Harley Benton MV-4JB Shell Pink

I’m an experienced professional musician and over the years have owned many high end basses (Warwick stage 2/fretless Corvette, USA P’s and J’s, etc) and my main bass is a 5 string Overwater. So I have perspective . But I still suffer from GAS and so I occasionally buy a cheaper bass for a bit of fun. I’ve got a couple of Sires which are great and I liked the look of this Harley Benton and thought I’d have a go for less than £200.
It’s really well made, plays exceptionally well and the tone is comparable with £1000 basses. Great for finger style and slap, don’t use a pick much but it seems good on that too. And the tone/volume controls enable a wide variety of tones from almost Precision to Jaco and quite a bit in between.
The neck is great, extremely smooth and easy to fly around. It’s fun, if you know what I mean, and makes you want to play more.
The saddles and truss rod only required a slight tweak to lower the action a bit to my preference. I can play fast on this bass the same way I can in my Overwater. I may change the strings as there’s a certain feel to them I’m not in love with, but they’re fine, I’m probably just a bit fussy.
They’ve even put fluorescent fret markers on the neck!
If I think back to my first bass in the late 70’s as a novice player (a terrible short scale Kay with an action you could fit an action man under) and what players can buy now for less than £200 is simply phenomenal.
The pink is really lovely. I’m putting a tortoiseshell pick guard on it and was thinking about new pickups, like a Bill Lawrence set, but actually why bother? They’re fine as they are.
Haven’t gigged with it as I mostly work in studios/pits, but in terms of weight it feels well balanced on the strap, no neck dive for me. It’s not light but I’m used to heavier basses and enjoy the solidity. What can I find wrong with it?
Er…..
To conclude: if you’ve got other basses, get one. If it’s your first bass, get one. If you want a decent bass to take out on gigs, without worrying, get 1 (or 2).
OK - I’m off to have another razz on it.

I am blown away by the quality of this instrument. At the price range of 200 - 250 euros, this is undoubtedly one of the best choices you can make, whether you're casually looking for your next bass to have fun/jam/gig with, or you want to purchase your very first bass!


Build Quality:
The glossy finish on the body is extremely well done, the knobs feel sturdy and easy to rotate, the jack is very tight and holds the cable well, and the neck has an absolutely lovely finish. The fretboard is nice, doesn't feel dry, and the factory D'Addario strings are very solid. I didn't replace them.
I did proceed with some slight truss rod adjustment and lowered the action, just to make the instrument even more playable. It worked perfectly!
The only thing I wanna mention as a slight downside is that the metal plate they used that holds the knobs and jack feels kinda cheap. You can see some leftover "stains" when you lightly touch it and remove your finger. That, however, is expected quality assurance wise. You can't have such an awesome instrument for this price and not expect any compromises. Therefore, this won't affect the rating.

Comfort:
The Harley Benton MV-4JB is extremely comfortable to play.
The neck feels very very smooth and it has the perfect width. It's ideal whether you wanna play some lines, fills, chords, arpeggios, anything. It is a breeze to just move your left hand around the fretboard, even on the higher frets, and play whatever phrase you wanna. It is a gem.
The only thing that's not-so-comfortable is that after playing while standing for a bit (say around an hour) you might start to feel some stress put on your shoulder. The headstock seems average sized for a jazz bass, but that could just be me. It could be larger, I didn't compare.

Pickups:
The HBZ custom pickups are actually solid and produce a nice, warm, slightly punchy sound, I am very very satisfied with them! Now yes, if you want the most high-end sound possible, you'll probably replace them in the long run. In my humble opinion, though, it's not necessary. They sound punchy enough for the average joe, and unless you plan to play for metallica, a lot of listeners probably won't tell the difference between them and better pickups (the lower frequencies also help with that, haha). I did a gig with them for a local show, where I used the venue's full rig of course. It sounded so nice I was blown away a 200+ euro bass could produce that sound.
Now, I know that the main factor that affects your tone, guitar or bass, is the cabinet's speaker (impulse response), and to another extent the head amp. I am not saying the pickups produce THAT sound I had, I'm just saying if you're looking to gig with this thing without doing any upgrades, you ABSOLUTELY CAN! The not-so-flashy HBZ pickups will be just fine, I promise :) Just replace them when something seems off with them.

Sound:
As was hinted in the pickups section, the sound is phenomenal. Warm, full, a little bit punchy, it has it all for what you're buying. For my clean tone I mainly use Guitar Rig 7's "Super Bass" profile, and modify it to my liking. For my distortion bass sound, even though the pickups were not really designed for such sound profile, I use Bogren's Trivium Bassknob head amp with some other bass IR's (Komposition101, Tone3000), and just crank up the gain, haha. The sound is obviously not Dingwall bass level, but it is alright with some tweaking and other plugins. I had fun with it still.
But yeah, the clean tones sounded just perfect, and I didn't get any annoying noise even on higher decibels and gain levels. That was so cool!


Overall:
Just buy this bass.

Honestly I couldn't be happier with this. The build quality is excellent, it plays and feels like a much more expensive instrument. I was expecting at least one or two imperfections or rough edges or frets but there was none of that. It's genuinely very well crafted and and just feels very high quality. The fretboard on mine needs a bit of lemon oil as it arrived quite dry but that is very easily remedied. Otherwise, this one didn't require any set up out of the box as the action and intonation were already good and the frets are all great. I love it.

These basses are just fantastic! The quality of the parts is excellent, the sound is amazing (real nice jazz bass growl!) & the plays beautifully.


The only negative points I could find really was the bass required a fully setup and clean. Out of the box the action was sky high & the fingerboard really dry/dirty (wood was almost a grey colour). The fretboard required three coats of lemon oil to fully hydrate and now is a lovely rich brown colour compared to the dry almost pale grey look of the fretboard originally.

An hour and a full strip down, clean and setup later this is one of the best playing and sounding basses I own. I’m fortunately skilled enough to be able to do this myself, but might be abit of a negative experience for someone newer who isn’t familiar doing this kind of work on their own instruments. Still one of the best value purchases you can possibly make.