First Fretless

[Perry Underwood]

I've been interested in building a fretless guitar for some time. I finally started a few months ago, and I spent most of my guitar building time on this.

I've yet to set it up. Basically, the nut slots need to be deepened and the strings intonated. Here are some of the specs.

The body wood is amargo. It's a nice wood to work with although it can splinter badly. This is the first time I've used it entirely for the body.
The neck is hard maple with an unknown wood for the fretboard. I used to think the wood was wenge, but recently I've started to think it is black palm. There's an ebony cap on the headstock. The scaled length is approximately 24 3/4.
The pickup is an active single coil with one volume and tone with a .022uf capacitor. I may change to a slightly higher capacitor later.

The one thing I spent quite some time thinking about was where to put the side dots. Do I put them on like a fretted guitar or exactly where the frets would go? I chose the latter. Here are some pics.

[G.S. Monroe]

A common practice in the Cigar Box community (where there is abundant fretless slide guitars), is to place the position dots (small side dots) where you would normally place the frets, or use some other marking for the fret positions. The main position markers are more decorative and should be placed where you normally would on a fretted guitar.

Very sweet build by the way...

[John Kingma]

I like the design. It looks really cool.

[Jim Bonnell]

Very nice Perry. I really like the body shape and the simplicity of the overall build. I used a piece of black palm on one of the $100 challenges and it worked out well. Splinters easily but I soaked it good with CA and it buffed out to a nice gloss and held up well.

[Perry Underwood]

Thank you for your comments. I've been working on slotting the nut for the last two days. At this time, I've got a height of about .025 to .030 from the top of the fretboard to the bottom of the string where the string leaves the nut slot. This has dramatically improved how the first string sounds. The other strings sound go, too.

According to what I've read about setting-up fretless guitars, the action should be as low as possible, even permitting fret buzz. The height of the strings from the bottom of the nut to the top of the fretboard should be as low as the thickness of a piece of paper, although I'm not yet comfortable with attempting that. Also, the neck should be straight.

Here are a few more pics, mostly of the headstock. One of the photos is of the fretboard wood.

[Hans Bezemer]

Perry,

That's a nice guitar, I like it.
Do you have some sound samples / video footage?
I would love to see / hear it in action!

Hans

[Perry Underwood]

Thank you for your comments.

I'll try to get something on Youtube next week. I'm still working on the nut. It's slow going because there are some major differences in setting-up a fretted guitar compared to a non-fretted one.

Thanks, again.