Harley Benton SC-450 P90 GT Classic Series

I bought this because I had severe GAS on p90 guitars. I first opted for the SC special one, but I just don't dig the mustard colour. This one is also way cheaper so it's was an easy choice!

It arrived within 3 days after ordering on sunday. Awesome!

The guitar looked great but out of the box there were some small issues. The setup was not great (although not bad) and there are a few little finish flaws. But hey, for this money you can't expect perfection.

Tuners are ok, not going to swap them because they hold tune just fine. They also turn smooth, the throw is a bit short, so when tuning just be really careful.

The nut is cut fine, it's plastic but I don't care. I put some pencil graphite in there and it's now smooth as any nut. EDIT: the nut was causing major tuning issues. Installed a graphtech nut and it holds tune very well. The tuners are really good enough.

Fretboard looks nice, was very dry an needed some oil.
The frets were a bit rough, needed some polishing with 0000 steel wool. Be sure to mask the pickups with tape when using steel wool!

There are a few high frets here and there. Nothing really disturbing. I've set the action on 2mm low e and 1.5mm high e. It buzzes a little, but can't hear it when playing on the amp. I do however want to try a fret level on this one to see how this goes. A guitar this cheap is a nice practise object. EDIT: I leveled the frets. It was my first attempt and I improved the playability. Still 2 or 3 frets that are a little higher. I might spot level them with the next string change.
EDIT: I don't know if the wood in the neck still thinks it's alive. I've done a second full fret leveling as 13 frets were again uneven. It's now completely level and plays great. Hope it stays this way, because I'm not doing a third leveling ;).

The pickups sound ok but not for me. They are ceramic of course and I don't like the boomy attacky sound of ceramic magnets. I ordered some alnico IV magnets to put in these p90's to see if they can sound the way I like them to sound. EDIT: the alnico IV magnets are installed. It didn't really change the tone much. I might go for some vintage voiced alnico 2 pickups. EDIT: A new set of p90's are on the way. A combo of A2 neck + A5 bridge with low output.

The pots are the cheap mini pots and they put linear pots in for the volume control. I like log pots better so I will swap them at one point. They do work fine though and they are not scratchy. I think I will buy Alpha pots, because CTS pots have too wide bushings. You need to ream out the holes and I'm not going to bother doing this :). EDIT: Yeah so I've grown to love linear volume pots... So much better volume control! Really the whole range from 10 to 1 is usable now, instead of most action happening from 10 to 7 on log pots.

The switch is cheap, but works fine, no need to replace.

Oh yeah one nice tip: when ordering I placed a remark asking if they could select a lighter weighing one for me. And they did! Mine weighs about 3.8kg (8.4 lbs) which is pretty lightweight for a Les Paul style!

Because the colour is more copper than gold, I also ordered black plastics for the pickups, switch and knobs. Looks awesome!

All in all I'm happy with the guitar. It's a love/hate relationship with this one. By far the worst HB guitar I've had, but I learned to level frets on this guitar and I dig p90's. I might sell it on later, but will definitely need a p90 guitar in my arsenal.

I've been playing for 47 years now as both a semi-pro and amateur/hobbyist, and a lot of great instruments have passed though my hands over the years. This is one of them. If you have some basic knowledge of how to properly setup, care for, and modify guitars there is no reason you couldn't have a Les Paul every bit as good as the real thing. For me, the only modifications I've made was to 1) swap out the tuners as they had a tendency to not immediately catch or engage at times, and 2) put on an Earvana Compensating Nut (which I automatically do to ALL my guitars). There was nothing wrong with the intonation and, in fact, the intonation was perfectly setup right out of the box! However, I mostly play around the first 4 frets where intonation is problematic on ANY guitar (even $20,000 ones!) and the Earvana solves that problem. Regardless of the "catching" problem, the tuners did work and the guitar had no problems staying in tune. I choose to replace the tuners with the Wilkinson EZ-LOK tuners which retail for about $20 USD and work great, so it hasn't proven to be a deal-breaker.

