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: 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: ----- H&K Black Spirit 200 head: Revv G3: Source Audio Collider: Focusrite 4i4 (the new 2i4): ----- Enjoy! ----- Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – TrackTribe. #HarleyBenton #HarleyBentonGuitar #Telecaster #ThinlineTelecaster #TelecasterThinline *Note: certain links in the description are affiliate links. If you click said links and purchase anything as a result, I will receive a small commission. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, but it does help to support the channel. So, if you do that, thank you very much!* @HarleyBentonOfficial @ThomannsGuitarsBasses @ThomannMusic