Harley Benton EX-84 FR

This is the Harley Benton EX-84FR White Progressive guitar! It's one of the HB "heavy guitars" available at thomann.de :
http://www.thomann.de/gr/harley_benton_ex84fr_white_progressive.htm?partner_id=73786

The Harley Benton EX-84FR is an explorer-shaped guitar with a set-in neck construction. It's got mahogany body, mahogany C-shape neck, real rosewood fretboard with dot inlays, 22 medium jumbo frets, 628mm scale. The nut-width is 43mm and the neck has a double-action truss rod! This is a great feature that allows you to use whatever string set and tuning you like!
The pickups are HBZ active hi-gain humbuckers. There are 2-volume and 1-tone controls plus a 3-way toggle switch.
It's got a Floyd Rose-style licensed tremolo system, deluxe black hardware, die-cast tuners, d' addario 010-046 strings. The finish is hi-gloss white.

The guitar came in with d'addario quality strings on and it had to be set up properly. The first step was to tune up the guitar and see what had to be adjusted. The action had to be lowered a bit but I didn't get any buzzing or dead notes. The neck relief needed a tiny bit of adjustment and the intonation was pretty good.

The electronics made a hissing noise. That was due to the active pickup system combined with 500K volume and tone pots. Replacing the stock pots with ~25K ones would be the best solution as far noise reduction is concerned but I didn't want to reduce the output of these really powerful pickups. Therefore, I just built an R-C low pass filter: a 100K resistor is series with a 100nF capacitor wired across the output jack terminals.This trick reduced the hissing noise while retaining most of the output and treble of the pickups. I would certainly recommend replacing the stock pots with 100K ones and use a 47nF capacitor for the tone control. This is a something between the emg/Duncan blackouts control system and the usual passive 250/500K control system. Emg/Blackouts pickups could also be combined with 50k-100k pots if you need more output and treble. The stock 25K EMG pot resistance value is a bit low for the HBZ pickups.

A 50K pot by Goeldo:
http://www.thomann.de/gr/goeldo_el50l_minipoti.htm?partner_id=73786




 The guitar was properly set up and it became really playable, The neck is comfortable, the fret work is decent, the pickups are hot and the tremolo is usable. I am not a big fan of the floating trems but I didn't lock this one up. Replacing the stock tremolo with a Sung IL single locking one would be the best modification! These sung il Korean parts are very good.


 The EX-84 fr is a value for money guitar, priced at 180Euros. There's also the ex-84 model finished in black or white for 150Euros:
http://www.thomann.de/gr/harley_benton_ex_84_white_progressive_serie.htm?partner_id=73786
The simple ex-84 has a tune-o-matic bridge which is a good thing if you're not a fan of the floyd tremolo system.
And also, check out the EX-76 which is a vintage oriented alternative, with passive hot pickups, tune-o-matic bridge and a chunkier "60's gibson" style neck profile:
http://www.thomann.de/gr/harley_benton_ex76_bk_classic_series.htm?partner_id=73786

I've used the ex-76 and it's pretty good too, although it had 1 or 2 minor finish blems (I think it was a b-stock product).

Cheers,

Thanos