Harley Benton ST-62 VW Vintage Series

I received my new Harley Benton ST-62 RW VW just five days after my order. Fantastic good shipping and especially in Christmas times.

I decided to by this guitar after looking at a review at Youtube that was very helpful: first intention was to replace the pickups with Fender originals, but after playing the guitar for the first time I will for sure keep the Wilkinson pickups that sounded exactly like I wanted.

The guitar I got was perfectly setup from from Thomann and the strings nearly in tune. No reason to change anything with the setup and no need for intonation, just to tune the strings and play :-)

It?s amazing that you can get a quality guitar with good pickups and already setup for 111 Euro!! It matched the quality of a 400-500 Euro guitar and cannot be compared with the Squier bullet guitars. Maybe with the high end Squiers for arround 500 Euro.

This was the second guitar I bought from Thomann, I will for sure come back! I?m a very, very happy customer!

I wanted a strat to play stuff like SRV (edge of breakup kind of tone). I took a chance on this because it was very cheap and I thought how bad can it be? Not that bad at all it turns out!

The pickups honestly sound great to me. They're varm and nice and fits amazingly well with the kind of sound I want. I even prefer these over the Fender Player Strat pickups.

The neck is comfortable to play. The color is a bit more yellow than I was expecting, but it still looks pretty good.

The issues I had with it were the frets. They were at first very rough (like barely finished at all). This sort of went away as i was playing and bending the strings and by doing so smoothening the frets out. However, the frets were also unleveled which caused pretty severe buzzing as I lowered the action.

I tried to fix this myself with a file and some sandpaper and honestly I really like it now. Barely any buzzing and i plays great except for a weird buzz on one single fret (due to me being unskilled and doing this for the first time).

Bottom line; It's a great guitar. You just have to take it to a shop and get i fixed or do it yourself. After that it's a great value instrument that sounds and plays nice.

... Right ... so ... this is absolute madness.

This guitar tops the Fender Player Series I had a few months back by MILES! I got to try a friends AM Pro and this guitar is not far from it.

It's an absolute STEAL for the money! Sure, the knobs look a bit plastic (as do Fenders), the G-tuner is a bit fiddly but apart from that it keeps tuning VERY well. The pickups are definitely equal, perhaps better than those on the fender series I've tried.

The only cons I can find is the tremolo and the pickups having this low-pitched screech to it when not muting the strings.The tremolo is stiff as heck but what can you expect from a guitar at this price point?

Cannot stress enough how HIGHLY I recommend this guitar. GET IT WHILE YOU CAN!