Danelectro Dano Cool 12-String Review: Classic Jangle With a Few Clever Tricks

12-string guitars are responsible for some of the most instantly recognisable sounds in guitar history, but they’re also one of those things that lots of players admire from a safe distance. They look complicated, they have twice as many strings to tune, and there’s always the suspicion that you’ll buy one, play that jangly chord a few times, and then leave it gathering dust in the corner.

The Danelectro Dano Cool 12-string makes a pretty compelling case that this doesn’t have to be the way.

Danelectro has always had a knack for making guitars that look like they’ve arrived from some slightly cooler parallel universe, and the Dano Cool is no exception. It borrows various details from the company’s ’50s and ’60s catalogue, including the gloriously bold 1954-style bell headstock and a set of 1958-inspired “skate” tuners. There are 12 of the things arranged six-a-side, which gives the headstock a pleasingly excessive appearance and also serves as a useful reminder that tuning this guitar is going to require slightly more commitment than usual.

The aqua finish shown here is particularly lovely, especially with the burgundy Tolex-style strip around the body. Other finishes are available, but this combination has exactly the sort of retro charm you want from a Danelectro.

Things get more serious once you actually pick it up. 12-string necks can be a bit of a nightmare if the manufacturer gets the proportions wrong, quickly turning into something that feels less like a guitar neck and more like a small piece of furniture. This one is wider than a conventional six-string, obviously, but the profile remains fairly slim while still having enough substance for stability.

There’s an aluminium nut and 21 medium vintage-style frets, and that combination makes perfect sense for what this guitar is designed to do. Nobody is buying a 12-string because they’ve suddenly developed an urgent need to sweep-pick diminished arpeggios at 180bpm. Chords, arpeggios and big layered textures are the main event here, and the fret profile feels well suited to that kind of playing. The slightly flatter neck also makes it unexpectedly good for slide.

The string arrangement is traditional, with octave strings across the lower four pairs and unison strings on the top two. Danelectro places the higher string first in each pair, rather than using the Rickenbacker-style arrangement where the lower string is encountered first on a downstroke. It’s a subtle difference, but it gives the Dano a slightly brighter attack.

Under the hood, the body uses a centre block with semi-hollow wings and no sound holes. The chambers help keep the weight down and also influence the way the guitar resonates, while a substantial four-bolt neck joint provides plenty of contact between neck and body.

The bridge is probably the cleverest bit of hardware on the guitar. Six strings pass through the body and the remaining six anchor through the bridge, but more importantly, each of the six main saddles contains two smaller saddles. That means all 12 strings can be intonated individually.

If you’ve ever tried getting a 12-string to play properly in tune much beyond the first few frets, you’ll know why this matters. Tuning 12 strings is enough of an adventure without discovering that half of them are wandering off in different directions once you head up the neck. Proper individual intonation makes the Dano much more usable across the fretboard and, crucially, far more suitable for studio work where tuning errors have a habit of becoming painfully obvious.

Electronics are where this guitar really starts showing off. At the bridge is a splittable lipstick humbucker — essentially two lipstick pickups working together — while the neck position gets a large-format single-coil. Controls are straightforward, with master volume, master tone, a three-way selector and a push-pull on the tone control to split the bridge pickup.

As is traditional for Danelectro, both pickups together are wired in series rather than parallel. On most two-pickup guitars, the middle setting tends to soften things slightly. Here, it does the exact opposite. The two pickups pile on top of one another to create the biggest, fattest sound available, and it works particularly well for slide.

Pull the tone control to split the lipstick humbucker and everything changes. Output drops considerably and the sound becomes much thinner and brighter, but that’s absolutely part of the appeal. Run it into an amp with a little bit of grit and it cleans things up beautifully, giving you that wiry, sparkling ’60s jangle that a 12-string is supposed to do.

The nice surprise is that the Dano Cool doesn’t stop there. Between the enormous series-wired middle sound, the thinner split tones and the accurate intonation further up the neck, there’s far more going on here than the usual “play jangly chords and go home” stereotype would suggest.

It’s also, according to the reviewer, shockingly affordable, although the exact number will obviously depend on where and when you’re buying.

If you’ve never owned a 12-string, this is a very easy one to make a case for. It looks fantastic, it solves some of the practical annoyances that come with the format, and it has enough tonal range to make you reach for it more often than you probably expect. You’ll still have to tune all 12 strings, of course. Danelectro can only do so much.

Find out more about the Danelectro Dan O. Cool 12 String at Danelectro.com