All About Fretless Guitars

Guitars are one of the most well-known musical instruments in the whole world. This popularity of guitars has brought about various experimentations over the years. One of those experimentations, fretless guitars, can be somewhat defined as guitars without limitations. In this article we are going to introduce you to one of the most original guitar types, fretless guitars.

What is a fretless guitar?

Fretless guitars are basically guitars without frets. They were discovered in 20^th century. Fretless Guitar is a unique type of guitar because the frets plays such a huge role in regular guitars. As a result of this absence, the sounds produced with fretless guitars is much more distinct than regular guitars.

What are the features of fretless guitars?

Fretless guitars might be one of the most unique guitar types you can ever see. A fretless guitar operates without the backbones of the regular guitars, frets. Therefore, all the sounds you can produce with fretless guitars are also unique.

There are different types of fretless guitars such as double neck fretless and 7 stringed fretless guitars. So, the idea of creative freedom behind fretless guitars have grown even more over the years to result in such unique type of guitars.

The Differences Between Regular Guitars and Fretless Guitars

There are a number of differences between between regular guitars and fretless guitar. The main difference is, as the former’s the name suggest, is having a fret or not. As you all well know, sounds produced with regular guitars depend highly on the frets. Fretless Guitars eliminates that dependency on frets to produce much more natural sounds.

Another difference between fretless and regular guitar is legato. Legato is a type of sound you can produce with fretless guitar. Legato is exclusive to fretless guitars because the only reason they can be produced is that there’s no frets to stop the transitions between sounds in fretless guitars.

The volume level of sounds produced by the regular and fretless guitars also vary greatly. In order to reach the desired volume levels with fretless guitars, you may need modified amplification or more forceful plucking.

How to play Fretless Guitar?

Playing fretless guitar looks very similar to playing a regular guitar on the surface level yet it Is so different when you actually try it. The reason it looks similar is because they are variations of a single instrument. However, because frets matter so much when playing regular guitar, playing fretless guitar differs immensely.

In order to play fretless guitar, you need to utilize your fingers at a maximum level. There is no guitar pick for fretless guitars, so you need to depend on your fingers at every level.

Another result of having no frets, position of node in fretless guitars differs so much as opposed to normal node positions of regular guitars.

All in all, Fretless Guitars are very extraordinary musical instruments. They would be a great choice for those who want to broaden their musical horizons. Even though it is harder to play than regular guitars, they offer so much more creative freedom.