The fit and finish are simply flawless! This is a beautiful looking instrument. My "gold" top is actually a little more on the copper side (too much red pigment?), but I've come to really like it this way. It still looks fantastic and it makes mine unique (I hope)!

As far as the neck and frets go: I see no issues whatsoever with the neck or frets. Frets are smooth and polished with no sharp ends. The neck feels and plays simply great. for those concerned about neck-dive, this model is well-balanced and there is no neck-dive with it. One thing I especially like about the neck is that the headstock is at a 14° angle like the Epiphones and not 17° like the Gibsons. This means there's less (unnecessary) tension on the neck/headstock so that the neck is more resistant to breaking while still providing all the tension you need. Why Gibson continues to use a 17° is beyond me as it's completely unnecessary and only weakens the neck. The SC-450 also has a scarf joint which aids GREATLY in preventing neck breakage. Yes, I like scarf joints and you should too. Nice touch, Thomann!

The inlays are perfect and centered. The bindings are perfect with no gaps or marring.

The weight is pretty hefty although not as heavy as an actual Les Paul.

The electronics, knobs, and switches are all solid and there are no problems there. The P90 pickups, which is WHY I got this particular gold top model are simply luscious! Nice beefy sound with a nice tonal range. Everything you'd want in a classic P90. If you know P90s you either love them or hate them. I love P90s and the Roswells are outstanding. Yes, they're a bit noisy, but that's all P90s (which is why some people hate them). You learn to deal with the hum because nothing else sounds like a P90. This thing grinds/rocks like a champion!

The bridge and tailpiece are solid and I see no problems there.

This guitar just smacks of amazingly good quality and craftsmanship and it astounds me as to how Thomann can do this for so little money! This is my first experience with an Harley Benton Les Paul and based on this I will be buying more HB Les Pauls. Right now I'm looking at that beautiful white one!

The guitar arrived in good shape. The finish and colour are amazing for this price tag (and my taste) but other than that, there are a few things that need to be "fixed".

Neck is straight and fat which is a bit odd (been used to faster necks) but will eventually get used to it.
The fretboard was dead dry so needed some oil treatment but the blackwood looks pretty cool.
Frets needed polishing since bending the strings is obviously not even close to smooth. They also need levelling in the B and high E strings at 17-19 where there are a few dead spots. Also some buzzing which needs to be reviewed/adjusted I guess.
The guitar is pretty heavy which can be either a good or a bad thing and a matter of personal taste.
Tuners are just OK.
Intonation was interestingly pretty on spot (nice one there).
Pots and switch look really cheap but work OK for now.
Nut has not been cut/finished with care (has remnants of the actual cut and not been sanded at all).

Overall at 166 euros, I don't think you can get something better (not even used) so if you have the knowledge and time to spare to get it properly playing, go for it. If not, you may end up with a guitar that is difficult to play. It's a good basis for experimentation on updates/maintenance and in general, stuff you wouldn't do in more expensive guitars but can also be a great (and stunning) player if you treat her well.

(This is actually the second one I had shipped to me, as the first one had a number of problems--uneven or "rippled" or "wavy" neck/fretboard, a visible shim in the neck joint, badly mismatched/miscolored body wood (and I mean BADLY mismatched--really light color with really dark color--visible a mile away). It was clearly B-stock or worse, and Thomann quickly remedied the problem (top-notch customer service, by the way!) by replacing it with a new one. So, this review is of the second one they sent me.)

I think either this model or the SC-450 Plus (if you need the mahogany body and neck) is the best guitar value at Thomann (I have both models now). After I bought the 450 Plus (which I absolutely loved!), I really wanted a model with P-90s. But I was a bit hesitant about the basswood body and maple neck (not certainly not classic les paul specs!). But after playing the SC-450 P90 GT back and forth with the SC-450 Plus, I really can't hear much of a difference. Maybe the Plus sounds a wee bit "tighter" and the P90 a wee bit "looser," but that may also come down to the difference in pickups. IMO, the tone character is in the same ballpark, and the P90 model sounds as much like a classic les paul as the Plus model. So don't let the basswood dissuade you from buying it.

