Dean USA ML Floyd Flame Top Electric Guitar - Slime

Some guitars whisper. This one arrives already screaming. The ML is the shape that built Dean's reputation — the split-V that looks like nothing else on a stage — and the USA ML Floyd Flame Top is that outline executed by Dean's American shop, where the fret ends are dressed by hand and the neck is fitted to the body one instrument at a time. In Slime, a book-matched flame maple top runs from a searing acid green through the centre out to a deep emerald rim, the grain flaring under it like heat haze. Single-ply black binding traces the whole silhouette. Turn it over and the show stops dead: bare gloss mahogany, no colour, no cover-up. We have one, and there will not be another.

Built in America, one at a time

This is a USA-made Dean, stamped as such on the back of the headstock. The body is solid mahogany with a flame maple cap, cut flat with no arch, so the top reads as one unbroken sheet of figure rather than a carved dome. The neck is three-piece mahogany, laminated for stability under Floyd Rose tension and set into the body rather than bolted, which puts wood against wood the full length of the joint. Scale is 24 5/8" — the genuine USA ML measurement, marginally shorter than the 24 3/4" Dean uses on its imported MLs. That fractionally slacker string tension is part of why these bend the way they do.

Slime, and a natural back

Dean's Slime is a green burst with actual depth to it: yellow-green light at the centre, saturating out to near-black forest at the edges, all of it transparent so the flame stays legible the whole way across. The back and sides are left in gloss natural mahogany — a deliberate choice, and the right one, because the reddish-brown grain underneath is furniture-grade. The headstock is classic black with Dean's winged logo in white, unbound, with the six-in-a-V-shaped tuner layout the ML has always used. Black binding on the body and the neck ties the two halves together.

DMT humbuckers in both positions

This particular instrument left the shop with USA-made DMT humbuckers at the neck and the bridge — double-black bobbins with the DMT stamp on the treble side, mounted in black rings straight to the top. DMT is Dean's own American pickup shop, and these are wound to push. Dig in and the bridge unit hits the front of an amp hard enough to bloom without turning to mush; back the volume off and it cleans up rather than going thin. The neck unit is the one that does the work on sustained lead lines — thick underneath, but with enough definition on the top strings that fast legato phrases stay separate instead of smearing into each other. Through a high-gain channel the pair stay articulate at gain settings where lesser pickups give up and compress into a wall.

The V neck and an ebony board

The neck carve is a V — a real one, not a soft hint of a spine. It fills the palm and gives your thumb a definite place to sit, which is exactly what you want when you are gripping over the top for a chord or anchoring for a long bend. It is a substantial neck, and after ten minutes you stop noticing it and start playing harder. Ebony fingerboard, 12" radius, 22 jumbo frets, pearl dot markers. The flat-ish radius and the tall frets are what let this thing be set genuinely low without the high strings choking out mid-bend, and the ebony keeps the surface fast and slick under fingertips.

Floyd Rose Original, top mounted

A German-made Floyd Rose Original sits top-mounted on the body — no recess, so the bar sits high and close to the palm, and the trem pulls down only, the way Eddie and Dime ran theirs. It is the real German unit, not a licensed copy: hardened steel knife edges, proper saddle blocks, and fine tuners that actually hold their setting. Behind the nut, a Floyd Rose R3 locking clamp at 43 mm shuts the strings off at the source. Grover 18:1 tuners get you into pitch before the clamps go down. Hardware on this example is chrome throughout — the Floyd, the nut, the tuner housings and the strap buttons — set against black knobs and black pickup rings.

Controls, and what comes with it

Three black speed knobs on the lower treble wing: bridge volume, neck volume, tone, all running through 500k audio-taper pots, with a three-way toggle for pickup selection. Two independent volumes means you can pre-set a rhythm level and a lead level and move between them with the switch alone — a Dean tradition worth using. It ships in its fitted hardshell case. Set up in-store by Guitar World Australia's techs before it ships to you, so it plays perfectly the moment it arrives.