Don’t upgrade your Harley Benton guitar before watching this

all right hi guys uh just a short video today I'm going to be talking about upgrading Harley Benton guitars and why you should be aware of uh you know making modifications before you purchase one if you buy one with the intention of upgrading it right and I think for most people it's probably a better idea to stick with like a squire guitar or like an original company budget uh budget instrument if you're thinking of getting one to upgrade it now I bought this Harley bentum guitar I like a lot of you because I've heard great things about the quality for the money that you pay and also that it's a good modding platform so I wanted to make some modifications to make this instrument play slightly better but unfortunately a lot of these aftermarket parts are not going to fit on this Harley Benton because they're Al they're usually made for actual Fender telecasters now the issue is for most people they think that it's a dropping replacement and that's not the case if you're a competent luer or even like a novice or maybe you you're a diyer who just likes to do things yourself sure you can make those offer market parts work but for most people who thinking that it's just like an easy replacement it's not and I learned this the hard way initially so I replaced the bridge with a Wilkinson compensated BR saddle Bridge right because I thought I would get better tone and I would get better intonation but the first thing I realized is well the tone was basically the same shocker and you might disagree on that but that's what I thought and secondly the intonation was actually slightly worse now the issue was on that Wilkinson Bridge there were no notches so that the strings could rest on them and this guitar the original Bridge actually has notches for the strings to rest on now this means that without notches the string spacing is going to be whack because whenever you bend the string it might move ever so slightly affecting the intonation and tuning and I had those issues with that bridge now I've put the original Bridge back on and the string uh string spacing is perfect I don't get any issues with uh tuning and the intonation is more less okay even though the design of this bridge means that it's not going to be perfect but it's it's good enough maybe like a 5cent different or something a 5 Cent difference or something and this guitar plays amazing now it played all right before but it's way better now and I should have just stuck with the original Bridge honestly one year late and 20 quid out but oh well you live and you learn and this is why I'm making this video so that you guys can also be aware of this stuff the next thing that you might want to upgrade is the pig guard well it's not fit to the fender spec if you buy a fender teleost pig pig guard you know any aftermarket Pig guard is going to be for that model of guitar so you would have to drill new holes maybe reshape it to get it a fit pickups are not that big of an issue on this because to my knowledge they seem like they're just you know uh made to Def Fender spec and that's because the Wilkinson Bridge fit the uh Bridge pickup really well so I think if you do replace the pickups you won't have to like you know drill like new holes in the pick guard make it bigger or whatever but again maybe someone who actually has done that would want to could advise you better the control panel the cavity or um the cavity for this is relatively I think it's okay in terms of space but for certain parts it might be too small so if you're upgrading it by adding maybe some like uh a really big switch it might not fit something to keep in mind of now the nut a lot of people recommend installing a graphtech nut on these guitars cuz they come with a plastic nut and graphtech has all these better tuning uh you know benefits and tone benefits and stuff now that might be true but graphtech nuts for the most part are made for guitars with a 9 and 1 half in radius fretboard or maybe a 7 and a qu if you're playing an older style taser these guitars have a 12-in radius fretboard and when you put that graph Tech knot into this guitar it's not going to play as well as it did with this original knot because the radius of the nut is going to be mismatched with the radius of the fretboard so certain notes will probably ring like clearly but they might be a bit too high on these first few Frets and then others might actually Buzz even if you sand it down right now you can overcome this problem by making an actual bespoke nut for this guitar getting take it to the Luther and be like okay add a bone uh to this guitar for me and that would work well but you can't uh you know most of you are thinking that it's going to be a Dro in replacement and it's not well maybe most of you is a wide generalization but to any one of you guys who thinks it's going to be a droing replacement it's not so be careful a lot of people recommended the Tusk PQ Q 5 50420 I think and yeah that's not going to be as good of a fit as the original knot is second thing tuners sorry next thing tuners the posts that you the holes on the um the holes on the headstock are slightly smaller than the average Fender Telecaster uh I think uh tuner requires so you would need to get a reamer make it bigger and then insert these tuning pegs but the screws that hold them in place are not the same ones Harley Venton and Fender use probably and you might have to like you know drill new holes plug in the old ones and if you don't have the equipment for that well that's just going to be a whole other issue and that's those are the things that you have to be aware of when you purchase this guitar to upgrade now now that I've said these things if you want the upgrades to be as like you know drop in and easy as possible get a squire cuz squires are made to the fender spec maybe maybe the neck pocket might be like slightly different or something like that but for the most part those guitars are going to fit aftermarket parts much better right and again with the bridge story I think I could have still used that wison bridge if I made some notches on it myself but I don't really have the capability nor do I want to so yeah keep that in mind so anyways I hope you guys enjoyed watching this video if you have any questions about this guitar or you know my experiences with it feel free to comment it down below in the future I will be making a review on some other Harley Venton guitars instruments that I've purchased which is this jazzz base over here so if you want to watch videos like that do subscribe and stay tuned and I'll catch you guys next time so thank you for watching

Channel: MaddNukes

Views: 2,006

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Id: mavlN3UHDkI

Length: 6min 10sec (370 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2024