I really, really love these guitars. The price is absurdly low. But the quality strikes me as being about 3 times what it actually costs. The contoured heel makes a big difference in terms of playability. I love it. Fit and finish is excellent (there is a bit of wood "scratching" that you can see in one spot under the gold sparkle finish, but you have to really, really be looking for it to notice it). It's fretting out a bit around the 14th or 15th fret, but that should be remedied with a professional setup, which nearly all new guitars need anyway. The pickups are surprisingly nice sounding for such a cheap guitar. I assume they are ceramic. But they sound really nice--raunchy and growly, but they also clean up real sweetly. I already had an alnico II P90 to put in the neck, and an alnico firebird to put in the bridge (Neil Young-style), so I'll be doing that shortly. But it's a solid player as is. Pots also seem solid. No problems there. I'm planning on putting a cheap Chinese bigsby-style tremolo on it (just to go full Neil Young or Daniel Lanois). If I weren't, I'd probably upgrade the bridge with a Gotoh or something like that, because the stock bridge appears to be on the cheap side. I'll also be upgrading the nut with a tusq. I haven't yet made up my mind on the tuners. So far, they seem to be good enough. I'll revisit them after I upgrade the other stuff.

In other words, I see this as an excellent guitar for modding. For the price, it can't be beat. Apart from the cheap components (bridge and nut in particular), it's a real solid guitar to build on. The neck feels great in the hands and the body has a lot of les paul heft to it. Good resonance, sustain and mid-rangey and growly les paul tone. Highly recommended.

Like a lot of people I'm passing through the "How do they do that?" phase with HB guitars. This is my second and will not be my last. I know Thomann have cut out lots of middle men in the process of the guitar being designed, made, distributed, and being in your hands, which significantly reduces the price, but it still feels ridiculous/unfeasible to have a guitar that sounds this good, and plays this well, for this amount of money.

When I was young, which was a long time ago, cheap guitars were unbelievably bad in every way, and still give me nightmares. These HBs good enough for me to stop buying posh brands and have a larger, more diverse, and interesting collection.

The science bit/scores on the doors.

Positives:
Finish 99%, as good as anything else I have with nothing out of place. The basswood body is a nice change from mahogany, and the back colour is lighter than the photos.

Sounds/Pickups 200%, they do what a P90 should from jazzy clean to high gain via classic rock and with no hum from my amp. No need to change these at all, for me these are the stand out feature and put this guitar way futher up my goto list than expected.

Playability 90%, I have do guitars with a lower action, but not by much, and they cost lots more, or were professionally set up. I also have guitars with a higher action which also play well.

Intonation is accurate and better than some more expensive guitars I have with chords beyond 12th fret still sounding correct.

Hardware is functional and does what it is supposed to with the guitar remaining in tune despite my aggressive playing style.

The neck joint deserves a specific mention as it is much nicer than a bolt-on and gives better access than other designs.

Price, I'm still coming to terms with how good value this was, especially as I had a few vouchers resulting in almost 50% off an already well priced guitar.

Negatives are very few and minor...
The control pots do stick out of the body more than the HB Deluxe range, a small cosmetic thing.

Others observations:
The frets are a tiny bit taller than average in my collection.
It needed new strings as originals were 9s, and I broke 1 fairly quickly (aggressive playing style/heavy pic/etc). With nut oil and my preferred 10s tuning is stable and no more string breaks.
The neck is a fairly large C and out of the box I thought "oh dear, not my bag". 30 seconds after plugging in I had forgotten as it disappears under your fingers when playing. It is thicker than the 60s neck on the HB Deluxe range.
2 day delivery to the UK.

Rather than costing many thousands and being a "true historic, 60s reissue, hand made in the USA, custom shop, weight relieved, hot glued, blessed by St.Paul, blah, blah, blah, blah....", this is just an honest, good quality, affordable instrument, that sounds great.

