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Bruce Comens wrote: > But to pick up the thread now--I've been thinking of going fretless >guitar > or adding an oud (my local oud store has a nice little model i've been > eyeing...) for some time, as I'm always trying to work with inbetween >notes. > > 2 questions i've been wondering about: > > Do you guitarists/oudists generally adapt guitar tunings and right hand > techniques to the oud, or do you go the oud purist route? The guy I play with travels the purist route. When I tried it, I used my guitar technique. I have no other and it's a little strange holding my hand at a 90 degree angle. If I actually owned an oud, I might change. When I was looping in my pre-microtonal knowledgeable days, I was heavily into the in-between notes. I would sustain a note on the guitar and after a couple of repeats, I would bend the note a bit, maybe behind the nut if it was an open string. I used to call it real time chorusing. Little I did know there was a science to it... > On a fretless guitar, what happens to tone and sustain when the string is > between wood and flesh instead of against metal? Can you make one by > simply defretting the guitar and filling the slots with some plasticky > material? Any web sources on this? I'll tell you about my friend Jon's guitars and maybe shed a little light on your questions. His old microtonal guitar had interchangeable fretboards. In the middle of a performance he would swap out the microtonal fretboard [different than the one we use now] and slide in the fretless one. Turn around and yo! new guitar! He had to use his fretting hand fingernail to play the high strings to get sustain. Indian musicans do this on the sarangi. This is typically the problem with fretless guitars - lack of sustain. This guitar has a stainless steel fretboard like a sarod. He has other interchangeable fret boards like a quarter tone - 24 frets to the octave. On his newer G&L, I guess he got it about 2 years ago, the luther (let's call him Satan. he hung on to my guitar for 13 months, didn't return phone calls, and didn't even do the work! we eventually found Glen Peterson with in weeks of getting our guitars back from Satan in June) used a product called 3 Ton Epoxy on the fretboard. It looks like a plastic fretboard and sustains real fine. I played it once before I could really play a fretless instrument and the tone was real nice. Jon doesn't have to use the fingernail with this guitar. In fact, unless things have changed, than Pat Metheny and I are the only ones to play that guitar other than Jon (ex-student, ran into ex-teacher at rehearsal studio in NYC). Pat won a Grammy for his fretless classical guitar solo on Imaginary Day. I never met the guy although I admire his work greatly. Jaco used boat epoxy on his bass. I tried an early Fender Custom Shop model at the local Sam Yak and the epoxy was nowhere as thick as the epoxy on Jon's guitar. I guess you could just pull frets and fill in the empty space with plastic wood but the epoxy finished fretboard makes a hell of lot of difference. Jon's web site: http://home.earthlink.net/~freenote/ BTW: besides having his own recordings, he played on bassist Hansford Rowe's (ex-Gong) new recording No Other. And of course him and his brother played on *Father-of-Minimalism* La Monte Youngs out of print Forever Bad Blues Band - Just Stompin' (Gramavision) -- * D a v i d B e a r d s l e y * xouoxno@virtulink.com * * 49/32 R a d i o "all microtonal, all the time" * M E L A v i r t u a l d r e a m house monitor * * http://www.virtulink.com/immp/lookhere.htm