Danelectro 57

review
DANELECTRO ’57 GUITAR & ’59 DIVINE
100
GUITARIST OCTOBER 2020
LIP GLOSS
A deep look at the Danelectros’ unique single-coil pickup
O
ne aspect of the new ’59 Divine
is the ‘Vintage 50s’ pickups. “The
pickups are a great replica of the
best 50s pickups,” Steve Ridinger of Dano
owners the Evets Corporation told us at
the guitars’ launch at NAMM earlier this
year. “We looked at a lot of old pickups and
analysed them,” he said. “All this time we
thought the magnet was Alnico 5 but we
found they were using Alnico 6 – and it was a
sand-cast magnet, which means it has pits all
over it and that affects the tone. So after we
sand-cast the magnet we sand-blast it to give
it even more texture.
“Then we analysed the old lipstick tubes and
found they were [brass, but an alloy of] 80/20
copper/zinc versus the ones we’ve been
making, which have been 70/30. It’s a very
musical material: cymbals are made out of
80/20 brass and the originals had a thinner
wall thickness, too, so we replicated that.”
Famously, the pickup doesn’t use a bobbin
so the 42 gauge wire was wound directly
around that magnet, wrapped with tape and
then stuffed into the cover. “We found that
the 42 gauge plain enamel wire, which was
used on the originals, was only available in the
USA,” Steve continued, “so we buy that and
ship it to Asia where we make the pickups.
Anyway, we’re hearing more top, more
bottom, a warmer, more open sound.”
The DC output was invariably lower than,
say, a Strat’s single coil, around 3kohms to
4kohms it would seem, although you’d expect
quite a variation with such a basic design.
These new ones certainly replicate that: ours
all measured (at output) approximately 3.02k,
lower than previous reissues we’ve measured,
which have been closer to 4.5k.
The ‘lipstick tube’ name was never used by
Danelectro. Instead, they were known as the
‘split-shell’ pickup: “The only metal-enclosed
guitar pickup to avoid ‘shorted turn effect’.
This irritating electrical effect is due to
currents induced in the case itself and results
in a loss of high-frequency response. The
split-shell pickup, exclusive with Danelectro,
checks the path of these currents.”
“The effect they are talking about is that
of eddy currents,” explains pickup-making
veteran Kent Armstrong, the son of Dan who
famously used up leftover Dano parts to
build a number of Dan Armstrong-modified
Danelectros. This was before creating his
famous see-through acrylic-bodied guitars
for Ampeg, which, incidentally, used a very
similar bridge design to Danelectro. “Eddy
currents are formed when any metallic
material is perpendicular to a magnetic
field,” he says. “However, with the design of all
pickups the low voltages and weak magnetic
fields’ high frequencies are not enough to
induce eddy currents that make any audible
difference. There will always be some people
that will convince themselves that their
magical ears can hear the difference but the
physics simply doesn’t hold up.
“If the magnetic field itself was alternating
then this could be a big problem but as it is
in a permanent state the effect is very small.
The Danelectro pickups were not the first,
and certainly not the only, fully enclosed
Faraday box-type pickup. The real and obvious
advantage of this casing is to stop RF [radio
frequency] noise. I would imagine that the
claim that the split-tubes limit the eddy
current would be due to the fact that there is
no surface large enough that is ‘perpendicular’
to the magnetic field for the eddy currents to
actually form. While this may be theoretically
true, if the eddy currents were a problem in the
first place, it is pretty much inconsequential
voodoo when it comes to guitar pickups!”
In his ground-breaking early 80s book,
American Guitars , Tom Wheeler tackles the
lipstick association. “Players often joke
that the company’s long, rounded pickups
look like lipstick tubes: according to George
Wooster [once Danelectro’s production
manager], that’s exactly what they are.
Danelectro bought the lipstick casings from
a manufacturer who serviced the cosmetics
industry and then sent them to another
contractor for plating before the pickup
winding and magnets were installed.”
It’s become legend that these tubes,
presumably intended to be used as covers
for the lipstick, were ‘surplus’ but this, too, is
refuted by Nat Daniel’s son Howard in
Neptune
Bound: The Ultimate Danelectro Guitar Guide
,
and you must remember Danelectro was
making a huge number of guitars – estimated
by Wooster in
American Guitars to be between
150 and 200 per day in peak times. That
would require a lot of surplus. Jerry Jones,
the Nashville-based luthier who specialised in
improved Dano-style instruments, is quoted as
saying, “As far as I know, Danelectro probably
procured their lipstick casings from the same
source we used: Lakewood Medal Products in
Waterbury, Connecticut.”
“Danelectro bought the lipstick casings
[for the pickups] from a manufacturer
who serviced the cosmetics industry”
GIT464.rev_dano.indd 100 03/09/2020 17:10