has been a winner. My CST-24 is by far the best one yet. I am no expert, nor do I gig professionally. I am somewhat of a beginner but I do know something about sound and quality and this one fits both wonderfully.

Pros:
Finish- outstanding, not a scratch on it.
Flame Top, not bad for 200 plus dollars. It doesn't compare to its cousin, but then again it doesn't cost $1000.00 either.
Pickups- to me, are outstanding, and with the split-coil option, the sound is fantastic.
Tuners- they work period. What else is there to say about that.
Neck- it doesn't look like its cousin's neck but back to my original point, it doesn't cost $1000.00 either. It is functional, straight and the nut is set just right for quick playing right out of the box.
Cons:
I bought the CST-24 hardtail based on some not favorable reviews of the "T" model and it does look like setting the intonation on the hardtail will be a challenge as the screws face forward under the strings. I am sure there is a way to do it and I as the blind hog will eventually find that acorn.

As far as being a modding platform, it's there if you want, but for me, the question is why? She plays like a champ through my Marshall 2X12 Cab and Orange Micro Terror, my Stage Right 15 Watt Tube Amp, and my little Fender L25 modeling Amp. So she stays the way she came from the factory. (Of course, I'm not really good with soldering anyway)
Even with the freight charge to the USA, it's a killer value, and for you players in Europe, it's a downright steal at the Euro price with free delivery.
All in all, a winner.