Harley Benton EX-76 Classic AN

I am an ageing guitar player/collector and own quite a number of guitars, sadly these days all played solely at home. As I am now on a limited income I have been looking to add a decent natural wood explorer to my collection. My budget would stretch to a second hand Epiphone but I discovered Thomann and Harley Benton on a discussion forum.

After carrying out an awful lot of research I decided to take a gamble on the EX-76 Classic AN. I have to admit to being a little worried as to how the face of the guitar might look, and hoped that the joins in the wood would not be glaringly obvious.

My guitar arrived exactly on time and I have to say that Thomann kept me fully informed throughout the process. The guitar was packaged extremely well and had suffered no damage during delivery.

Upon unwrapping my guitar I was delighted at the quality and finish for such a budget price. The guitar was well set up straight out of the box.

The last thing to worry about was the sound of the pickups, but to be honest, for home use, they are more than adequate and quite punchy.

Pros
The quality, look and feel of the guitar are way above what I expected.
The neck has a good feel and is slimmer than some other Explorers.
The Roswell pickups are surprisingly good for home use.
The Grover locking machine heads are exceptionally good, the guitar stays in tune despite frantic string bending.

Cons
The guitar arrived with two very minor scratches to the rear, but to be honest they are not visible whilst playing and do not really affect my satisfaction with the guitar.
The overall size of the body of the guitar is a little smaller than other Explorers but makes it a little lighter and easier to handle.
My only real gripe is the quality of the volume and tone control knobs which fall slightly below the quality of the rest of the guitar. However, they are easily replaced for a very minor cost.

In conclusion, I can admit to being a Headstock Name snob in the past and have avoided " budget guitars " but I am really pleased that I took this gamble. I am so impressed that I have ordered another two guitars.

Been seeing a lot of videos lately on YouTube on the Harley Benson guitars and saw this explorer style guitar and thought I would pick it up. Took about 5 days to get to California which is pretty cool. Once i took it out of the box everything looked good. The setup on it was actually pretty decent. Very minimal fret sprout. Could easily be taken care of with a file. Overall, the guitar feels great. For the money, I don't think there's any better value out there. The guitar just needs a little work on the nut to be perfect and a little bit work on the fret ends and this guitar can compete with almost anything. Originally I was going to put some Gibson classic 57 pickups but I think the pickup's on there pretty solid. The pickups are a little hot so I lower them a little bit and they sound pretty good. I'm really amazed at the quality and the finish of the product. Although it does need some work but that's to be expected at this price point. But the amount of work it needs to play great is very minimal which is amazing. I would totally buy this again.

The most pleasing thing is, of course, the appearance, the guitar looks just gorgeous and clearly worth the money. The frets don't scratch, which is very cool for me, considering that the Fender, which costs the same money, does not handle frets so well. Of course, she has her own problems.
Personally, I don't have any serious problems that could somehow interfere with using it, but cosmetic problems are not so few.
The most that upset me was the smeared fret on the side, the tree apparently split off and this place was filled with paint in the color of the neck, it is not felt with a finger and does not interfere in any way, but still a little unpleasant. The next obvious problem is how the pickguard was cut, there were so many small pieces sticking out, I just sanded them off and everything seemed to be fine. Well, not a significant small bubble of varnish is located next to the neck pocket, but it is completely invisible. And to be honest, the only thing I want to replace is the tone and volume knobs, there is a big bubble in the tone knob, and all the knobs are very worn out, but I don't think this is a big problem, this is very easy to solve.
About the pickups I can’t say either anything bad or nothing good (for the price it’s not bad that it’s not a noun sound), the electronics are all in working order, everything turns and switches.
The wood is selected and glued very well, the joints of the wood are certainly not striking. We are very pleased with Grover locking tuners who do their job.
The most important thing that I would like to note is how the guitar was packed, there is very little foam, literally a couple of pieces of paper so that the guitar does not fly all over the box and that's it ... I honestly was very surprised when I opened the package, but thank God everything was whole and without a single chip
Even the fact that this guitar has such minor cosmetic problems, which, of course, are related to its price, the guitar made me very happy and I hope it will please for a very long time. If you want to try how the shape of the explorer feels, then this is definitely your version with which you will not go wrong, but keep in mind that minimal cosmetic problems can be