I was browsing Craigslist late last night when I came across this Danelectro 56 U-3 reissue from the 90s. It was a pretty good deal with a hard case thrown in so I felt the need to jump on it. She’s in terrific condition with the person I bought it from being the original owner. 3 lipstick pickups, aluminum nut, gotoh tuners, slim neck, and no dings. I can’t wait to plug her in later tonight!
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Tell us about the switch, dial and button.
The toggle switch in the down position engages all 3 pickups in series, up enables the rotary switch. The rotary switch has 6 positions for different pickup configurations. The dual stacked knob is volume/tone.
Sounds logical and easy to use. Like it.
Casual browser here. TIL those are called “lipstick pickups”
the history of that pickup design is awesome. danelectros were designed to a price point. the pickups on the originals were nickel plated surplus lipstick tubes housing a very simple straight bar magnet based transducer. they sound absolutely incredible.
danelectros should be bullshit but aren’t. the fact that they are instead incredible i think demonstrates a concerted effort to spite god. just like… when you think about and read about how they’re constructed, they should fucking suck. instead they rule. they, as individual non sentient objects, decided, somehow, to stand up to their creators and be incredible.
and i really respect that about them
As someone coming from All, I’d love to hear more about this. Why would you expect them to suck and what makes them so good?
danelectros were built to a price point. the originals were made of masonite (coutertop material) and the pickups were made of surplus lipstick tubes. as for what’s good about them, they have really excellent necks (the designer considered this the most important aspect of a good instrument, correctly), and they just simply sound amazing.
this particular one is a korean reproduction made of plywood instead of masonite. they’re more adjustable and more user friendly, but a little less charmingly weird. still cheap as hell and incredible sounding for the money though
It’s the same with some of their effects. Cheap plastic enclosures with the worst knobs ever? Oh wait they sound killer and don’t break the bank. I have a Spring King spring reverb pedal made by Danelectro and it’s just too cool. Yeah let’s make a simulated spring reverb tank into a stomp box and add a rubber pad so you can kick the hell out of it to make the springs crash.
Them and berringer make some of the best value effects. But the danelectros have more… Charm. They look goofy. They look like something you bought because you enjoyed it, not because of the value proposition. And I respect and appreciate it. Is it all marketing? I mean yeah. But so is music. Music is just taking your ideas and packaging them for someone else to intake them who wouldn’t have otherwise. Danelectro did that with sound effects. I think it’s okay for products to be designed with some whimsy just to move more units. Far better that then having them juiced by promoting them on bullshit peddling sites like The Wirecutter, Uncrate, or EverydayCarry, or worse having shit artificially promoted by AI that was trained on marketing material from those bullshit peddling sites, or even worse than that having them artificially promoted on the whitehouse lawn. Fucking just pay creative people, society! We the customers like them better, and will buy more products if we feel like it connects us to someone else. I’m not even saying commodifying this shit is better because capitalism corrupts all that it touches, I’m just fuckin’ saying making everything worse sucks and it’s shitty and stop doing it.
Love that color.
Fun machines. Get some Jimmy Page slide licks going on it to break her in. (I know he used a DC2, but still will sound right.)
Excellent find! If you hadn’t, i’d’ve asked
Shiny!
right!? sooo shiny 🤩
Damn I love lipsticks
