Harley Benton Enhanced MP-4EB Lake Blue

Hi all. I am a seasoned player, collector, modifier, and builder of electric basses and have been doing so for well over 40 years now. Curiosity got the better of me when surfing the web and reading about and watching videos about this bass.This is by far the cheapest bass I have bought new and I have had it at home for a day after it arrived yesterday afternoon. First off, the Harley Benton MP-4EB looks fantastic and much better than on the Thomann website . It really is a very pretty bass. The blue is a fine metallic and does have a shimmer to it, really nice. No orange peel at all and the head stalk in the same finish is always a treat. There is however a finish flaw on my head stalk which is simply sloppy and certainly should not have passed inspection. The finish on the neck is a flat poly nicely done and feels smooth. The fret board looks great, nice and dark with a nice polished sheen, no sanding marks and the block position inlays certainly add to the look and are done nicely, no raised blocks... good stuff. The neck is bound in white plastic but looks a little cheap and there are some signs of scouring and marking. The pick guard is 3 ply fastened with chrome screws.. looks great. The stainless frets seem to be good so far and I have not found any high frets or any sharp fret ends so no issues there. This bass has a Zero fret and that is a nice touch however the nut is not placed very well and is not flush with the neck It is not a great issue but still. The neck also has a MusicMan type truss rod nut and to be honest all basses should have this, over the years I have repaired many truss rods due to wrong tooling and you cant go wrong with this truss nut.. two thumbs up!!! The hardware appointments are more than to be expected on a bass of this value and more than adequate, bridge is good, string retainers are nice and as a string through bass the ferrules are nicely inserted and flush with the body, the tuners are ok but will do the job i'm sure. Upon inspection on the bench there was a pick guard screw loose, It would not tighten so after removing the pick guard I found that the wood had split under the guard and broken off, so the first repair had to be done, I also found that the jack plate had a screw that was protruding in front on the insert point and had to be screwed home. The jack plat is the round concave type and is a nice touch. These are things that Thomann's inspection guy certainly missed and If I were not living in Canada I would have certainly returned the bass on these points alone. So after all that time to plug in! The bass was well set up, action good and low but the strings were terrible so I restrung it with a set of D'addario NYXL's. I am very anal about strings ( we all have our string preferences I'm sure) and the mounted D'addario EXL155SL .045 - .105. are better suited to binding up the exhaust pipe on my old Dodge Caravan than to be used in a musical fashion. The neck profile is not my cup of tea, slow and fatiguing is the word I would use but my muscle memory may need to get used to it and time will only tell. But hey, how does it sound? Well the neck pick up is alive and well, quite nice, lots of beefy low end tones to be had BUT the bridge pick up is dead, out of phase and there is a large volume drop when soloed, simply bad and really should not be on any bass guitar regardless of price. The pre amp is 2 band active(V/B/T /T) and really is no better with large amounts of hiss with even the slightest amount of treble boost and there is no amount of tweaking the bridge pickup to make it sound any wear close to reasonable. The pot detents are good and firm. The volume pot is push pull and in the up position it is passive but no tone control in passive mode... Meh! The battery compartment is ...hmmm cheap. Shielding is conductive paint and the pick ups are mounted on neoprene rubber. I gave this bass four stars out of the 5 available for looks and for appointments like the zero fret, bridge and string retainer, truss nut etc. It weighs in at 9 pounds or just over 4 KG's and the balance is exceptionally good but sound wise it is a fail and I think that Harley Benton sells these on looks rather than going a little bit further and getting the tone and electrics right. I will keep the Harley Benton Enhanced MP-4EB and mod it to my specs( which will end up costing more than the bass...lol) as I think that this is a modifiers dream bass but to label it a Pro Series is a little rich in my honest opinion. but she is oh so pretty!

This bass is worth taking a serious look at. I am a semi-pro bassist for 40 years, have a ridiculous number of basses in all price ranges and am super impressed with this model. When unboxed, I found no flaws of any kind. The neck and fretwork is first rate. Nice and thin , and needed only minor tweaking to get the action down to my liking. The pickups are dead quiet in either position. I love the fact it has a blend pot, rather than a switch. The rear pickup is bright and kind of nasal sounding, like Bartolinis. The split P bass P/U is very full and together give you lots of options tone wise. I live in Canada and you cannot get anything of this quality for this price. I am very happy with this bass and will be bringing it to all my upcoming gigs to show my fellow gearheads you don't have to spend a fortune to get a quality built , great sounding and looking bass.

This one went back because of a slightly misaligned bridge. Other impressions:

Beautiful looks (maybe apart from the huge headstock if you ask me).
Chunky neck made of lovely maple with a soft feel. It felt great to me apart from several sharp fret ends. These need attention and the frets need a polish as well. On the positive side the stainless frets were level and the neck was straight (which is after all more important). Strings came with a very high action but I was able to adjust them down to a more playable level without any buzz. I also like the zero fret which is a rare feature especially in this price range.

