LESS CAN BE MORE
It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world reckons Dave Burrluck (via Ray Davies). When did cheap guitars get so good? We put one under the Mod Squad microscope…
It wasn’t too many years ago that brands like Harley Benton had a bit of a laughable reputation, not least to guitar snobs. A rather good local guitarist, bassist and indeed drummer began turning up with a supply of Bentons and plenty of positive things to say about them. We chuckled. Who the heck is Harley Benton?
Conceived by the gigantic gear supplier Thomann, the Harley Benton range is massive and includes not only electric guitars but acoustics, ukes, banjos, basses, amps and a whole host of parts and accessories. In the high-end, the Amarok-7 seven-string gets up to a whopping £539. The lowest priced full-size electric appears to be the Strat-inspired ST-20 at £69 in black or white. Adding a pound – yes, just the one – gets you a sunburst finish. Cough up another whole pound and you’ll get one with a humbucker at the bridge. How is this even possible, you cry?
Knowing that we’re serious tone tweakers, Thomann shipped us a Fusion-T HH Roasted Flame Natural Pro Series, which (aside from being a bit of a mouthful in the name department) boasts a custom
shop-like specification at a far from custom shop price of £359. In brief, what we get for this frankly paltry sum is a full 648mm (25.5-inch) scale T-style electric guitar with a sapele body topped with a flame maple veneer. The neck and separate 305mm (12-inch) radius fingerboard are spec’d as roasted Canadian flame maple. And the toppings continue: 22 medium jumbo stainless steel frets, Graph Tech Tusq XL nut, Wilkinson 50IIK two-point vibrato and WSC staggered post rearlocking tuners. There’s a pair of Roswell LAF Alnico 5 humbuckers controlled by a three-way lever switch with master volume and tone, the latter with a pull-push switch to split the ’buckers to single coils. Oh, and it ships with a set of D’Addario EXL110 0.010 to 0.046-gauge strings. Suddenly, we’re not laughing any more.
Reality Check
Okay, so our Benton doesn’t ship with a gigbag or case but once we’ve unwrapped the polystyrene-sheathed guitar from its cardboard box its woody style certainly recalls Charvel’s Guthrie Govan flame
maple-topped signature (and, yes, there is an S-style with HSH pickups): it has a roasted maple neck, stainless steel frets, direct-mount humbuckers and, we have to say, an overall classy style. Outwardly, it’s difficult to see the precise construction of the body. It looks like the flame maple bit is just a thin veneer over the two-piece sapele body unlike PRS’s SEs, for example, which use a plain maple cap over a mahogany body and are then topped with a figured maple veneer. You can see the offset join of the two pieces of sapele, plus a few tool marks, through the translucent gloss poly Deep Cherry that covers the back and sides, aside from the natural edge ‘binding’.
But what is going on with the treble cutaway is anyone’s guess: there’s a bit of a PRS-like scoop in that darker colour but a strange ‘binding’ line. There’s also a cutaway on the back of the cutaway, too, and a slight ribcage contour. A little odd in some regards but far from bad.
The fretwork appears pretty good with a gauge that isn’t over-wide at 2.67mm but is quite high, very similar in terms of measurement to Ibanez’s AZ Premium
“You really don’t need to spend a lot of money to considerably elevate a low-priced guitar”
frets – a guitar that’s also made in Indonesia. The neck shape actually isn’t a million miles away from that model, either, a slim-feeling C that’s 20.5mm at the 1st fret and 23.4mm by the 12th.
The Korean-made Roswell LAF humbuckers talk a good fight, as Roswell suggests in its own description: “Well rounded bridge pickup that captures a nice top-end clarity combined with a solid midrange and tight low-end response. Reminiscent of the classic PAF-style pickup with a boosted output. Unbalanced coils keep the bottom-end tight for the amount of fullness the pickups have, overtones build after each note is played. Alnico 5 magnets in the neck and bridge are degaussed to specific levels.” As for DCRs, the pickups measure 8.25/4.17kohms full coil/split-coil at the bridge and 8.05/ 4.05kohms at the neck.
Plugged in, first impressions really aren’t bad. There’s a hot-ish but not overly dark humbucker voicing, which does sound a little ordinary at the bridge. The neck ’bucker is a little more characterful, but the simple coil-splits – which voice the screw coils of each humbucker – extend the range and I’ve certainly heard worse. In fact, comparing the Fusion to a similar-style bolt-on PRS CE 24 that’d cost you about four-and-a-half times more, I’m not saying they’re on the same build or sonic level (the PRS does sound bigger with more detail and clarity, plus noticeably fuller splits) but it’s an interesting real-world wake-up call. Are we really seeing, hearing and feeling a £1,600 difference?
