Harley Benton Upgrade. Powerup achieved. Mission 2

Following on from the single demo I did of the upgraded Harley Benton (Price: £99 used) plus a boatload of parts including:

Mojo Dogear P90 and Mojo paper in oil 0.022uF capacitor
CTS TVT taper pots
Tone Pros metric adjustable intonation wraparound bridge
Vintage style Kluson single line tuners
Gibson style bell knobs and pointers
Tiny Tone tort guard and backplate

I now present a direct comparison again of the guitar versus it's 'authentic' ancestor, the increasingly expensive Gibson custom shop Les Paul Junior 1958 re-issue.

These days, it's easy to become distraught at the huge price rises for guitars lately. Ridiculous and largely inflated I think by opportunity rather than necessity. In short, I think the big companies are taking the absolute piss out of us. So, a solution might be to get a cheap one. A Harley Benton for example and either love it for what it is or throw parts at it and see if it rivals the expensive one.

Show these greedy opportunist guitar companies that we see through their crap. They are at it big time and are grossly inflating prices just because we are led to believe they need to.
Casino guitars recently published a really stupid video where they start bumping their gums about Harley Benton and how you should buy really expensive guitars (from them apparently) like the John Cruz Strat and Tele rip-offs and all the other boutique copies that they happily sell for a fortune but dare to buy a cheap great sounding guitar from Thomann or want them to do work on it? Nope. Talk about being hypocritically blinded by your own profit margin.

Suck it bawjaws!

I am using a Fender Deluxe Reverb 1965 Re-issue with a Tone King Ironman II in input 2 of the Vibrato channel set about 5 and the amp is right at the point of distorting depending on how you hit the strings. I include chapters to compare the 2 guitars which were set with tones half way and volume at max as the Benton was wired in modern style whilst the Gibson was in '50's style so I wanted to minimise the difference in pot behaviour. In short, the guitars were set equivalently through out. No effects, no post processing. What you hear is what I heard during recording.

00:00 Intro
00:15 Clean arpeggio Gibson
00:47 Clean arpeggio HB
01:15 Checking the intonation fretted strings against open for both guitars
02:03 Blues phrase 1 Gibson
02:31 Blues phrase 1 HB
02:50 Blues phrase 2 Gibson
03:20 Blues phrase 2 HB
03:44 Rock chords 1 Gibson
04:14 Rock chords 1 HB
04:40 Rock chords 2 Gibson
05:15 Rock chords 2 HB
05:41 Clean phrase Gibson
06:24 Clean phrase HB
06:50 Less clean Gibson
07:16 Less clean HB
07:37 Checking volume and tone controls Gibson and HB
09:09 Bass pop Gibson
10:12 Bass pop HB
10:47 Country bend Gibson
11:22 Country bend HB
11:54 Rock Riff 1 Gibson
12:30 Rock Riff 1 HB
12:56 Rock Riff 2 Gibson
13:55 Rock Riff 2 HB
14:49 Blues Riff Gibson
15:37 Blues Riff HB

Read all about the upgrade with the story and pictures in my website feature:

https://www.gringopig.com/harley-benton-upgrade