Harley Benton TE-30 BE Standard Series

When you take this beauty out of its box it looks really amazing: medium-weight ash body, with nice texture you can see under white lacque, beautiful creamy maple neck - straight and handy... even pot knobs look OK. It really gives a good first impression and you feel that you got a really solid guitar for less then a hundred!
But when you take a closer look, you understand that 'corners have been cut' almost in every part of this instrument:
- frets - the cheapest frets you can imagine, slim with sharp edges, which cut your hands (need filing anyway)
- machine heads do not stand long time of playing, so you have to tune up this guitar rather frequently
- the 6th string buzzes severely both open and when you play almost on every fret (I guess the nut was overcut from the factory or during thomann quality check)
- pickups give you quite a thin sound

So I think its a good peace of wood or a modding base, which really requires your hands to be put on.

good points : looks great, has the typical tele sound

Not so good points: It is heavier than i expected and i expected it to be heavy, Nut slot was marked but not cut at all playing open chords made it way #sharp, normal tele nuts will not fit as the radius is so flat and do not match, tuners some good some very tight and notchy so do nothing then jump, saddles down as low as they go and action is still a mile high, neck is dead straight no relief even after adjusting the truss rod just stays straight, needs some work which i will do in time but in no hurry, over all not bad think is a coin toss some are great guitars from other peoples reviews and some not so

I bought this guitar mainly for the price of this ash body tele. The set up was ok when I got it, but I had to fix some string buzz. After playing for a while it felt ok, easy to play at least and good acoustic sound. But I was not very impressed by the neck it was a bit big and odd. So I sanded it down a bit and now it's good. It's more of a Ibanez neck then a classic fender tele. I was never really impressed with this guitar (well for the price yes but otherwise no). So I decided to make it an project partcaster guitar. So now I have changed the bridge and made it an string true and changed the pickups (and I'm going to change the electronics to). So now this guitar is starting to grow on me. For this price I would recommend it.