Harley Benton TravelMate-E

The guitar seemed a bit like a toy on being unpacked but after playing for just a few moments that is not the case. I’ve been lucky to play some Emerald carbon fibre guitars and although not in the same league obviously it still manages to capture some of the innovative qualities of using that material.
This is a robust construction and well designed with lots of attention to detail making it a great travel guitar, just a tweak or two to make it better for me….. slightly lower action and better strings, easily sorted.
I’ve had this for a few weeks now and it’s stayed in tune well just sitting on my sofa taking up hardly any space at all.
I bought this out of curiosity and intended to possibly sell it on after a few weeks…… that’s not happening. This is a great fun guitar and I play it every day for 20 mins, it makes me smile.
For the price you get a heck of a lot, if you have a spare £200 give it a go.

This guitar sounds unplugged great for its small size and thin profile.

It weights 1880grs not the advertised 1700grs. The difference (10%!!) might not seem much, but when one is trekking with a travel guitar in addition to a rucksack every weight difference counts much! My full blown dreadnought is much bigger but weights just another 200grs more than this one, so the TravelMAte is great in terms of size, but in terms of weight look elsewhere!

The onboard effects are imho no more than a gimmick. Whereas to the untrained ear this may sound kinda cool (as non musical friends report), for anyone who has a little bit of an ear this effect are quite useless. If anything the reverb might be a little useful. The other ones sound too artificial and not useful, the delay can hardly be heard for example. Do you want to stream music via bluetooth and play over it? Be mindful that whatever effect you put on the guitar sound with also be applied to the bluetooth streamed music: cacophony!

Also using the guitar as a bluetooth speaker is nonsense: not loud at all.

I also found the effect very fiddly to dial in the mobile phone app, it was very difficult to get to the sound I wanted as there is an unavoidable process of trial and error which is very impractical in my view. One time I turned on the guitar and got a terrible screeching sound because some of the levels dialed in the effect and could not find the source of the problem so I had to factory reset the whole thing. Maybe I could live with all of the above. But. The deal breaker is that I cannot use my practice headphone amp (Fender Mustang Micro plus): it doesn't work. I called Thomann and I was told that the TravelMate's piezo has a very low signal which is not enough for the Mustang to read, so I would need a preamp to make it work, which wouldn't make sense. I actually even use the Fender Mustang as portable modeller sometimes running a small jack cable into a PA or speaker of some sort. It works with any of my guitars making for the ultimate portable rig... which is incompatible with a guitar that mkeant to be the ultimate in portability.

Sadly I have to send back :(

For the price, you have :
- a very decent acoustic guitar (the action needs to be lowered a bit for my taste, but nothing that a bit of sand paper can't fix (bridge), and the factory strings are also bit too strong and cheap in quality)
- an instrument that is so robust that you can carry it everywhere, and don't fear of sharing it which is really nice because I really can't say this for my other guitars
- a "mini amp" inside the guitar, with effects (the reverb and chorus in particular really do the job)
- the audio system is also blutooth so that you can send your music also inside the guitar, and play along on top of it (with effects, if you so wish)
- an app to control the presets and save them onto the guitar, which is really nice because once done, you can really use your guitar without the app

So this is quite a lot to offer for that money ! I've been surprised to play with it for one or two hours and really have fun and the inspiration after I've received (and prepared) the guitar, which is a very good sign in general ;)
I'd really recommend the guitar (even for beginners), with a light set of good strings (like Elixir Nanoweb Custom Light Phosphor, for example)