Harley Benton R-457FFB Roasted MultiScale

I ordered this guitar for two reasons - 1. I didn't own a seven-string guitar and I wanted to have one in my collection, give it a shot; 2. I fell in love with the finish ("flip-flop blue"), I always wanted a guitar with such a finish (another guitar I had my eyes on was the Petrucci signature model Sterling JP-60/JP-70, but it was around 4 times the price).
When I got the guitar delivered, as soon as I unboxed the guitar I saw that it was very worth it, it's a beautiful guitar, but the main part of the wow-effect ended up being the roasted maple neck, it's a blast to play.
Through my 3 weeks of playing this guitar I am very satisfied, the sound is solid (not excellent, but not as bad as other reviews state, it gets the job done), the guitar is very comfortable to play and also to look at. I encountered 2 problems with guitar so far: 1. the tuners (tuning pegs) are awful, they have "dead spots", where you have to turn a lot in one direction for the pitch to change at all; 2. the nut is horribly cut, the D and A strings slip easily out of the nut when bending notes on lower frets (2nd-5th). Because of the two mentioned problems I also expected tuning stability problems, but I am happy to say that the guitar holds the tuning well (it survived a 4-hour long rehearsal session). All in all, a great guitar, and especially for the price point, but I couldn't give it 5 stars as the nut and tuner quality is simply unacceptable (even though both problems are fixable with further upgrades). If you are asking yourself if you should buy this guitar and your priorities are similar to mine (you want a solid 7-string and a chameleon-type finish), absolutely go for it.

Pros:
- beautiful finish (sparkly green-purple-blue)
- very comfortable to play and beautiful roasted maple neck
- solid sound (but expect nothing special)
- very good price point (as expected for a Harley Benton)

Cons:
- bad quality tuning pegs
- very badly cut nut, two strings slip easily out of the nut

I really wish the pickups on these guitars were easier to replace or not so dark. Not every seven string player is playing gained up doom metal. This guitar looks spectacular, plays extremely well, and seems well made. But the pickups are dark to the point of sometimes sounding dull - especially when playing anything remotely clean to mid-gain. Having to crank the treble at the amp and on every pedal gets to be a drag. There's not much standardization on pickup sizes for these fanned fret guitars, so it's hard to know that anything I might order as replacements would actually fit without hacking away at the cavity. And you know, I'm a guitar player, not a woodworker.

So Thomann - I get that 7 string players lean a certain direction, but maybe don't presume that everyone wants metal tones, and provide some range to these guitars.