Harley Benton HWY-25BKS Progressive Series

Have had this guitar for over 6 months now and have decided to review it after being able to play for a while and get a good idea of how it plays and holds up. This is my first guitar but I have been playing the violin and been in a band for years so had a decent knowledge when beginning to learn.

It arrived in good condition with only a small scratch on the headstock. It is very good quality and the matte black is very nice for the guitar. It is relatively heavy but this isn't too much of a problem and is not too bad considering the weight of many guitars out there. For the price, the body and neck are of a very high quality with a good whammy bar and knobs.

The sound is incredible, especially for a guitar that is so cheap - very good for heavy metal music with great pickups.

Overall, in my opinion one of the best beginner guitars for its price. A very cool looking, and good sounding cheap guitar.

This thing is a metal machine, once you get it set up right ( and you might need a soldering iron as mine was buzzy because the ground wire solder had come loose) holy sh*t what a guitar for the price. I have guitars 4 or 5 times the price that can't compete with it. The pickups don't need replacing just put it through a metal zone pedal into an amp with the gain up high and it's instant metal. Mine had no fret edge problems, the frets were reasonably clean but you might want to go over them with a piece of 8000 grit sandpaper. I also replaced the tuners with locking ones, i mean the tuners it comes with are your bog standard cheap ones, they're not great but all in all you get a guitar you can gig with for less than 200 quid, bargain! For beginners I might recommend going into a guitar shop and getting them to set one up for you as it does require you to know your way around a guitar already, it needs a decent amount of set up but still, who can complain for that price?

Tuners, nut, bridge and electrics are cheap garbage. The frets are very rough. However the body and neck are perfect for an inexpensive project guitar.
I got this guitar to do a fret level and polish and upgrade all the hardware, it's perfect for this purpose. I'm extremely happy with the result.
Got a wilkinson trem, axetec locking tuners and a tusc nut, tuning stability, action and intonation are now perfect and it stays in tune even after extreme trem use.
The pickups were a surprise, I was planning to upgrade them but after trying them out, I haven't changed them yet. A real bonus that I wasn't expecting.

What I love about the guitar:
Neck is a nice shape, not super thin like an Ibanez, it's just a bit chunkier like a Schecter
Frets were pretty level, didn't have much work there, but they needed a lot of polishing
Reverse headstock is a great feature, it looks great but even better it gives more tension on the low strings for chugging and less tension on the high strings for bending

My only gripe:
I wish the heal joint was a bit more modern, it doesn't bother me much, but ferrules instead of a back plate and a slight taper would have made this guitar absolutely perfect.

Conclusion:
I paid very little money for this guitar and with a bit of work and a few choice upgrades was able to make it into a very, very good guitar. I have a few £1000 + Schecters and Ibanez guitars and this guitar after the work I did, is easily as good as them. Thankyou Harley Benton and Thomann for providing a great quality guitar for a joke price

There is no doubt the standards of skill and craftmanship demanded by thomann far exceed any other maker of guitars in their price range and even rivals that of many "BIG NAME" guitars. I recently purchased 3 Harley Benton guitars...Harley Benton HWY-25BKS Progressive Series...Harley Benton SC-450 CB Classic Series, and the...Harley Benton R-456FR BK Progressive Series. Each of these guitars were impressive for their price point and I could have paid twice as much and would have been just as impressed. To spare you from the boring technical atributes and specifications outlining just how far above and beyond Harley Benton guitars are from what someone would expect from a guitar in this price range....I will end this review with a simple statement. Harley Benton guitars are without a doubt the best playing best sounding best set up - quality crafted..out of the box guitars you can purchase today at this price point...period!