Fretless Guitar

Channeling Jaco, eh?  You know he made his own fretless bass...

AFAIK, In the G3 Live In Denver DVD, Vai used a triple neck guitar. The bottom neck was fretless. I think he only used it for slide work...

chopper wrote: I guess it should be possible to remove the frets and fill them in, but how the hell would you play chords on a fretless guitar and what would they sound like? Or are you just going to use it for solos?

NecronCommander wrote: Chords are possible, just going to be very difficult.

That's really not a very good video when it comes to representing what a fretless guitar can do.

Here's a couple of decent ones.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PyOZhgQnvU
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3pewohhs3g&feature=related
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRBwK8J-5Tw&feature=related

However, I'm yet to found a video where someone plays deep, sustained, chugging metal riff and then slide it up the neck. I'm curious to know how it will sound.

himtroy wrote: So I'm thinking about making a fretless guitar.  I'm planning on doing what I did the one and only other time I've made a guitar and make it with almost all Carvin parts.  However I'm going to have to de-fret the neck.  The purpose of this topic is to see if anybody sees any flaws in this...because I've been looking around and just wondering why fretless guitars hardly exist?  I haven't put much thought into it yet, but I'm assuming the neck process would just be removing the frets and filling it with some kind of wood filler? 1.  Yes I know personal made fretless guitars do exist on the internet. 2. Don't ask me why I would want a fretless guitar...why wouldn't I?

If you don't have a religious fixation on Carvin parts, you could check out Allparts. They have at least one fretless guitar neck in their catalog: http://www.allparts.com/Plain-Unfinished-Rosewood-Stratocaster-Neck-p/sro-inl.htm

People are playing guitars without frets?!?! 

It's a miracle! 

Yeah I've played with my friends fretless bass a lot and we just always think....fretless guitar.  Yeah chords would be difficult, but once I got used to it I'd definitely be able to.  And to whoever said classical styled guitar, I''m already like that.  I haven't used a pick for quite a while and I have a classical guitar background.

Good luck. Fretless all the way! (I have 4 basses, of which three are fretless)

Thanks for the Ron Thal tip. The musician I'm aware of promoting the fretless guitar is Scott McGill - check out his last couple of releases

This project changed massively.  I ended up buying predominantly Warmoth parts (had them personally make the fretless neck), with some outside hardware as well.  I'm also either putting a Sustaniac pickup or Fernandes Sustainers in it.  For those who don't know what those are, they cause the string to vibrate giving you infinite sustain,  while alternate settings give you infinite sustain with different harmonic settings.  However I can't find a good audio sample of what these sound like when clean.  Every damn person online who demonstrates them has absurd amounts of cheesy sounding distortion on making it impossible to tell what they actually sound like.  

Edited by himtroy - March 29 2011 at 19:06