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.

The TE-62 DB is a beautiful guitar that I have always wanted to have. It captures the essence of the 60-70s rock music and particularly the look of these guitars. Myself, I am not a guitarrist and I am just starting learning the basics. My teacher says the quality is great considering the money and when he plays, the guitar sounds amazing. When I play, I cannot get the high quality sounds that he obtains but I am not sure it is my lack of experience or the fact that TE are considered as a difficult guitars for begginers.
The guitar has a good sound even unplugged, I can practice without amp which is not something that all e-guitars offer.
Downsides for me (particularly to me!!) the nut width is 42 mm and my hand are relatively big, thus I struggle a litte to make clean sound and not touching unwanted strings when I step on one particular string. The bridge switch is definetely very weak and you need to pay attention not to bend it.
All in all, I think it is a great begginer guitar

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.