I’m going to need a pickguard to mount all the electronics on, so first I have to design that.! I wish I could simply copy the design from the original Danelectro’s verbatim, but that won’t work for me, owing to the fact that the lipstick pickups I bought mount differently than the real Danelectro ones. More on lipstick pickup later in this post (more than you probably want to know, actually). The big difference is that the mounting tabs below the actual pickups make the bottom of the pickup somewhat bigger then the top, so I had to make the pickup cutout on the guitar top way bigger (lengthwise, anyways) than I wanted. To cover this up, I need to extend the pickguard up to cover that extra bit. Here’s the real Danelectro:
I like that pickguard design though – it’s sometimes called the ‘baby seal’ for kinda obvious reasons. So, I start with some paper cutouts and rough out a chubbier baby seal, just big enough to cover the pickup edges but still look swoopy…
This also lets me figure out the locations for my volume and tone knobs, as well as the pickup selector switch. This goes through a couple iterations, and I finalize on…
This gets glued to a piece of scrap pressboard, the I bandsaw close to the edge and spindle sand it to the final dimensions. This is my template now, so I then bandsaw a piece of the plastic I bought for the pickguard roughly to shape, then use the router table to copy the template to a thicker template, then again to the actual pickguard…
Holes are drilled for the controls, then it’s time for the electronics. An electric guitar needs some sort of electronics to make noise, and it’s time to get all of that set up. “Electronics” isn’t always (or usually) the technically correct term for this though. As any high school principal from my youth would start an assembly lecture:
Merriam Webster defines ‘electronics’ as “a branch of physics that deals with the emission, behavior, and effects of electrons (as in electron tubes and transistors) and with electronic devices…”
Mr. Principal, Typical High Scool, 1981
Most guitars that do use electronics usually call them ‘active electronics’ (kinda redundant) – typically these are battery powered pickups that have better sound and less noise than traditional pickups, on-guitar fancy EQ controls or effects, etc. But most guitars still use passive ‘electronics’, maybe better termed ‘electrics’? And mine definitely falls into this camp. And here’s a primer on how electric guitars work!
Acoustic guitars rely on the hollow chamber of the guitar body to be resonated by the strings in order to amplify the sound being played. Back in the early 20th century, music went from wandering minstrels and small ensembles larger bands, which were understandably louder. You could make a guitar bigger to make it louder, but that only goes so far. Other tricks were developed, like making the bodies more resonant. Metal bodies were tried, with and without resonator plates…
But again, this could only go so far. Early pioneers experimented with various ways of converting physical signals (strings vibrating, for example) to electrical energy that could be amplified, and a bunch of ways were found, but cutting to the chase, the ‘single coil pickup’ was one of the early revolutionary designs. These work because of the way magnets and wires interact when the move relative to each other.
- A permanent magnet has a steady magnetic field around it, and that field will be stable as long as nothing magnetic or metal around it changes.
- The guitar strings are close to the magnets though, and when they vibrate when strummed, they affect the magnet’s field slightly, according to their vibrations.
- A changing magnetic field can induce a current in a coil of wire, and coincidentally enough, a guitar pickup has a coil of wire in it for this exact purpose!
- The output of the pickup is thus the current coming out of the pickup’s coil, which is generated by the strings vibrations affecting the magnet’s field…
And you thought you were done with Physics after high school!
Anyhoo, this all leads to the pickups on my guitar. Most pickups use a magnet per string, and the coil of wire goes around the whole thing, like this:
One magnet (‘pole piece’) per string has some advantages, like each magnet distinctly gets the sound from a single string, which makes for a cleaner sound, supposedly. As shown above, the pole pieces can be at different heights, which is kinda like a per-string volume adjustment, and with other pickup designs, you can get tricky with the way you wind the coil in order to minimize external electrical hum and noise from thing like, say that guitar amp you’re using to make all this louder…
As I’ve said in earlier posts, the Danelectro’s were designed to be cheap to build and sell, though, and all these pole pieces, windings, plates etc were more complicated than they wanted to put up with. So Nathan Daniel came up with his own style, known as the Lipstick pickup. This is a single bar magnet mounted horizontally, with the coil running around it like so:
The whole thing is dipped in wax to isolate it, and it’s all held inside a shiny case that is attributed to be post-WWII surplus lipstick cases, hence the name. This design isn’t fancy, but it’s cheap to manufacture. And my guitar will have two of ’em. Coming up with the rest of circuit, I stuck to the values of the components that Danelectro used, if not the exact parts. What we want is a volume control and a tone control for each pickup, and a selector switch that lets you use the front (neck), rear (bridge) or both pickups at the same time. I found the schematic for this online:
The original Danelectro’s used what are called ‘stacked pots’ – ‘pot’ being short for potentiometer, basically an adjustable resistor. I couldn’t easily source stacked pots, which are basically two pots stacked vertically kinda like an Oreo cookie, and from what I read they aren’t that great to use, as when you adjust one you invariably accidentally turn the other one. So mine will use four separate pots, but the circuit is the same. And for those electrically/electronically inclined, I challenge you to study and figure out this circuit. I did, and wasn’t all that easy.
The big trick with this design is the way that the two pickups are used when you want them both ‘on’. With most guitars, two pickups will be connected in parallel. Kinda like if you put two batteries together with the ‘+’s connected together, and the ‘-‘s connected together. If they are 9V batteries, this results in… 9V, but the combination is capable of supplying twice as much current. Hooking up the batteries so that one battery’s ‘+’ connects to the other’s ‘-‘ will give you 18V, but not as much current as in parallel. There are other factors in play with pickups, but the upshot is that with the Danelectro cheap design it makes more sense to use the series arrangement. And this makes the schematic a lot trickier than it would be with regular pickups. It also means that you need a very special switch to do this – I found this out the hard way as the first switch I bought would not work, as it was designed for regular pickup designs. Most switches would, in the above diagram, have the middle tab of the switch (shown with the yellow) as the ‘output’. The switch would either connect the yellow tab to the green tab, the red tab, or BOTH at the same time (i.e. that ‘parallel’ arrangement…). In order to be able to make a series arrangement work, these switches either connect the yellow to the green, the yellow to the red, or (here’s the difference) none of them connected to anyone. I ended up having to find a switch that I could actually take apart and modify to do the switching the right way.
From there though, I marked up the back of the pickguard with how the wires would have to be run, installed the pots and switch, and wired it up. I was able to test it, holding each pickup close to the strings from another guitar, and now knowing everything was correct, removed it from the pickguard, cleaned off the marker and put it all back together again (and re-tested it).
A moment of full disclosure here though – when I laid out the components and drilled the mounting holes, it was before I realized the old switch wouldn’t work. The new, good switch was somewhat bigger than the old one though, and a little tab on it meant the pickguard wouldn’t fit back in the guitar, at least without some modification. So I ended up routing out a little channel for the tab to fit in on the inside of the guitar.
The only remaining electrical bit dealt with the output jack so I could plug this baby into an amp. The Danelectro in the pic at the beginning of this post has its jack on the front of the guitar; I prefer them on the side, so I drilled a channel for that and checked the fit of the jack plate.
That worked out fine, so phew, electronics are done.
But I write this post about a month later than when all of this went down, and since then I have done the painting and binding on the body, so here she is, close to final form. Everything is just loosely fit as I still have to do the clear coat.
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