You might remember Harley Benton’s Fusion IV series. No, you will remember them. Launched in May, high-performance S-styles, officially MusicRadar approved, they retailed for under $600 and there were dozens of them, 41 in total.
Well, meet the sequel – or at least its T-style sibling series, the Fusion-T II. You know the drill. These are Harley Benton guitars, so super affordable (prices on Thomann are all under the magic £/$500 mark), and there are options. Go big or go home.
We have 18 of them in total, in a variety of finishes. Some have metallic solid-colour finishes – the green and the purple look pretty sweet – and some come with figured maple veneers.
What is common to them all is the roasted figured maple neck, bolted to an ergonomically sculpted nyatoh body, fingerboards carved into a 12” to 16” compound radius fingerboard, and Jinho locking tuners on the headstock. This spec is impressive by anyone’s book; we have 24 stainless steel frets here, people.
The inspiration might come from the Telecaster. That’s the general shape. The scale length is a familiar 25.5”. But it is quite a different beast from the OG mass-produced electric guitar.
There are no single-coil pickups here. Instead you'll find a dual-humbucker pickup configuration hooked up to a control circuit that’s equipped with an Alter Switch, that could get you on the guest list to single-coil sounds
This opens up the possibilities for all those in-between tones that are particularly useful when playing clean, but also for the so-called “Ghost tone,” which is described as “a hybrid tone which blends the warm bass of a humbucker with the bright bite of a single coil and takes on a spectral quality for ghastly playing”.
Pretty neat. We’re trying to think of another as-standard spec item but we have to talk options here, because with 18 different varieties of Fusion-T II, Harley Benton is offering players a lot of choice.
Devotees of the brand will be cheered to learn that its Tesla humbuckers are an option, some covered, some with the open-coil zebra-coloured bobbins.
Those who crave a bit more output – well, metal players – also have an EMG option. This one doesn’t have the Alter Switch but it will have that active humbucker attack that can lend your riffs a certain physicality.
Oh, and it’s a good choice of EMGs, with the Custom Retroactive Hot 70 a nice option for those who still want a bit of old-school warmth in their sound.
The EMG model model is offered as a left-handed model – there are plenty of southpaw models available in this drop – with a Babicz Z Series hard-tail, but the Babicz FCH 2-Point Special Z-Series “full-contact” vibrato is available on the Tesla-equipped models.
There is a lot to get to grips with here (we haven’t even told you that the nuts are Graph Tech Tusq XL, or that the truss rod adjustment wheel is helpfully positioned at the top of the fingerboard).
So, the best thing to do is to pop over to Harley Benton where they have the spec configurator and you can look at these in more detail. They are available now through Thomann.
