{"id":302,"date":"2005-05-20T11:44:38","date_gmt":"2005-05-20T19:44:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/?p=302"},"modified":"2020-08-21T16:36:15","modified_gmt":"2020-08-22T00:36:15","slug":"working-without-a-fret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/2005\/05\/20\/working-without-a-fret\/","title":{"rendered":"Working without a Fret"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve had a spare guitar knocking around the place for several years. It’s a Yamaha APX-10N nylon-string classical with under-saddle pickups. It’s been pretty decent but since bringing it across the Pacific, I think the climate change from muggy Auckland to dry Las Vegas has put a little out of sorts. I tried tweaking the truss rod but I couldn’t seem to bring it back to life. I haven’t been playing it much at all – it’s been hanging on the wall as a dust-gathering ornament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, the other day I took it down and pulled the frets from the fingerboard, effectively turning into a fretless guitar. I followed some online advice<\/a> and used a soldering iron to heat up the individual frets prior to levering them up using a pair of flush-cutting nipper pliers. The frets came out relatively easily, with only very minor chipping of the ebony fretboard. At this point I could have just left the fret slots as-is, but being a perfectionist I wanted to try filling them with a lighter-coloured wood. Using a craft knife, I cut slivers from pine shims and wedged\/tapped\/forced them into the slots, welding them in place with liberal application of crazy glue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After trimming the excess with the craft knife, I used successive sandings with 180, 240, and 320 sandpaper to eliminate the bumbs, strip off the spots of over-flowed crazy glues, and liberate a large amount of dense, dark brown wood dust. The end result is rather effective:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I’ve put a standard set of nylon strings on it, and tuned it in fourths: EADGDF. Playing it takes some getting used to. Standard barre chords are out of the question, but that really isn’t a desired function of a fretless guitar. Think slurred melodic phrases and eastern-style riffs. I’ll post some samples here in a bit – when I’ve practiced some more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve had a spare guitar knocking around the place for several years. It’s a Yamaha APX-10N nylon-string classical with under-saddle pickups. It’s been pretty decent but since bringing it across the Pacific, I think the climate change from muggy Auckland to dry Las Vegas has put a little out of sorts. I tried tweaking the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equipment","category-studio-diary","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}