2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Full advantage of the fretless guitar may still be in the future., September 11, 2006
There are many ways to play microtones on a guitar: 1/Blues guitarists usually use their fretting fingers to push or pull the string towards the adjacent string to 'bend' or 'shake' the note. 2/The guitar's tuners can be used, or, more commonly, a wide variety of whammy bars and banjo tuners are installed to 'de-tune' more easily. 3/More subtle pitch changes can be achieved by changing the pressure of the fretting finger, (sitars have high, bridge-like frets to enable a wide pitch shift in this manner). 4/Notes can be artificially altered with electronic 'boxes'. OR, 5/the frets can be removed from the board to enable violin-like microtonal playing. This idea hasn't become very popular yet, perhaps because the player must give up a lot of techniques and styles that require frets. Fretless guitars do, however, allow the broadest range, (literally and stylistically), of microtonal techniques. In practice, so far,I find the use of the fretless guitar to mainly limited by two camps: The new music makers who are too fascinated with anything that sounds different, and more traditional rockers who aren't really doing much that a whammy bar couldn't do. Suggestions: A/ Fretlessness precludes most traditional chord work, and allows left-hand range beyond the 'stretch' of a fretting hand, so tune in fifths. (A-E-B-F#-C#-G# will give a 6-string guitar the range of an 8-string, although the benefit is melodic range in position rather than extended chordal depth.) B/Forget new music and rocking out for a while; apply classical repetoire and technique; there's a foundation to fretlessness that needs to be mastered. (As ahead of his time in educational methods as he was in his playing, Jaco Pastorius used trombone music to each fretless bass technique.)
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