Harley Benton Baritone CLG-414BCE NT

I am in a unique position since a colleague/writing partner of mine has one from the first production series with a different (earlier Fishman) piezo system. I was really suspicious at first, but I had a chance to actually test one before making the purchase. I really liked the guitar a lot. It seems that my writing partner got a good specimen. I didn't.

The factory strings on mine were Elixir Nano Web 016 - 022 - 030 - 047 - 059 - 070 making this relatively hard to play and sound almost brash acoustically. C standard tuning with the factory strings is creating serious tension. Anything below B seems to be working better. I strongly recommend restringing the guitar with Daddario EJ18 (014 - 018 - 027 - 039 - 049 - 059), but replacing the 059 with Daddario PB070 as my partner did. One can go to drop-A#/C-standard with that set without sacrificing playability and clarity.

I don't expect the finish or build quality to be perfect at this price range, but I would expect a decent fret job at least. The fret-ends on mine needed serious work. The bridge set-up was horrible with the strings riding really high above the 12th fret. This is easy to fix, but to buy a 299 e acoustic, which is borderline unplayable was not what I had in mind. The Harley Benton "quality control" dropped the ball on this one, both at the factory and at the warehouse. The neck, especially in acoustic guitars, can move in transition during winter, but mine was crooked beyond description. Machine heads seem to be pretty solid and this one does keep in tune.

This sounds what you would expect an acoustic at this price range to sound. The Fishman Sonicore pickup and Fishman Isys+ Preamp sound actually pretty good.

Great quality and sounds really good. I'm not a pro on acoustic guitars but I have played more expensive ones that sounded much worse, so I'm happy with this one!

I guess you should know that when the guitar arrived it was tuned to standard tuning and that was a little strange. But I gotta say this guitar sounds even better in standard tuning. Luckily I bought baritone strings separately for the guitar in the same order.

Also, not a big deal (at least for me) but if you're going to tune it low and put thick strings on it like I did, the thickest being a .070 gauge string, it won't fit straight away to the tuning peg. But it took me 2 minutes to fix that (drilling the hole bigger with a 2mm drill head).

But I totally recommend this guitar, even if you play in standard tuning!

I bought this a while back and it was good from the start, but I didn't find myself playing it much. Then I tried on the "Parabolic Tension" strings from Santa Cruz – the mid tension set they don't seem to have at Thomann (but hope they will?) – and it became just amazing, in intonation, tuning stability, sound, playability, and across-the-broad projection. That's a lot to say, but I've never experienced such a shift from a "mere" string change; as this is a review for the guitar, I do realize I sound like hyping the strings instead – but this is only because in my experience at least, that's a commendable option for making this fine guitar superb, and not only for its affordable price range. (There are some demos on my YouTube; the tuners are not great but do the job.)