Slick SL56 Review: Earl Slick’s Road-Worn Offset Is Weird in All the Right Ways

Earl Slick is known for plenty of things: playing with David Bowie during the Diamond Dogs era, appearing on more projects than most of us could reasonably keep track of, and having a fairly well-developed taste for guitars that look like they’ve already survived several decades of touring. That last part is particularly relevant here, because Slick Guitars grew directly out of Earl’s habit of buying guitar bodies, sanding them back and generally making them look considerably less new than when they arrived. The SL56 takes that philosophy and runs with it.

It’s an odd little thing visually, sitting somewhere between a Jazzmaster, a Jaguar and a Telecaster without really being any of them. The body has that familiar offset shape, but it’s considerably smaller than your average JM or Jag and feels closer to Tele dimensions. This particular example is finished in a sandblasted, open-pore red and black that makes absolutely no attempt to look pristine. If you’re the sort of person who keeps polishing cloths in every guitar case, this probably isn’t aimed at you.

Underneath all the deliberate abuse is an ash body with chambering around a solid centre block. The centre block helps keep feedback under control, but the guitar still has that lively, resonant quality you get from something with a bit of air inside it. More importantly, you can actually feel it vibrating against you when you play, which is one of those things that’s difficult to quantify on a spec sheet but very easy to appreciate once the guitar is in your hands.

The neck is Canadian rock maple and, thankfully, Slick has resisted the urge to relic the back of it. Instead, it has a smooth satin finish and feels like a properly new neck attached to a guitar that looks like it’s been through several questionable bars. It works. The fretboard is walnut — convincing enough that it could easily be mistaken for rosewood at first glance — and the frets are roughly medium jumbo, sitting nicely between tiny vintage wire and the kind of enormous fretwork beloved by committed shredders.

The setup straight out of the box was excellent, too. These guitars ship with D’Addario 10s, despite Earl himself apparently preferring 9s, and the slightly heavier gauge suits the SL56 nicely. There was no need to start attacking the bridge with Allen keys before getting down to actually playing the thing.

That bridge is worth talking about because it’s a clever bit of hardware. It’s a wraparound, so you get the simplicity, stability and general lack of faff that comes with that design, but there are six individually adjustable saddles for proper intonation. The string contact points are also notably sharp, which helps keep things bright and clear rather than letting the attack get mushy.

Brass turns up pretty much everywhere else. The tuner buttons, control knobs and selector tip all use it, and the tuner buttons add a little extra mass to the headstock. That appears to help the balance of the guitar. Whether it also transforms the tone through some mystical transfer of vibrational energy is a debate I’m quite happy to leave to the internet.

Things get more interesting again when you reach the pickups. In the bridge is a Fullerton T-style pickup built to Earl Slick’s specification, while the neck gets a Slick Junior P90. Traditionally, these aren’t necessarily the easiest two pickup types to pair because they tend to prefer different pot values — around 250k for a Tele-style pickup and 500k for a P90 — but somehow they behave themselves here.

The bridge pickup is the aggressive one: robust, bright and properly bitey. The neck P90 goes the other way, with a big, fat, warm response that has plenty of that Junior-style character. The surprise is the middle position, where the two pickups combine extremely well rather than sounding like two completely different guitars fighting over the same output jack.

Controls are wonderfully straightforward: three-way selector, master volume, master tone. Done.

Clean, the SL56 has enough snap and clarity to make the bridge pickup genuinely useful rather than merely waiting for distortion to arrive. Add gain and the guitar starts to make even more sense, particularly once that P90 gets involved. It’s not trying to be a pristine vintage reproduction of anything in particular, and that’s probably why it has so much character.

Perhaps the most impressive part is the price. At the time of filming, the SL56 was selling for under 400. It’s made in China, which obviously helps Slick get it there, but there’s very little about the fretwork, setup or general construction that screams “cheap guitar”.

The relic treatment will be the deciding factor for some players, and that’s fair enough. But if you can get on board with the aesthetic, the SL56 is much more than a quirky-looking budget instrument. It plays beautifully, the pickup combination is genuinely clever, the chambered body gives it a lively feel, and the hardware has clearly had some thought put into it.

For this kind of money, it’s slightly ridiculous how much guitar you’re getting.

Find out more about the Slick SL56 at Earlslick.net