Harley Benton Fusion-III HSH Roasted FNT

I've been playing for 49 years, owned over 40 guitars in that span. Mostly hobbyist playing, but lately I've started clubbing with a small combo on sporadic dates. As I get closer to retirement, I'm looking to expand my clubbing with a guitar that can cover a wide variety of rock, pop and country from late 50's through 90's.

After much researching around, I found both Henning Pauly and Jonathan Koh's video reviews of this guitar on the YouTuber, both of which combined convinced me to take a chance on this beauty. Subscribe to both of them if you haven't by now... both are wonderful and honest in their reviews of these guitars.

The purchase process was great. I live in Minnesota, USA. Guitar arrived in 10 days from Germany. Packaging was great and finish-wise the guitar was pristine on arrival. Setup was good, with slightly too much relief in the neck for my liking, so about 1/4 turn of truss took care of that. 2 of the intonation lock-down hex screws on the bridge needed tightening, otherwise setup and intonation were great!

All electronics except the 5-way switch worked fine. The 5-way was intermittent, so I shot with electrical cleaner and that seemed to fix. With an eye on future upgrades and/or maintenance, I asked Thomann for a wiring diagram and was surprised to hear they don't have one. Please supply these with your instruments, Thomann!!! PDF's in the Support Page would be Awesome!!!

I play through mostly Positive Grid products using a '63 Gibson Skylark played clean, and the tonal choices on this guitar are terrific. I can get anything from Tele to Strat to LP and combos thereof. Love it.

This guitar has a neck to die for! Beautiful roasted maple, stainless steel frets (which are perfect), GraphTech nut and roller tree. Man, you can dive the crap out of the whammy and it holds tune! It's thinner than the other guitars I've owned, but not weirdly so: very comfortable and capable of supporting much faster players than me!

All in all, I'd rate this guitar as the nicest playing instrument I've ever owned, with the possible exception of my Gretsch Electromatic. (No, they're tied for first!). And my faith in Harley Benton and Thomann is 100%. So much that (again, Thanks to Henning and Jonathan) I put an order in yesterday for the CST-24HB Tortoise Flame. Dying to get my eyes and hands on it!

Keep up the good work, Thomann! I'll be spreading the Harley Benton Gospel here in Minnesota for ya! --Cheers!

Due to the current pandemic, I'm not playing out. I have yet to gig out with the guitar.
I've had the guitar for over a month. First what I liked about the guitar. I was always wondering what the big deal was with "roasted" necks. Well, if you haven't tried one, please do. This is the smoothest playing neck ever. I have over 20 guitars, Tele with maple, Les Paul with rosewood, Schecter with ebony. IMHO this is the best neck of all.

Next the pickups.
I wanted a guitar that could do it all, humbucker and single coil. First of all despite some of the You Tube reviews, I like the pickups and will not be changing them. The humbuckers would not be confused with the Seymour Duncan Custom 59's but they have a good tone, compare them to the Epiphone Probuckers. When split I'm able to get very close to the Fender Strat sound, playing clean, think of Jimmy Vaughan or Robert Cray. I have played this through my Fender Hotrod Deluxe to check out the tube sound with volume, and the Fender Champion 50 XL for around the house. I was able to get myriad tones with both amps.
Looking forward to gigging out with this.

The guitar was set up very well, I have a slew of luthier tools, but needed none. I adjusted the action and intonation. I had to go to You Tube for a video on how to adjust the Wilkinson bridge, which BTW is much better than the Fender vintage. Electronics all worked well. Cavity is shielded, no name large pots, smooth action on volume and tone, with no big drop offs. Locking tuners are a real plus on any guitar with a tremolo, BTW the arm is adjustable, no flapping around.

Cosmetics.
The guitar cosmetics were well done, no flaws found. The flamed finish looks great. I had to get use to a little different style of picking as there's less than 3/4" inch between pickups. I had ordered the "bundle" which is supposed to come with a HB gig bag, it came with a GEWA economy gig bag, which I actually consider an upgrade as I can compare this with my HB.

The only negative was the shipping of the guitar. I was aware that there would be delays due to the current situation, however there was a mix up in either their shipping or DHL. The order showed my address as correct, but somehow the mailing label hat was printed out had a zip code from an old address over 300 miles away. It was lost for a while until someone in the Postal Service here corrected the address by hand. The good news is that there was no damage despite a round about route to get to me.

Question, "Is this guitar suitable for the Blues?"
Answer, "All guitars are. It's the player that puts the Blues out there."
Yes, when I return to gigging I will be playing this guitar, but for the B.B. King songs it'll have to be my Gibson.
I'm happy to have this guitar in my arsenal.

First things first, I am a big Harley Benton fan and I wanted to love this guitar. I pre-ordered this Fusion Pro on the basis of Corey Mura's excellent you tube review of the prototype and his interview with HB's CEO, who I admired for his business ethos, openness and honesty. Out of the box the guitar looked great, beautiful flamed maple top and roasted maple neck with laminate maple fretboard. However, one minor niggle at this point was a small area of swirls / scratches on the rear of the body.

The major problems immediately arose when playing the guitar, it just does not stay in tune. This is regardless of whether the tremolo arm is used or not. Without tremolo use the guitar consistently detunes within a minute of playing, using the trem (even lightly) instantly detunes the guitar and it will not return to pitch. These serious tuning problems appear to be due to a number of design issues on the guitar. The main one being the use of a string retainer bar behind the nut the same as those used on locking nut / Floyd Rose type trem systems. Unfortunately, on a floating Wilkinson tremolo system like this, it is a tuning disaster! The friction imparted on the strings by the retainer bar is always going to cause tuning issues unless a locking nut is used. Furthermore the two screws used to hold the retainer bar down directly contact the two adjacent strings that the screws are positioned next to, adding even more friction to these strings in what is supposed to be a 'free floating' tremolo system. The nut slots are also poorly cut adding more friction to the strings, had the nut slots been the only issue I would have filed the slots but the other significant fault on the guitar was discovered when trying to rectify these tuning issues and that was that 5 of the 12 grub screws used to adjust the bridge saddle heights have had their hex slots stripped and are not adjustable using the hex key provided!. Sadly, the tuning problems cannot be rectified by simply removing the retainer bar, as this results in severe string 'pinging' when playing.

I can only postulate that the reason the string retainer bars have been added (they weren't on the prototype) is to minimise production costs by producing the same neck for the Wilkinson trem version as the Floyd Rose version. In my humble opinion, this could have been easily avoided by using the same neck but with staggered locking tuners and NO string retainer bar. As such the cost of the hardware upgrades and modifications that would be needed to effectively correct the problems encountered on this guitar are too prohibitive for me to carry out this work. I have therefore requested a return / refund from Thomann customer services who have kindly agreed and sent me a shipping returns label.

I really hoped the Fusion Pro models would be a game changer for Harley Benton, I sincerely hope they get the issues on this model rectified. Although the guitar looks stunning and has a lot of great features it fails to achieve its fundamental requirement and that is to play and stay in tune. For this reason I can't give it more than 1 star!