Harley Benton TE-62DB CAR

I got 2 te-70s last year, and they had some flaws. The tuners were terrible, the string through drilling slightly off, ferrules fell outand needed a lot of setup work. I said I'd never get another Harley Benton. However the te-62 had been positively reviewed so I thought I would give it a go.

When I opened the box I was slightly disappointed. The candy apple red was a bit lighter than I had hoped, and as another reviewer has said, in a certain light, slightly pink. But I was impressed by the metal flaking, it is eye catching.

As always the guitar came very well packaged.

Once I had the guitar in my hands, I was excited. The neck is fantastic. A real quality feel to it. No rough fret ends, and finished superbly. The nut seems well cut too.

The paintwork is good with no blemishes or overrun into the binding. The neck fits perfectly to the body.

The guitar was perfectly playable out of the box. Good action and intonation. I did tweak the saddles and truss rod slightly too my own personal preference, as I prefer a lower action. The vintage tuners felt positive and I had no issues with the guitar staying in tune.

Honestly, I had already been looking at pickups to replace the roswells with, but once I plugged the guitar in, I was impressed, they do exactly what you would expect from vintage voiced pickups, classic telecaster sound. I can't wait to do a side to side comparison with my fender 50s Vintera pickups. They could be quite close.

I would definitely recommend this guitar, it is value for money. The improvement in quality from my te-70s is amazing. If the setup out of the box is the same as mine, a great beginners guitar too.

I have swapped the saddles for brass ones, and will be replacing the import switch, but this is personal preference. I haven't checked for any high frets and will report any problems here.

I've been doing self-build guitars for a few years, and now i'm in the process of doing Cadillac colour telecasters, i've nitro finished a few Squiers and sold them on to fund my self-builds. I have in my collection, a Surf Green, Sea-Foam Green double bound, a Daphne Blue, Shell Pink and a Metallic Purple, i sold my Lake Placid Blue, but have since replaced it with A HB TE-62 LPB. Building guitars from scratch can be expensive due to the cost of parts and painting them can take a couple of months. I needed a Candy Apple Red and an LPB and with this new line of TE-62's they have the colours and the quality and will save a lot of time and money, i always upgrade the bridge, pickups and electrics and use them to upgrade cheaper guitars that i sell on. The pickups and hardware on these are pretty decent and there is no real need to change anything, i just prefer to. These are quality built guitars and a really nice neck, their Laurel necks are a slimmer profile than the maple ones, which are pretty wide (56.5mm) and suits me better. The TE-62 CAR in the title does not mean Candy Apple Red, these are CARdinal red, but the former sounds a bit more appealing than the latter in terms of a sales pitch, the guitar looks good either way. The other thing that concerns a lot of the buyers is, not being able to change the pickguard, so i went about finding out why that was. What i discovered was, the bridges are fitted a little bit further from the neck than usual and that affects the installation of the control plate, as a result they have had to re-design the pickguard to compensate for this, maybe they are using the same CNC machine they use for the 6 saddle bridge type. I am not a fan of the mint green pickguard on some of them so i bought a blank sheet and cut my own, a bit fiddly but well worth the effort, if you want to change the pickguard, then that's your only option. These guitars are game-changers and i highly recommend them.

In fairness, this is a great guitar for $150 or whatever. However, as the headline says, stay away in the U. S. A. I now own 5 Harley Bentons. The first 2 came in mostly without a hitch (one had a lousy nut, but for $250 everything else was very good). The particular model that I am rating here came in my second haul and it is actually a pretty decent instrument. The volume knob is cheap and falling apart, but that's a really easy fix and or cheap repair making $280 (purchase + shipping + repair) a very good deal for this.

With that said, I got a Fusion 3 w a floyd (a super strat) along side of this guitar. It had some MAJOR fret issues and the high B/E strings were unplayable. In order to make an exchange, I would have had to have shipped back to Germany, and the cheapest option was in excess of $400 which is as much as I paid for it. My other option was to take it to a luthier and have them do a $500 refret (it came with stainless.) Since I didn't want to do either, I removed the neck and found that the frets were both unseated (there was a gap between most of the frets and the fret board), and many of the fret slots were cut way too wide. So, my options were between paying $400 to send it back, paying $500 to have it refret professionally, or pay $400 for the tools to do the repair myself along with 15-20 hours of elbow grease.