More of that please.

P.s. I'm not an HB fanboy, but like many vids on YT the price/quality combination is shockingly good.

I bought this guitar with a plan to upgrade the electronics, hardware and pickups, but I'm not sure I'll bother now.
To start with, I wanted a gold top with P90s, and short of dropping £2-3k on a Gibson this looked like a decent option. My experience with Harley Bentons has been good in the past. I've previously bought b-stock models and been happy with the minor imperfections. This one was so cheap I didn't bother getting the b-stock model, though I wish I had now. The QC on this guitar is so bad. The holes drilled for the tuning machines look like they've been done by someone with a blunt drill bit, in the dark with their eyes closed. Chipped headstock, chipped binding, chip in the fretboard, paint missing by the pickups... The list goes on.
I know this guitar is cheap... Perhaps one of the cheapest I've ever bought, but this is way, way below HB's normal standard. It's like it's been made by a different company at a different shop. Tellingly it has no country of origin or serial number. Only a "QC Passed" sticker on the back of the headstock. They early just put those on there regardless of whether anyone's ever looked at it.
The paintwork shouldn't be described as being a gold top either. It's perhaps a copper top. People might buy it just to be different, but those expecting a gold top will be disappointed.
On the plus side, the P90s actually sound decent.
I complained to Thomann and they gave me £20 back, which was appreciated, though now I wish I'd sent it back for a refund. Especially as the toggle switch has since died (after 2 days of bare minimum play).
I really can't recommend this guitar. Even for the money it's a rip off.

For the price, it sounds amazing. Honestly, for a cheap Les Paul clone I got a great piece of wood, but the setup was unfortunately atrocious. The HB DIY kits were playable out of the box, one took very little work to be supremely playable. Well, after assembly, that is. This? The action was somewhere in the stratosphere and it forced me to stop my practice for the day after around five minutes, that's how bad the setup was. I had to wait a while to recover from the garottes that the setup turned the strings into. The frets were uneven, but fortunately my man sorted that out and after some TLC the guitar could be coaxed into comfortably low action and good playability.

The tuners are a bit janky, but they do hold tune just fine. The frets are a bit pokey and they're not really polished out of the box, so I'll need those ends sorted out sometime but they haven't wounded me so far.

These things being said, I'll go back to what I said at the start - it sounds great for the price, and that honestly caught my attention from the start. It's pretty much going to do what I got it for just fine now (And what I wanted was a guitar with P90s!). On one hand, at this price point you shouldn't be expecting miracles, but AFTER sorting out the uneven frets and atrociously high action the guitar is definitely going to be great. I particularly like the neck joint, as it makes access to upper frets excellent for this type of guitar, beating out my Epiphone in that regard. So it turned out pretty cost-effective, even though it did require some extra investment on top of the price. But then again, at this price point getting those guitars set up is kind of a given. The end result, on the other hand, is usually *not* that good.

So yeah, I'm pretty likely to be using this a bit from now on.

This is the second p90 style guitar I've bought. The other was priced higher but not close to this in terms of sound or finish.

My review is subjective and based on my limited experience of playing and owning guitars (2 years)

The pros
Great sound, warm, fat, great sustain, puts the higher priced p90 style LP copy I owned to shame

Great finish, lovely gold top, plays well.

The minuses
Few, strings feel cheap, they don't feel or look like the D'Addarios that come on other HB guitars. Please Thomann put good strings on all the HBs, there's nothing worse than having to immediately change the fitted strings

Minor quality control issue, my guitar had something loose inside rattling around, a screw or a part, didn't want to take risk of invalidating warranty so I rang Thomann to arrange a replacement.

A really nice guitar just a little disappointing to have to immediately return it as it was lovely to play

Update- July 2019 - I just bought another one of these guitars to replace the previous one which I sold (and regretted) comments pretty much the same. The one I just bought was B-stock and generally it was fine, a couple of the blemishes it was hard to tell whether they were just cosmetic or structural.

