RE: fretless ?

[Leander REININGHAUS <LEALOOP@compuserve.com>]

Hi everybody,

I've been playing fretless guitar for a while
I took a Strat body with a sustainer on it and put on a fretless maple neck
with ebony fingerboard
Warmoth made for me. It cost me around 650 Deutschmarks incl. shipping (
unfinished and without saddle ), so you can guess what it will be for you
guys in the States.
I wouldn't recomend metal fret(less)boards, because ( to my ears ) they
just sounded nice with plain strings
( like on sarods which only have plain strings ), but i didn't like the
sound of the rattle they produce with the
lower wound strings. You may compensate that rattling a bit with flatwound
strings but I still didn't like it.
But that's a question of personal taste, I think.
What I would highly recomend is a sustainer on a fretless guitar !
A few advantages: 
1. you can use whatever string gauge you like and just decide on sound, not
on playability ( esp. sustain )
2. you can play sustained notes even on the higher plain strings, which
otherwise are more or less useless,
    unless you press the string down and do slides with your lefthands
fingerNAILS instead of fingertips            (ouch!), like sarod players
do.
3. you can produce real violin or ( with an old fuzzbox ) cellolike tones (
which will sound like singing sawblade
   or doing something nasty to young cats until you mastered the
intonation, hehe... )

By the way, if someone wants to go even deeper into the orient with guitar,
I know a german luthier named Eyb who builds real fine sitar-guitars.  And
the good thing is, you can order the bridges alone and put it on
whatever guitar you like ( but has to be a flattop ). I bought one for 200
Deutschies two years ago, maybe a little more now but is still a good deal.
If someone's interested I'll give you the address.

If someone's interested in fretless guitar on CD I can recomend three nice
albums:

1. " Sleep my love " - Philip Catherine playing some pieces on a fretless
Tele ( but just on the low strings )
       with Jasper van't Hof - keys and Charlie Mariano - Saxes and
Nadhaswaram 
       -  CMP -
2. " Fretless " - Turkish guitarist Erkan Ogur playing acoustic and
electric ( with ebow ! ) fretless guitars
       with Philip Catherine again and Arto Tuncboyaciyan ( Night Ark ) -
percussion
      - Feuer & Eis - distributed by EFA ( probabely not available outside
Germany, but I don't know... )
3.   The first and second album of a french craftyband called  "
Philharmonie " 
       I don't know the titles, names of the players and label because
these albums somebody taped for me
      and he didn't write everything down. I just remember it was a
small(?) american label with lots of other
      interesting music; some rare tracks of known artists like, among
others,  Steve Tibbetts' first first album
      ( the one before  " Yr  ", which was just made for friends in an
edition of 200 copies...)

Hope you'll enjoy !

Leander