This bass is fairly heavy for a 4-string. Ergonomics and balance is good though.

The push pull volume knob had a lot of play (a dead zone) which made it feel cheap. I didn't play the bass enough to make a final judgement on the pickups and preamp but I'm pretty sure that the pots and preamp would have been replaced soon if I had kept it. Not sure about the pickups, they might be fine.

All in all it's a nice looking bass with some premium features but in this case it was let down by poor fit and finish in some areas. I personally don't mind giving the frets some love on bass in this price range but a misaligned bridge and inaccurately drilled string holes underneath it would be too much of a hassle to make perfect. It wasn't so bad that it influenced playability much but I like my strings to align nicely with the neck and the pole pieces of the pickups. They didn't on this sample.

In the end I decided not to have it replaced with an identic model since a perfect one would still be slightly heavier than I prefer and it would likely also require some mods to the electronics to make me 100% happy. If you can live with that it's a lot of bass for the money though. Just cross your fingers and hope that you get a good one since the finish and quality control does not seem to be better here compared to Harley Benton's cheaper models.

I ordered this bass because I needed another bass for alternative tunings (mainly guitarist) and this was both very affordable and very well spec'd. I've gone through many basses before and each one was missing that punch or were missing the body I like in my bass tones . The second I plugged this bad boi into my rig, it proceeded to beat the wrath of God into my gut. It is now my main bass and has its own personality in my mixes that demands its own pocket of space.

Each note is a force to be reckoned with. In the "both pickups" position, it is simultaneously snappy and beefy, filling in any sonic space it needs to and makes every note clear and concise.

The only bad thing that I found with mine is that the G string was set up just a tad low, so I raised it up a bit. Other than that, everything was perfect.

If you need an all-rounder that can fill any role a bass needs to, get this one. I will more than gladly get another or the 5-string version.

I got a flawed instrument, where the pickups and bridge was not aligned.
So i had to change the pickups to inlined magnet ones to fix the alignment with the strings. Because of the stringthru body i could not move the bridge, witch had been an easy fix.
Bought EMG P and EMG MMTW. And now i have a bass that is nice to play, and sounds awesome. The MMTW pickup can be used as both a single and a humbucker. And together with the P pickup, i now have 3 different sounding options that can be blended together. The EMGs are better than the stock ones. Because i was unfortunate to buy a flawed bass, the shop gave me a 35€ cut in the price, witch was to little. But i did not want to ship back the bass, so i took it. The new pickups had a price that made the bass more expensive, but the end product after the upgrade fix, is good.
It's a heavy bass. And i guess the weight, build materials, string thru body, high mass bridge and quality pickups makes the big sound it has. I took out the stock pre amp, and used the pots and wires that came with the EMGs.
The stock pre amp ain't bad, so i will use it in my Ibanez gio200 wich has a bad stock pre amp.
After the upgrade fix, i am now happy with this beautiful bass. It is very nice looking, and you can se the quality parts and work witch has made this a bass build like a much more expensive one.
And i find it an easy bass to play, much because of it's nice slim neck.

...the string spacing is really out of whack. The G string is very close to the edge of the fret board and the E has plenty space to spare, and the gap between the E and the A is much larger than between the other strings. Not bad enough for me to send it back (too much hassle from Norway, but if I had bought it locally I would have). I will have to get a new nut for sure. Since this is supposed to be an "enhanced" instrument, I'm a bit disappointed.

In all other respects it's a great bass for the price, but HB needs to pay attention to the small, but important details.

Nice bass with a great sound. The P pickup sound decent, and this is the only one I used so far. Not a big fan of the bridge one. The wood is very resonant and sustains pretty good. Some drawbacks consist of manufacturing errors. The bridge was mounted 1 centimeter above the center and so was crooked and strings didn't align with the pickup pole pieces. The electronics are a bit iffy, but provide nice options for this price range. The neck is extremely nice and the binding is actually nicely executed. The color is a bit too blue for my liking (like extremely saturated), also the perloid pickguard is driving me insane and does not really fit imo. I have written to customer service in hoping I could get a replacement black pickguard, like on the natural version, and await response.

I saw this bass and was attracted by its look at first. I then checked the specs and could not believe what a great bass this seemed to be. I checked some reviews out and decided to get it. It will be my back up and practice bass. The Roswell picks ups are excellent sounding and wide ranged with a versatile selection of sounds from the split coil and humbucker. The hardware is excellent quality for the money and the bound neck feels fantastic. Only negatives are that the bass is a little on the heavier side and the scratch plate was a little roughly cut around the top curve but to be honest, this is a minor issue and can easily be sanded flush.