Dean Tonic D - A Perfect Slide Guitar

I have become more serious about slide lately.  Sure, you can play slide in standard tuning with regular gauge strings - for me those are 9s or 10s - but the aficionados will tell you, “Boy, that ain’t real slide”.  For that I think you need to explore alternate tunings, like open D or open G, which gets tiresome if you have to retune your regular guitar.  You also need to move to heavier gauge strings for a thicker tone and more sustain as well as raise the action so your bottleneck is not clanging on the frets.  Bottom line:  if you’re serious about slide, you need a dedicated slide guitar that’s set up properly.

I spent about a year looking for one and finally settled on the Dean Tonic D.  I really wanted a Teisco with the gold foil pickups and watched them sell on eBay for $200, then $300 and often over $400.  As a value conscious player, I was not going to pay that price for what is, frankly, a poorly constructed guitar made up of marginal quality materials.  Then I started looking at the Korean Danelectros.  I had a chance to play one at Guitar Center, and although it sounded pretty decent, it didn’t feel right to me.  It was well constructed, but the quality of the parts seemed cheap. 

About a month ago I finally pulled the trigger.  Not on the Dean Tonic D, but a Godin LG90.  This is a beautiful guitar with a violin finish mahogany body, mahogany neck, rosewood fretboard and Seymour Duncan P90s.  A mahogany body, P90s and slide go together like PB&J, milk and cookies and all those other classic combos. So what does this have to do with the Dean Tonic D?  I did play slide on the Godin and it sounded great.  And I played all kinds of other things on it as well which made it hard to put down.  The guitar is so good that I decided I did not want to dedicate it full time to slide so the search continued.

Then a couple of days ago I wandered into my local Music-Go-Round and saw a Korean Danelectro and a Korean Dean Tonic D hanging on the wall.  I spent about an hour playing them both and picked the Dean.  Head-to-head, here’s why the Dean gets the nod:

Looks:  I really like the look of the Dean - it’s definitely retro [art deco maybe?] with a nod to the weird Teiscos and Mosrites of the late ‘60s with the slanted bridge, even though it has a basic Strat/SG shape.  The yellow is unusual as is the bi-level top: the area that contains the controls is half an inch lower than the rest of the top.  It also has a cut rim around the edge of the entire guitar.  All in all a cheesy, retro, but cool looking axe that was more appealing to me than the Danelectro.

Quality:  Both the Dean and Danelectro are made in Korea - quite possibly at the same factory.  But the Dean just seems to be of a higher quality.  It has Grover tuners which is a big plus, nice diamond inlays on the thin neck, which are well done, and a good quality Tune-o-matic bridge.  The body is fairly light - not sure what wood, but at this price point probably basswood. Machine heads are arranged so the strings remain straight after crossing the nut, helping tuning stability. The fretwork on the neck is excellent with no sharp edges.  All around, a well-conceived and executed instrument.  The Dano has a hollow laminate body, which is a concern when setting the guitar up as a full time slide guitar with heavy strings.  I can see the bridge or top lifting at some point.  The bridge is metal, but the saddle is wood, so while that may have worked for Jimmy Page, I wanted something that I could intonate correctly. 

Sound:  Both guitars sound good, but as the Dean has a five-way switch, you get more tones from the two hot rails pickups [stacked single coils].  It's quite clever what they've done with the five-way switching as you get HB neck, tapped neck, tapped neck + bridge, tapped bridge, and HB bridge.  Plugged in, that’s basically a Les Paul with humbuckers in positions 1 and 5 and a single coil Telecaster in positions 2, 3, and 4.  With such hot pickups you can get some excellent rude and nasty distorted slide tones from positions 1 and 5, which was a prerequisite for me.  But switch to positions 2, 3 or 4 and you get a more refined, cleaner sound.  The only thing I am not 100% happy with is that the guitar is a little noisy and buzzy.  The previous owner applied some shielding paint, but not to the entire electronics bay so I will complete that job and see if that helps.  Upgrading the wiring and the 5-way switch may also help.  The Dano sounded good as well, but I liked the extra tonal variety that the Dean offered.

I ended up paying $149 for the Dean and that’s an incredible value for an instrument of this quality.  After a lengthy search I found a great sounding, great playing slide guitar that’s unique in looks and not on everyone’s shoulder as Dean only produced this particular model for two years in the early 2000s.  This will always be a novelty guitar for me dedicated to slide, but for that limited role, it’s an ideal choice that’s considerably cheaper and better made than most of the Teiscos selling for hundreds more on eBay.