Just when you thought you had Harley Benton guitars all figured out the Thomann-owned budget gear giant goes and rips up the rule book, teaming up with Gregor Fris of the BassTheWorld YouTube channel for a signature bass guitar that does something very different for the brand.
Yes, the first thing we think of when we think Harley Benton is affordability, and, oftentimes, a cheap electric guitar, or a cheap bass guitar; instruments at a price for beginners and students, and a vast range of budget-friendly instruments that stack the specs high for the price.
But what if it really pushed those specs one step further, using custom hand-wound single-coil pickups from Kloppman Electrics, hooked up to a control loom using CTS pots (just like, say, premium Gibson USA builds), used premium tonewoods such as a deeply caramelised piece of Canadian flame maple for the neck – roseacer stripe for that classic aesthetic – alder for the body and a rosewood fingerboard, and paired a Gotoh bridge with lightweight open-gear Gotoh tuners?
Well, then you would have a pretty fancy bass in your hands. And that, says Fris, was the idea.
“I’ve been a fan of Harley Benton for a long time,” he says. “In the budget bass territory, there is just nothing like it. But when we sat together and started talking about this project, we figured out early that we wanted to try something different. This is Harley Benton but the features on this bad boy are very different… “It’s all premium. As premium as it gets.”
The MV-4JB retails at a cool £718 ($971 approx) via Thomann, with that price including a gig bag.
But Fris and Harley Benton have made a compelling case that this, albeit at a midrange price point, is simple Harley Benton doing Harley Benton things again – there’s value here.
Those hand-wound Kloppman JB-61 Alnico 5 bass pickups are, for Fris’s money, the best single-coils you can stick in a J-style bass. There are player-friendly appointments such as a Modern “soft D” neck profile measuring 21mm at the 1st fret, 23mm at the 12th.
There are practical touches, too, such as the heel-mounted truss-rod adjustment wheel.
And there are some details that are simply friendly to the eye, such as that metallic Burgundy Mist finish and matching headstock – not to mention the pearloid block inlays on the fingerboard, and the cream-coloured binding finishing it off.
Find out more over at Harley Benton, or head to Thomann where it is on sale now.
