Janglin’

August 2010

Danelectro-63c

Unlike a traditional guitar pickup that uses a plastic or fiber bobbin as a form for winding its coil, the lipstick-tube pickup has its coil wrapped around an alnico bar magnet, and then wrapped in tape, usually a cellophane-type tape on vintage units, before being inserted into the metal tube casing. The original lipstick-tube pickups were, in fact, manufactured using surplus lipstick tubes, and were featured on Danelectro, Danelectro’s Coral series, and guitars that were later marketed through Sears, Roebuck and Company department stores under the name Silvertone. Most vintage Danelectro guitars had their pickups mounted using spring-loaded brackets underneath the tube casing, which could be adjusted for height by means of screws located on the back of the guitar body. Vintage Danelectro lipstick-tube pickups are quite wide, at 3.22 in (8.18 cm) overall. They CANNOT be retrofitted into a Stratocaster or similar guitar without removing plastic from the pickguard or wood from the guitar body. The Fender Telecaster’s neck-position pickup, despite its appearance, is NOT a lipstick-tube pickup. It is a traditional single-coil pickup under a chrome-plated cover.

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Danelectro-63b

Danelectro-63d

Danelectro-63a

The sound of lipstick-tube pickups is frequently described as “jangly” and is most closely associated with surf, rockabilly, and jangle pop. Silvertone and Danelectro wired their pickups in series rather than in parallel (the usual wiring for guitar pickups), which is similar to a humbucker wiring, and this may have contributed as much of the pickups’ sound as did their unique construction.

The Lipstick pickups tend to respond best either to AC30-style grit or fuzzy dirtbox distortion, rather than the dirty channel of a modern high-gain amplifier.

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Danelectro Lipstick Pickups

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Danelectro-63e

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