Harley Benton JA-Baritone BK

This was a bit of a punt as I wanted to try a baritone but didn't want to spend big money. The guitar was back ordered and I nearly forgot about it until it arrived and, all in all, I was pleasantly surprised. Fit and finish is outstanding for a sub £200 guitar, no sharp fret ends, no dodgy paint and the neck is beautifully finished. Machine heads look cheap and cheerful but this thing just stays in tune regardless. Action is a little high but perfectly playable. Pickups are a bit raspy but otherwise sound OK and are not unpleasant (the middle position is rather nice). The guitar is very light but there is no neck dive whatsoever. Being a full scale baritone you can get some pretty good hybrid bass/six string vibes and it really makes you play in a very different way. I am really happy with this guitar and I literally cannot put it down, I'll change the strings for some Ernie Balls and may think about upgrading the pickups at some point but, for the money, this is a great guitar if you are looking at adding a baritone to your armoury without spending big bucks.

Influenced by YouTube, I bought myself this guitar as a gift. And what a gift!

If you want a super tight B standard guitar, it does it out of the box. I dropped it to a Low E Standard and it chugs! I find myself lowering the gain as it doesn't require a lot to cut through the mix and chug. It does however require you to work with your tone knob to get a humbucker-ish gain sound, but you get used to it.
The tuners are a bit meh, and fretboard had some filler, but what can you expect at this price range?
Middle and neck are great for clean, I was surprised how well the p90s sound.

Tip for using - make sure that when you buy strings, they are long enough to fit a 30 inch scale guitar. Not all 8 string sets work, baritones do.

Short version: this thing is really cool for the price point and looks and sounds as good as you can possibly expect for a budget baritone guitar. That’s no insult, this thing really sounds and plays great! There were a few very minor cosmetic blemishes on the body and neck which are to be expected for an internationally shipped budget axe. Nothing was broken, all was functioning great and looking nice.

(Mild) complaints: the plastic that is there to protect the pick guard and pickups was super hard to remove. Not a big deal, just an observation. The tuners work as they should but they feel cheap and if I end up making any upgrades that will likely be the first change I’ll make. The pickups sound good overall but the neck pickup (in typical baritone fashion) is pretty muddy and it took some serious fiddling with amp tones and EQ to get a good sound there.

The looks and performance overall are excellent and truly better than I expected for the price.

I ordered this guitar to experiment a bit with low tunings, but I was between this or a 7 string. The guitar came in good condition and the set up was decent. Probably a bit too high the strings and perhaps it needed a bit more neck relief and probably intonation.

About the quality: I would say not great but not bad. I would say the weakest parts of the guitar are the nut and the fretboard. The nut came too deep for the second string which caused buzz when playing it open without any fret, and it seem pretty cheap. I would have probably exchanged the nut. The fretboard came super dry and the fretwork was not great but not terrible.

In terms of sound was pretty good, surprisingly good for high gain tones, although I would recommend a noise gate or use the middle position, since P-90 are very noisy similar to single coils.

The guitar came very detuned, but I believe this one comes on B standard by default, although I would say the strings are pretty tight on that tuning so probably it can be tuned down to G# or A standard at least.

Overall, a decent instrument with some quality issues that can be fixed relatively easy, so if you are fine with that possibility then probably won't be disappointed.

Pros - good value and a good starter to upgrade. Good clean sounds with a percussive attack as expected from a p90 pickup.

Frets and finish is good. Has a decent setup.

Cons - A string was broken down the core, horrible sounds coming from 1 string. Replaced them with light gauge baritone strings as I only wanted to tune down to C.

Plastic tuners.

Bridge pickup can do a good caveman chug but a good modern metal tone will require a humbucker which will involve a bit of modding.

The guitar has potential but as it is new, it feels like similar quality to my daughter's 3/4 size squier jazzmaster. My son's 3/4 Ibanez Gio feels like much higher quality.

String trees on the headstock look misplaced because of size.

Will be a decent instrument after a few hardware upgrades.

So this guitar, as I'm sure most people know, has a grounding issue that will cause a noticeable hum. This can be repaired, but you're going to either need a luthier you like, or be handy with tools yourself. Without getting into it, the ground wire needs some adjusting.

That said, it plays well and it set up nicely. For $300 dollars, you should be expecting to have to give it some love on arrival. I will still absolutely recommend this guitar to bedroom warriors and for stage alike. Despite the mentioned issue, I am absolutely shocked at how nice this guitar is for the money. The plastic tuners seem to hold tune quite well, after a few weeks of owning.

Just pull the trigger if you're still reading! :-D

The baritone is ok had it for about a month now so finally got over the new guitar excitement. Pickups are okay I can get some decent sounds out of it. Sounds better in a DAW w/ plugins as you can fine tune better. Neck is good fits nice and snug in the pocket. File marks almost the whole way up the neck where they rounded the fretboard edges and frets, could have been cleaned up better. Purpleheart fretboard was drier than the Sahara when it arrived. And mine also had the annoying loud buzz whenever the smallest amount of Gain was introduced **Ground Issue on Mine**. Didn't play well out of the box definitely needed a setup sounds like that varies from JA to JA. All in all you get what you pay for as inexpensive as it was I didn't mind taking care of the issues myself but if your someone that doesn't have guitar luthier knowledge I wouldn't recommend this or someone that flat out wants a 100% functioning guitar out the box...Would no recommend. My SubZero had less issues than this JA.