Fretles bass

A

awkgreen

New member
I am considering getting a fretless bass to get around the problem of fret buzz whe recording directly into my roland vs 2400. I have never played fretless,would this be the answer or am I buying into other unknown issues.hope you can help,before I decide to buy
 
Fretless bass guitars have a distinct character (unless you hit the notes really accurately but that would make it kind of pointless to have a fretless) which you may or may not want for the kind of music you're playing. I would not get it in order to fix things. They are really cool though! How about adjusting the action on your bass guitar?
 
My bass is a 1975 fender jazz , have had it set up but I still get buzz when releasing the played note slowly.
 
Buzzing comes from technique as well as set up. Where are you fretting the notes? (Rhetorical) Why would you release a note slowly? (Not rhetorical)

Also, you might want to recheck the neck. Weather can definitely make it move. If you had it set up last year, it's possible it needs to be checked again this year. Maybe look up a YouTube tutorial on how to check and set the neck.

Good luck.
 
Playing a fretless is fraught with danger.
If you get one you'll probably want to mark in where the frets were. Playing a fretted instrument makes life much easier. Things like double bass, cello, viola & violin not only don't have frets, but no markers for where the frets would be AND no position markers. They rely on LOTS of practice and a very good ear which is why my cello is dotted with stickers for position and notes.
Fretless bass - depends on how you play it. The fellow from Japan was very keen on sliding into notes and wabbling them about (probably a compensation mechanism for not knowing where the notes were).
Eliminating buzz is set up and practice.
If you're preapred to put in the time & effort to get the notes accurately it'll sound like a fretless in that it's not a precision instrument.
 
Thanks,I am looking at one that has been converted from fretted to fretless,so the exact markings are all still there
 
awkgreen, it seems from the distance that you get buzzing from bad technique.
If that should be the case, then a fretless will make things worse.
If you just happen to lust for a fretless, then go for it, by all means,
but it will make bass playing a lot harder than just playing a fretted bass...
 
Right. Make sure you want a fretless for the right reasons. Bad playing and a bad setup is not a good reason to switch to a fretless bass. If you play bad on a regular bass, you're gonna flat-out suck on a fretless.
 
Greg_L said:
If you play bad on a regular bass, you're gonna flat-out suck on a fretless.
Click to expand...

Yep, with a fretless, you've got to be super-accurate.
I've been playing a marked fretless as my primary bass for over a decade, and I still get buzz occasionally. The strings tend to rattle against the fretboard more than the frets themselves.
 
But that fretless conversion may benefit someone else down the road :D. That's how I got my Peavey T-40--some collegiate types made it fretless, put a Wilkenson bridge on it, and otherwise screwed it up, then got frustrated and put it in the trash. Then I found it, swapped the neck, rewired it, and got it working. The conversion neck got SANDED and ended up on a P-Bass copy I had laying around--the score, Me two, college kids zero.
 
awkgreen said:
I am looking at one that has been converted from fretted to fretless,so the exact markings are all still there
Click to expand...
If you're still around and looking at this thread, let me tell you from experience, this will make things worse. I once converted my fretted Fender to a fretless and got an almighty shock when I hit the fret spaces and sounded out of tune. You need to be super accurate on a fretless because there's only one place where the note is right whereas on a fretted bass accuracy isn't important as long as your finger is somewhere within the space. On a fretless, "somewhere" isn't good enough.
Having said that, on my present fretless acoustic bass guitar there are fret markings and hitting fractionally behind each fret line yields the right note.
 
The trouble with a de-fretted bass is that on a fretted bass you play between the frets, but on a de-fretted one, you play ON the lines. I've got two fretless basses - one is a very old defretted semi acoustic, and it has always sounded dull and horrible. The other is a proper manufactured fretless and sounds much better. If you started on cello or DB, then tuning isn't too bad, but from friends who went the other way, they've never needed to be that accurate, so it's much harder. Depending on what you play, however, tuning isn't as hard as it might be.
 
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