Love my new guitar, But can't see frets

  • Thread starter Thread starter jeff0633
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jeff0633

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HI folks. I love my new guitar, but the frets have small fret markers on the edge of the neck. There are no round inlays in the middle of the neck that I can see on the dark stage. My first night, when I got in fron of the stage and was jammimg, I couldn't see which frets were which. Is there something I can do or put on the fret board that will allow me to see the frets better on a dark stage? Remember those stickers that Roy clark used to have people put on their guitar necks? I need some white ones that I can mark my frets with, or something similar.

Any help would be great.

Jeff
 
You could have it inlaid, but that probably means a refret. Alternatively you could have larger side dots inlaid.
 
mshilarious said:
You could have it inlaid, but that probably means a refret. Alternatively you could have larger side dots inlaid.
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There is no need to refret if you are doing something as simple as dots. We, in fact, do simple inlays (Dots, snowflakes, diamonds, and the like) after the guitar is otherwise completely finished on our guitars. You just need to get it done by someone who knows what they are doing.


Light

"Cowards can never be moral."
M.K. Gandhi
 
do what I do. Learn to play with your eyes closed :cool: . