Harley Benton B-550FL BK Progressive Series

When i bought this ¤ 150,= fretless bass, i hoped to get a decent spare instrument for guest players, and for the fretless experiment. When you buy a low priced (probably Chinese manufacture) product you don't expect to get great quality with perfect finish. However, that is what i got: the guitar not only is quite handsome to look at, it also is technically well designed (German or British design?) and manufactured and assembled with great eye for detail.

It plays unexpectedly comfortable and easy, stays in tune (also depending on your string quality of course), and pre-set parameters are perfect: string action and spacing, intonation, etc. It has an attractive sound to it, which could perhaps be a bit more specifically fretless. This might also have to do with the pickups, or the strings i have mounted (d'Addario ECB81-5 fatwounds).
Update 17.10.2017:
Now that i'm playing it through a BBE BMax Bass Preamp since a few months, the Jaco Pastorius sound is finally there, so even if the bass itself is not particularly fretless sounding, it doesn't prevent you from attaining that sound either, without use of specific effect devices. Just find the right preamp and the right settings for you, and this bass will give you a LOT of playing fun for an incredible price!!

Played the bass for many months now, very few drawbacks so far:

1.
Wear on the fretboard. This wood seems a bit soft (sensitive to wear by string friction), but it 'll be okay for some years of non-intensive use i suppose, when using flatwounds. These don't cause as much wear on the fretboard as roundwounds do. When going fretless on a cheap bass like this, flatwounds are the strings of choice. If i were Thomann, i'd sell this bass with flatwounds standard issue, because the rosewood fretboard was visibly damaged in the first month of playing roundwounds.

2.
In active mode, the battery drains even when the bass is disconnected. Whenever you forget to switch the volume knob to passive position, the battery will run out in about a day.
Pulling the volume knob (passive mode) prevents this battery drain, but i tend to forget this or accidentally push it into active mode. At any rate, when your battery is out, you can still play in passive mode.

3.
A bit annoying, even though the bass is so charmingly priced, is the fact you cannot adjust the intonation while your strings are mounted and in tune. The tiny bolts that keep the (individual) bridges in place can only be reached when you loosen or remove the string, meaning you have to adjust your intonation several times by the trial and error method, until it is exactly right. This of course only happens every time you switch to different strings, so once set you are relieved of this time consuming task for quite a while.
If you don't like to spend an hour on this task that normally just takes five minutes, you could mount a Shaller 3-D5 B replacement bridge available at Thomann.. that one looks very good and from what i can see precisely fits this guitar. Considering the upgrade...

Conclusion: have been playing it for almost a year now and still quite happy!

Addition 17.10.2017: DUNLOP Lemon oil seems to protect the fretboard pretty effectively. Since i treated the board about a year ago, the flats mounted thereafter have not caused any visible additional wear.

Having searched around for a cheap fretless 5 string bass, I found there wasn't much in the way of choice, unless you wanted to spend a lot of money, I saw this Harley Benton here on Thomanns site and my first thought was "is that priced correctly", well it was, my second thought was "is a you get what you pay for guitar, the answer is yes it is, and you do get what you pay for, ok it doesn't quite have that expensive finish, tuners, bridge and strings that you would expect on a guitar, but your not paying that sort of money are you? Well ive play with it a little and found that although the way it is set up is playable ,I did have to lower the bridge and change the strings and I also as other have done given it a good dose of lemon oil which it soaked up like a sponge. Changing the setup has now made it how I like and I can honestly say I am very surprised at the way it plays, It really is well worth the price and you would be very hard pressed to find another with this sort of playability. On the down side, and there isn't much, except that the fret board could do with a bit of smoothing as it has a bit of a grainy feel to it, but its not the end of the world, and it really could do with some simple instruction/note to tell you what the 4 knobs do, (for anyone else who wants to know 1. push pull volume/passive/active 2. front/rear pickup balance 3. treble 4. bass) There are probably more tweaks that I will do to it, but for now its great. Well done Thomanns for such a good product. Well worth the money, plus you get an excellent service from Thomanns

I have been playing a fretless 4 string (various) for a number of years and decided that I wanted to extend the tonal possibilities to a 5 string but without spending too much to see if the added string was an essential I needed.
After much internet and soul searching over build desire I stumbled on the H.B. fretless...
Seemed too good to be true... 5 string. Active pick ups. nicely styled...Must be a nag to play... but hey, £107..., Ok lets order and see.

