Harley Benton launches the Aeolus series – stylish semi-hollow singlecuts with a touch of AAA flame maple class

Harley Benton Aeolus
(Image credit: Harley Benton)

Harley Benton has added the Aeolus series to an ever-growing complement of  electric guitars that somehow manage to offer super-classy design features and be priced well within range of students and beginners.

The Aeolus models are semi-hollow singlecuts with mahogany bodies and AAA flame maple veneers on top, and glued-in, satin-finished necks fashioned from figured roast maple. 

Behind the eye-catching features there's some real substance to their build, with locking 'kidney bean' Grover tuners, stainless steel frets and roasted maple fingerboards, and a Graph Tech TUSQ nut. The tune-o-matic variant looks like a solid piece of hardware for the bridge, too. 

Offered in Frost Flame and the Tobacco Burst-esque Bengal Flame, these should cover a wide range of styles. They're refined enough for jazz, with a vintage look that's ideal for blues, and a pair of classically voiced Tesla VR-2 Alnico 5 humbuckers offering a slightly scooped tone profile.

The control circuit expands your sonic options considerably. Besides the orthodox three-way pickup selector, volume and tone controls, there is a coil-split function on the tone control that'll let you access some single-coil tones that should work very nicely with the semi-hollow build.

There are lots of nice touches on the Aeolus models, not least the glow-in-the-dark side markers, and the 25" scale length feels like a nod to PRS's split-the-difference approach to appeasing dedicated Fender and Gibson players. Also, let's not forget the convenience of having a truss rod adjustment wheel mounted at the top end of the fretboard.

The Aeolus models are available now via Thomann, priced £285 – which, when you look at the pictures above and consider the spec, is deserving of a double take. But then, this is Harley Benton and we're used to this sort of thing by now.

Jonathan Horsley

Jonathan Horsley has been writing about guitars and guitar culture since 2005, playing them since 1990, and regularly contributes to MusicRadar, Total Guitar and Guitar World. He uses Jazz III nylon picks, 10s during the week, 9s at the weekend, and shamefully still struggles with rhythm figure one of Van Halen’s Panama.