Harley Benton ST-JAMster SCA

For the price is is a bargain

Packaging is excellent double boxed and very sturdy.

>Guitar is on heavy side about 3.5kg. 22 frets.

The guitar is beautifully finished, stunning candy apple red metallic colour. No blemishes great quality. Neck 22 frets is well set up and has good low string action.

Frets are well finished and it plays well.

Tuners. Adequate but not the best. I found they were not stable for tuning.

Tremolo badly set up, three springs make floating trem impossible. I removed centre spring and adjusted the claw. I can now do the Jeff Beck upwards trem pitch with ease.

Sound, the pickups are adequate but not amazing.
Not a great deal of tone from any of them, neck pickup just doesn't work well, does not have that Strat distinctive neck tone.

Volume pot, works well


Tone pot, kills output sound too much, not great.. I discovered that if you push it down it can select different intensity to reverb and delays This feature is not well described in manual.

Built in active effects.
Clean OK.
Clean +Reverb. Weak reverb only small room size and not powerful.( see note on Tone pot push selector)
Overdrive not a great sound
Distortion weak fizzy
Distortion + Delay. Good the best of all the settings but not loud enough.

Difficult to know which effect has been selected.

Effects in general
Reverb much to weak small room size with no good use. Should be a plate or spring type reverb with medium hall size and 50% in sound mix. Reverb fails on this guitar. See notes on hidden tone control selector

Delay is good but only available on Distortion setting.
The delay like reverb should be available for all sound settings and a tap tempo adjustment for delay.

Overall the guitar is well priced and works well with headphones especially distortion+delay setting.
Used with a conventional amplifier the guitar in passive use is obviously built to a tight costing, it sounds cheap. Nowhere close to Squire Classic Vibe sound for example.

I think better pickups and option for Reverb and Delay adjustment would make this a very useable guitar.

The Audio output mini jack does not work. A mystery.

An input to take sound from phone or Bluetooth audio input would make this so much better.
Overall I give it a 7 out of 10 score based upon great visual appearance.

Hope my feedback is of use.

David Jeffreys.