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.

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)