They just copy other guitars. My grandfather has a Harley Benton goldtop copy with P90s. Its pretty good for the money, probably Epiphone standard but for half the price.
But yes this looks very similar to the Kiesel Osiris.
Yeah they're basically Rondo, but with better distribution. Rondo tries to have tiers of quality (SX, Douglas, Agile), mostly artificial separations for the possibility of the upsell, whereas HB pretty much sells everything with the same branding. So you can get a SS fret headless with roasted maple FB for whatever, $450 and then you can get a black strat plywood body for $100 with the same logo on the headstock, which raises it's perceived value since it's from the same brand as the feature packed one.
I don't know about that. To anyone in Europe who started playing in the 90's Harley Benton is synonymous with cheapest of the cheap beginner guitars, so if anything having that name on the headstock lowers the perceived value of the better ones. The HB's from when I started playing made my Ibanez Gio seem like a Suhr in comparison.
Yeah that's the HB I know of growing up, too. I just thought the goal of packing in the features on the new stuff was to flip that perception but I agree, for people familiar with the brand it has the opposite effect. I can't not see a cheap guitar no matter what they add to it.
I think they should had rebranded their Brand when they started doing better specs models. The name itself sound like cheap crap at least to me. Although they are peaking my interest in some of their guitars.
The Fusion line or whatever it's called, the one that's a Suhr/AZ/Charvel thing that Henning helped with, I really liked the specs on but the finished product looked a little cheap. Finish looked plastic, top looked photoflamed and the necks looked like stained chocolate finish instead of real roasted maple. I'm not sure if that's just HB's version of a Suhr or if it's a perception issue based on the brand, because otherwise, the specs and outline were pretty nice.
For one positive note on it, it looks like they have at least copied good, high end headless bridge designs. Cheap headless bridges that you see from other chinese guitars are gaaarrrrbage.
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