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I've built a grand total of five fretless guitars and four have since had frets added. Those four were acoustic steel string instruments and the fifth was an electric.
Using an Ebony fingerboard on a fretless guitar eliminates sustain.....and sustain is an important part of any instruments tonal and dynamic palette. Sustain in classical stringed instruments like violin, viola and cello is not actually sustain but a maintained tone that is continued by the activation of the bow passing across the strings while the sustain on a guitar is actually created by the wood's ability to continue to freely vibrate while being fed by the activity of the strings being suspended between the hard origin and destination points provided by the nut and saddle or the fret and saddle.
If you watch Ned Evett, you'll see him playing instruments with very hard fingerboards made from glass or metal. These materials allow the suspended string between the saddle and nut or his chosen finger position have a level of sustain that isn't possible when the string is pinched between the finger and a softer figerboard material like Ebony. I've been able to see Ned play live and he is a lot of fun to listen to.
Accurate chord playing is very difficult on a fretless guitar and that's precisely why you see most players who use them doing a huge majority of their playing in single note lines with their chords being limited in notes or dominated by intervals like fourths or other close intervals and of limited string courses. We take for granted how much we rely on frets to aid in our ability to shape our chords with wide intervals that would otherwise be impossible to achieve unless we had freakishly large hand or long fingers.
On all of the guitar that I built with fretless fingerboards, I did actually cut fret slots but filled them with either Ebony or a lighter colored wood and leveled them to the fingerboard radius. The lighter wood served as reference lines for them while they played in the strange format, but when the players came back frustrated and wanting to have frets added all they had to do was pay of the removal of the wood and a full fret job and set up.
I'd venture to say that if you build this guitar, the player will be back to have frets added later so prepare accordingly.
I've also built a pair of partially fretted guitars that had frets to the ninth fret and were fretted above that point. On those, I made the fingerboards so that the fretted area was .040" lower than the unfretted area to eliminate contact between the strings and the frets behind them as the fretted section was played on. When the fretted section was used at the ninth fret, there was about .005" of clearance of the elevated unfretted surface so the player could step right of the ninth fret and hit a simulater tenth fret position with no contact with that steel fret behind it.
Both were for the same guy in Europe and he still ons and plays them.
Regards,
Kevin Gallagher/Omega Guitars
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