It came today (mon) after ordering last week (tues), and... Well I am a little in awe of the whole deal to be honest.

Out of the box... It is very aesthetically pleasing, but also being an alder body is surprisingly light. The finish is smart black and unfussy. the quality of finish at this price point is superb. The neck, truly straight. Action a little high but easily sorted. strings are awful cheap roundwounds, but... in tune with each other and intonation not too bad too. A quick tune and adjustment to the bridge helped out, but I will be changing to flatwounds asap, so full set up can wait. Even so, it is remarkably playable and the fretboard which I expected to be a little bad is actually as good as found on many fretleses £700 range.

The pups are not quite what you would expect either, don;t get me wrong they're not brilliant but they are more than workable and in conjunction with the active pull pot volume control and tone pots there is a range of tone that is both usable and expressive.

I will break it in over the next month and update later, but my initial thoughts are that this is a very very good fretless bass for a very little price... stunned really.

After searching Ebay for hours and hours to find an old bass with frets which I planned to remove, hence make a fret less bass I finally gave up. Al the second hand basses on Ebay are way too expensive or are broken.

So I decided for this 5 string fret less bass with the extremely low price... feeling rather suspicious and it helped that I noticed the "30 days money back guarantee" because I had no high hopes at all.

How wrong I was.

Delivery was within 36 hours and when I unpacked the box I found a shiny black bass which was playable right out of the box. WOW !
And it plays well. It sounds well. I have the bass now for five days and no way I will send it back. At the moment I am making small adjustments, like the strings a bit lower and really fine-tune the bridge, checking the neck, so it will play even better.

The first review of this bass here on the website was very helpful for me because there a lot of the functions are explained which I could not find elsewhere yet. ( A small manual in print or on-line would have been welcome.) Oiling the fretboard was a good tip indeed.

The sustain is not too much but I do not need it so no problem there. And hey, the price is low so the value for money is very good.

=== edit ====

When I brought the (huge) carton box where my bass was delivered in to the trash I noticed a piece of paper sticked on the box ... here some valuable information about the bass was printed, so if I would have looked better when the bass was delivered I would not have made the remark about the manual ....

The bass and I get to know eachother better and better, did the first few gigs with the bass and it went really well. People even ask about the bass, 'what is this ? Is it really a bass ?? "
Yep - still very happy.

Received the bass a few days ago, it came playing perfectly and even intonated properly.

Put flats on right away and lowered the strings, I didn’t even have to touch the truss rod.

The tone is quite nice if nothing fancy, and the active passive switch does pop as other reviewers noted. A mid band for the EQ would be nice, but between amps and EQ pedals definitely not necessary.

The passive mode even sounds really nice, close to the active unlike some more expensive offerings where passive mode sounds bland.

Fit and finish is also pretty on point. Legitimately have nothing to complain about.

I wanted a fretless electric bass for some home recording. I used to play around with a Fender Jazz fretless in the 80's, so I know where the bar is set. As it was just for the occasional track, I didn't want to spend too much on a big name, so wasn't expecting it to be top drawer. Was overwhelmed by the quality that showed up. As someone who has been buying guitars for nearly fifty years this has got to be the golden age when you can get something this good for so very little. I told the wife that this would be the last one as even I have to admit that I've run out of room, but at these prices and this quality, I fear total GAS relapse.

When i decided to get a fretless bass, i knew from the beginning that i did not want to spend a lot of money and regret it later. But fortunately this Bass is far better than what one would think by looking only at the price tag , for the following reasons: 1) The neck is modern and comfortable even when playing for hours 2) The Pickups respond extremely well in all musical situations 3) The tuners are quite stable, keeping the bass in tune most of the time 4) It is lightweight, especially for a 5 string instrument. The only weak point of this otherwise exceptional instrument is that the figerboard wear occurs faster than expected, even after a couple of hours the damage was obvious. You should not worry about this though, since you can either use Flatwound strings or if you need the growly punch of the Roundwounds, coat the fingerboard with some kind of hardener like epoxy resin (Jaco method) and Polyurethane.On the musical side of things you can play anything from Jazz to Metal with nice rich tones and perfectly clean harmonics! In conlcusion i would recommend this instrument to anyone who wants to learn fretless Bass and does not want to spend a fortune. Thank you Thomann!