There was a small ding on the neck near the nut which I thought was a wood crack but seemed to be just a minor ding. At the side of the fretboard there was what looked like a crack which was filled during manufacture (the lacquer was covering it) On the back of the neck at the body join are some cracks in the finish. These I can live with, they seem cosmetic and for the B-stock price, they're fine, if any of them turn out to be more serious or worsen I'm confident based on previous experience that Thomann will make it right (they've been very good with warranty stuff so far).

There were also some other annoyances, dirty and dry fretboard. The low E and A strings don't align properly with the pick-up pole pieces on the neck pickup.

As for playability this new guitar is pretty much the same. The same awful cheap strings, frets needs a polish they are very scratchy (this is partly the strings too I suspect).

The retail price of 149 is 20 more than I paid originally in 2016, but it's not clear where the extra money is going, at 129 this guitar was a steal, at 149 with the same types of issues and the same cheap strings it's not clear where the extra money is going.

Overall HB guitars are good, but different models seem more consistently good than others. My 119 euro ST-62 was more or less perfect and has D'addario strings, this 149 euro guitar has far more issues. I think different HB models are made in different factories and therein perhaps lies the explanation for the QC variation between models.
That being said, for 109 euro I can live with the issues on my B stock SC-450 P90 GT

For years I wanted a Gibson Gold Top with P90s, but also for years I've been aware that the Tokai (Japan) Gold Top was rated more highly, so I actually wanted that in preference. However an offer by my poorly Mum to 'buy what I wanted for the Christmas' just gone, still seemed churlish to spend so much seeing as we had her care home fees to pay, so I plumbed for the Harley Benton after seeing YTube demos. Sadly, it turned out to be her last gift to me, but boy has it not disappointed! If ever there was a legacy to live up to - this Gold Top and its P90's does it! I have had to get used to the raw tones of these P90 PUPS, but EVERY demo online of either the Tokai or Gibson reveals EXACT same tonal qualities. The biggest surprise was the fit and finish and the neck profile and playabillity. Out the box the setup was perfect; intonation/fret finish string action too. In fact all I have done is tune it! Make no mistake, this is not a pale imitation, shrinking violet - it rocks your face off! I have a plethora of quality tube and solid state classic amps (13) and a good tone is to be had through each. These P90s are fiercely powerful and will push an amp hard, so little added gain is required. It feels nicer in the hand than my Les Paul Custom but they don't compete on tone as are in different camps. I initially thought this was to be a stop gap just for some much needed fun until I could justify a top brand option, but is no-way I am spending upwards of £1600 for the Tokai or £2300 for the Gibson when this delivers in spades. So, *Thank You Mum*, your legacy will live on in my hands every time I pick this up to play... xx

Everything was pretty much ready to go and played well out of the box. Great for beginners as is, but If your an experienced player and need something that meets your reliability needs for recording and gigging you will likely need to upgrade it.

A new nut. The one that comes is plastic and cut poorly. It looks cheap and feels cheep and slightly harms the intonation.

Better tuning machines as there is some minor slippage if subjected to agressive styles.

Some minor fret levelling, pretty good out the box only 1 fret was high and 5 mintues with a file and it all works with no buzz.

New pickups, the ones that come sound like p90s but are a little harsh and not very well rounded. Replace them with quality pickups and seat them at your desired height and you have magic.

Swtich has excessive play but works. Replacing it will something more sturdy and longer lasting would be a must. I doubt it could live through use as a killswitch for more than a day.

New pots and wiring, the mini pots do the job but dont add much to your sound or are helpful musically. Replacing with full sized pots and your caps of choice will have your pups reacting more how you want them to.

Only other issue is cosmetic. The tailpeice is not fully seated and instead of taking the time to seat it properly and raise the height they opted to just only partially sink it on one side. Not an easy fix if it bothers you but not exactly something that will affect performance.

If you want a cheap guitar you can upgrade to something playing and resembling something much more expensive then you can absolutely do it with this guitar. A couple of hours and another 200 to 300 on parts and you'll have a stellar instrument.