Thomann sucks. While they do in fact provide an excellent bargain, you will have a blemish or two (of the 5 I've owned, only one came in perfect shape and it was the most expensive HB coming in at $600 shipped.) You are simply rolling the dice as to how much the repairs will cost you. I have since bought 2 EARTs from Amazon. They're both flawless and can very easily be exchanged if there is an issue. The tele is just short of $300, which is maybe an extra $80 after you have this thing shipped. I HIGHLY recommend getting an EART to a Harley Benton. They're a much better instrument for roughly the same price and you don't have to deal with the worst music company in the world.

Straight out of the box, this is one of the best guitars I have ever purchased, no matter the cost. I recently sold a Fender 60th Anniversary Ash Telecaster and this Tele plays as good or better than the Fender. The pickups in this guitar have more character, clarity and power than those on the Fender. As for the weight, this guitar is a dream and compares favorably with my Danelectros, which are my lightest guitars. The finish is spotless and without any flaws and the tuners keep everything stable. The only thing I did is adjust the truss rod 1/8th of a turn to get the relief closer to the way I like it. The intonation was nearly perfect and the action just right. I just ordered the TE-62DB in black because I like this model so much. A winner.

My first Telecaster ever, and I've never been so i n love with a guitar like this before, i keep playing it over and over non stop.

you know how they say owning several guitars doesn't make your playing any better ? i used to agree with that, but not anymore, you see if you get a bad sounding guitar you'll not gonna play it, the same goes to the quality, finish, parts, thickness of the neck, and so on. if you're comfortable with it you'll play it more and more, if it's a good sounding guitar no matter how bad you play you'll play it because you're satisfied with the pickups for example.

Before this guitar last month I bought the ST20 HSS the matt black strat shaped guitar, I liked it at first but then i started lose interest in it, then i decided to return it and get this instead, and i'm loving it since then.

the ONLY downside with this guitar is the color, it says CAD that's how it looks like in the pictures as well, but when i got it, it was lighter than CAD color, in a well lighten room or if you hold in next to a sunny window you will see that it has a bit pink-ish color to it. i wanted it to be THAT red i was expecting, anyways i still love it.

trust me. for this price, it's more than you can expect. And you see Thomann gives a 30 day money back guarantee no questions asked type of deal, that's how much trust they have in their products. well done Thomann.

I bought this after seeing several favourable reviews from sources I trust.

I was certainly not disappointed. This really is a wonderful Telecaster copy. It looks beautiful, it sounds just like a Tele should, it plays really well and construction and finish quality on mine are beyond reproach - all for £138.00....astounding.

Believe it or not, I offloaded my two other Telecasters (Squiers) because this was genuinely so much better and it's the only one I need. If you have a Tele itch that needs scratching, and aren't a brand snob, you can't go far wrong with this little gem.

All I did to mine was take it for a professional setup, a few very minor tweaks to taste...even kept the original D'Addario strings it came with. It really didn't need much work at all, probably the easiest £30 my luthier guy ever made!

I reluctantly loaned it to someone who had broken the headstock on his genuine Tele and he played it for a small pub gig.....no, he didn't prefer it to his Fender.....but he confessed how surprised he was by its performance. Sounded way better in his hands than it does in mine but that's the only negative experience with this guitar that I can claim.

Only one thing to be aware of....the colour, Candy Apple Red, is a little bit misleading---it's red sure and it's a nice finish, but under certain light conditions it can look rather "pinkish".........just something to be aware of although it doesn't bother me and you could always buy a blue one if it's really a concern.

Highly recommended. Very happy customer on this one. Get yourself one if you can.

Even though I know that HB have been upping up their quality, I also know that it can be hit and miss, so I had low expectations, so I bough this guitar to have on my vacation home (low budget, not expecting highest quality, but decent enough). This is my 1st Harley Benton, but I can tell you I will buy more because I was blown away by the overall quality. The neck only is worth more than the price of the whole guitar, smooth satin finish (personal preference), all frets are nicely polished, all fret ends are absolutely smooth and perfect, this neck is better than the ones on my other guitars that cost 5-6 times more. It even came well set up with low action, I only had to tune it.
The only low points are a small hair line crack on the paint of the body next to the neck pocket on the side, only visible at certain angles and good light, and a bit rough volume-tone knobs. The red has some pinkish undertones depending on how the light reflects on it, but the guitar is red, period. Nothing major, and again, the neck outshines everything else. I may be an extremely lucky person, but this is my 1st HB and I got an almost perfect guitar that if you don't tell me the price, I would have told you that it was over 1000 euros.