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Has anyone ever built a fretless acoustic? and if not why?

I have one pending- that means I waiting for the deposit on a small body guitar. There are a few videos on youtube of people playing fretless guitars including one where the only modification was that the frets were pulled off a classical. I already use a 16"-20" compound radius on the nylon string guitars I build. I might increase it a little - all 16" for the fretless.

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GEO
perpetual beginner

Never heard a steel-string acoustic fretless, but nylon string yes, and it's nice. Godin made a 11 strings (double strings, exept the lower one) fretless classical (electro-acoustic). They call it Glissentar. They wanted to make an "electric sitar". There are some vids of it on youtube.

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Francis Richer, Montréal
Les Guitares F&M Guitars

Would they not sound very muted and /or muffled...?

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A person who has never made a mistake has never made anything!!!

I worked with Ned Evett some years ago when we both lived in SF. He played fretless at the time and had many issues. He tried different woods, and of course the yank the frets and fill with epoxy. All the woods had the same issues for him over time. They do have a muted sound and even worse, they all got grooves from the thinner strings very quickly.

At the time I was doing some basic guitar repairs on the side and working full time as a glazier. Hence the glass fingerboard guitar was born. I worked with him on a few of these in the beginning, we used different thickness glass and even some mirror. The thinner glass conformed better to truss rod adjustment, but the thicker seemed to work better. The sound was much brighter then wood and no grooves. People play with glass slides (bottle neck), but no one uses a wood slide. Ned also developed a technique using his fingernails on the left hand to get better tone. We adhered the glass with both mirror mastic and glazing tape(double stick), I think Ned uses the double stick tape now, but I have not spoken with him in a while.

So the advantages of glass:
Cheap, very easy to cut, good sound
Cons: Very hard to grind a small amount off, so the cut had to be right on. Can't radius, but that was never an issue for Ned, you don't bend strings or make chords the same way on fretless. Finally, it is glass, and can break. The looks can go in either the pro or con side depending on taste. For Ned it was shiny and looks great on stage in the rock environment, every one in the club would always get close during intermission to see what they heck this shiny thing was.

We did convert an acoustic at the time, but I think Ned plays mostly with a glass fingerboard dobro now. Ned is a great guy and a real fretless advocate, so he will have the better answers on his and other fretless conversions. You can contact him through these websites, both his.
http://www.fretlessguitar.com/guitarsite/home.html
http://www.nedevett.com/
Hope that helps.
Rob

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