Hi Bud,
the Gibson Epiphones are still going strong, and are a popular range of guitars here. I don't know what your Danelectro sound was like, but just recently I went mad with one reverb:

initialise
select guitar / bright solid guitar
switch r1/r2 octave to -1
press and hold reverb, page 2, select live stage
take total depth to 110
press detail edit
reverb time 60
high damp 24
volume 100
volume (v) 120
there's still room to manouvre left, but it can get unplayable!

When I could not afford the spring reverb units, I made one. The transistors were relatively cheap, the main expense was getting the spring box. These were made in various sizes, the bigger the better, and I could only afford the smallest 8 inch one. It worked, but don't ask me what the quality was like!
Yes, Mike, the springs and units had to be mounted on rubber decoupling mounts, and if you tapped or kicked it by mistake your speaker cones could go flying across the room

Lindoz, we had an ARP synth that belonged to the university, in the acoustics department. It was the maximum of cool, and was guarded jealously.
Don't mention cassettes, Chuck, I always hated them, there was just no way to improve the quality no matter how many dolbys or dbxs you tried. Now my old Revox, that was a recording machine...
I was stunned with my first DAT machine just how good it was compared to analogue recording.

Do you remember the Yamahas that could dump the memory data in real time onto cassette tape, like the first computers? I once did a magnum opus that lasted 10 minutes, and took 11 minutes to load the sequencer data from cassette!!! Even more helpful was when you had the inevitable data corruption 9 minutes into the tape, that used to make your entire day!
Then there was the Yamaha "mini disk" recorders, which used a floppy disk about half the size of the 3 1/2 inch floppy disks. You could only record one track at a time, so endlessly overdubbed, but with the 8 note polyphony available then, you did not do that much overdubbing! Another format which bombed without trace.
I then bought a KN800 with disk drive.

Then I needed a graphic equaliser for the music room, then a reverb unit for microphone input, then a noise gate for silence between tracks, then a compressor for making tapes. All these boxes now useless, redundant and worthless as each new keyboard had more and more features inside turning it more and more into a complete workstation. I suppose if I get a 7000 the USB soundcard will be redundant too. Well, I suppose that's progress, Folks