Harley Benton TE-69TL Hot Rod | The best affordable Thinline Telecaster around?! Review & Demo

This is the Harley Benton TE-69TL Hot Rod NT Roasted – the Thomann house brand’s affordable take on a Fender Thinline Telecaster!

Get the TE-69 here: https://thmn.to/thoprod/517406?offid=...

Coming in at around €219, the TE-69 is certainly an affordable take on the Thinline philosophy. And, on paper, it looks great too – you get an ash body with some lovely grain going on, plus a roasted maple neck and fingerboard. The neck is built for modern playability, too: it’s got a 12” fingerboard radius, a satin, medium C-shape profile, and 21 frets on its 648mm/25.5” scale.

This is also a hot-rodded guitar, meaning we’ve got a Roswell stacked bridge humbucker to play with alongside the traditional single coil neck pickup (you split the bridge humbucker by pulling up the tone pot).

All that said, the TE-69 should be an incredibly versatile guitar. Thinline Teles are known for sounding slightly rounder and fuller than standard Teles – which probably has something to do with their semi-hollow construction – but the stacked bridge pickup on this one means we should have even more tonal options.

In this video, I attempt to show you all of them! I put the TE-69 through its paces in as many different musical styles as I can, from country, folk and indie, to pop, rock, blues, punk, metal and more. Let’s see how it matches up to its Fender and Squier competition!

Here are some links to the various playing samples and info bits:

00:00 Hello!
00:19 Introduction to the TE-69TL
01:36 Specs and info
04:15 Today’s rig and plan

Clean Sounds
05:05 Clean tone reference chords with all pickup options
05:37 Poppy barre chords
06:06 Blues progression
06:17 Ringing open indie pop chords
06:30 Funky chords
06:44 Country lead
06:50 Country ballad arpeggios
07:04 Cowboy chords with tone control test
07:37 Strummed folk pop chords
07:54 Surf pop riff
08:11 Clean sounds with extra reverb/delay

Overdrive Sounds
10:09 Kings Of Leon inspired riff
10:15 Southern rock arpeggios
10:26 Fat indie rhythm chords
10:55 Indie rock octaves
11:21 Choppy barre chords
11:41 Indie rock barre chords
12:05 Volume control roll-off test
12:29 Ringing indie arpeggios
12:48 Droning ascending riff
13:01 Mellow octave chords
13:17 Fratellis inspired riff
13:31 Classic rock riff
13:48 Driving rock riff
14:03 Airbourne inspired rock riff
14:14 Hendrix inspired riff
14:31 Groovy classic rock riff
14:57 AC/DC inspired classic rock riff
15:15 Quacky classic rock riff

Heavy Overdrive Sounds
15:25 80s rock riff
15:44 Classic hard rock riff
16:01 Hard rock riff
16:18 Glam rock riff
16:33 Hard rock melodic lead
16:55 Alternative rock riff
17:19 Green Day inspired punk rock riff
17:32 Pop punk melodic lead riff
17:48 Pop punk riff
18:01 Punk rock power chords
18:27 Less Than Jake inspired punk riff
18:39 Modern rock palm-muted power chords (Drop D tuning)
19:03 Rage Against The Machine inspired groovy riff (Drop D)

Metal sounds (all in Drop D)
19:19 Metal chugging riff
19:36 Mastodon inspired metal riff with country twang
19:48 Heavy metal lead sound
20:04 Rammstein inspired industrial metal riff
20:16 Hardcore punk riff
20:27 Classic metal/sludge riff

21:05 My thoughts
22:03 First impressions out of the box
22:38 Weight
23:47 Build quality, playability and the neck
24:55 Sounds and pickups discussion
29:11 What other similar guitars are out there?
32:08 My conclusions on the TE-69TL

My setup was as follows: I ran the TE-69 into my Hughes & Kettner Black Spirit 200 head, also using my Revv G3 for heavy distortion sounds and my Source Audio Collider for the extra delay/reverb. The amp went from the Red Box DI straight into my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4, which went into Logic Pro X. That's it. No post-processing on the sounds was done.

Here’s some links to those bits of gear:

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H&K Black Spirit 200 head: https://thmn.to/thoprod/447827?offid=...
Revv G3: https://thmn.to/thoprod/437353?offid=...
Source Audio Collider: https://thmn.to/thoprod/475734?offid=...
Focusrite 4i4 (the new 2i4): https://thmn.to/thoprod/467952?offid=...
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Enjoy!

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Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – TrackTribe.

#HarleyBenton #HarleyBentonGuitar #Telecaster #ThinlineTelecaster #TelecasterThinline


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