A Closer Look
You really can’t expect a fully dialled-in setup with a guitar at this price, but it’s okay – we’ve had worse from suppliers over the years. The string height is 1.6mm on the treble side at the 12th, a little lower at 1.3mm on the bass side, with sympathetic relief, pretty much spot on at the nut and without that sometimes ‘clacky’ sound you can experience with stainless steel frets.
The Wilkinson vibrato is intended to sit parallel to the top, the distance determining the amount of up-bend. Here, it’s quite low to the body with barely a semitone lift on the G string. Plus it all feels a little stiff, and, as that low bass-side string height indicates, it’s set lower on the bass side than the treble, actually touching the top of the guitar.
“With a bolt-on like this, increasing the neck pitch is made easy by adding a shim”
So, before investigating further I decide to sort the vibrato. There’s no rigid right way to set up this kind of floating vibrato, so I decide to use that PRS CE 24 as my ‘blueprint’, because I really like the feel of that vibrato. Like the VS50, it sits parallel to the top and, as set, gives me a fairly standard one semitone uplift on the high E string and approximately one whole tone on the G. PRS suggests that the vibrato sits approximately 1/16th of an inch (1.6mm) above the body. The CE’s is bit higher, though, at a little over 2mm, so I decide to replicate that. However, there’s no way I’m going to get the string height I want if I raise the vibrato. Clearly, I need to increase the neck pitch.
With a bolt-on like this, that’s made easy by adding a shim to increase the back angle. Place a capo at the 1st fret, slightly slacken the string tension then lay the guitar face down on your table/bench (don’t forget to remove the vibrato arm!) and unscrew and remove the neck screws. Flip the guitar over and carefully pull the neck out. There is a thin shim fitted (approx. 0.42mm thick) so I remove that and cut a slightly thicker one (0.62mm) from my stash of veneer off-cuts (pic 1, page 122). That seems like a very small increase in thickness but you’ll be surprised by the actual rise in height at the bridge it’ll give. Hopefully.
With the neck still off I add a very small drop of 3-in-1 oil to the points where those posts touch the vibrato’s baseplate and, using a wooden shim (or you can measure it), set the front of the vibrato to that same 2mm and a bit (actually 2.4mm) height. With the neck back on, I install the vibrato arm, push it down and put that shim under the back of the bridge (the spring tension pulling it tight) so that the bridge is now perfectly parallel.
The Fusion has a rear coverplate with access holes to adjust the spring tension but, again, to follow the PRS setup I remove that and I replace the three springs, one by one, with my default springs (from WD Music UK) – four in total, leaving the centre slot empty. A small clockwise turn of the spring claw (pic 2) adds a little more tension, too, which will be helpful as we fine-tune the vibrato – something I’d do with any vibrato setup at this stage, including a Stratocaster. So far, so good.
If you tune up the high and low E strings you can set those outer string saddles to a little below what you’ll finally want. As you tune up to pitch the neck will invariably pull forward a little raising the string height. If you’re in the right ballpark you can then set the approximate saddle heights of the other strings (pic 3). Remember that the VS50’s saddles are locked to the baseplate with those Allen key bolts. Also, slacken those off before you raise the saddles (pic 4) and don’t forget to tighten them back down once everything is set correctly and intonated. Finally, tune up all the strings, check everything again and tweak accordingly.
The vibrato’s springs should still be a little too tight and that shim should still be in place. Tune to correct pitch then, slowly moving the guitar away from your lap but still sort of in playing position, unscrew each of the spring claw screws a little at a time until that shim drops out. You should then still be in tune and with the vibrato perfectly parallel (pic 5). Now we have a similar up-bend to the PRS – and it really does feel very similar in action.
Final Thoughts
The great thing about guitars such as this Harley Benton for us modders is that we can really practise our chops without breaking the bank. With a few exceptions, it’s a very fit-for-purpose guitar and buying new you should have none of the fretwear worries that you might have with a used purchase. Okay, it was let down by its vibrato setup, but with a simple no-cost ‘fix’ it’s made a rather good guitar feel considerably better. Plus, if you’re working on something like this, you’re learning an awful lot about the basic principles of any vibrato based on Leo’s original design.
There’s plenty more to investigate, too, not least the electronics. I’m pretty sure you could enhance its performance with a simple treble bleed capacitor, again using that PRS as your guide, and adding two resistors to thicken up the coil-splits. It’s these small fixes that can really make a difference and are more proof that you really don’t need to spend a lot of money on replacement pickups and parts to considerably elevate a low-priced guitar. If the chassis is good in the first place, you really can’t go wrong. See you next issue!
“Us modders can really practise our chops on guitars like this without breaking the bank”