When it comes to guitars with the perfect combination of cool styling, righteous tones and amazing value, Danelectro has been the guitar industry’s shining city on the hill since 1954....
When it comes to guitars with the perfect combination of cool styling, righteous tones and amazing value, Danelectro has been the guitar industry’s shining city on the hill since 1954. That’s truer today than ever before, as Danelectro’s current products offer an alluring combination of vintage appeal and modern high-performance upgrades that make Dano guitars incredibly versatile.
Danelectro’s new ’59XT is the perfect example of where the company stands today, as the model offers the classic shorthorn double-cutaway semi-hollowbody design, a wider tonal palette courtesy of its pickup configuration and a rock-solid Wilkinson tremolo. (Danelectro also offers the ’59X without the Wilkinson tremolo for all you hardtail purists out there.)
FEATURES
Like the Danelectro guitars of yesteryear, the ’59XT features a Masonite top and back, and the body has hollow inner chambers. Tonewood snobs may scoff, but in a blind listening test I doubt that most would notice and probably would prefer the Dano’s tone because it’s rich, thick, dynamic and musical. The neck has 21 jumbo frets with a shallow, rounded profile, and the neck’s profile itself is a shallow C shape that plays fast and comfortably. Classic features include the signature three-on-a-side Coke bottle headstock shape and die-cast chrome master volume and master tone knobs.
The pickups consist of a high-output single-coil P90 at the neck position and a pair of iconic Dano lipstick tube pickups placed side-by-side in a humbucking configuration at the bridge position. Both pickups are also angled, with the neck P90’s bass polepieces angled closer to the bridge while the bridge lipstick humbucker is angled with the treble string portion closer the bridge. The humbucking pickup also has a split coil function that is activated by pulling up on the master tone knob. The Wilkinson tremolo is floating, so users can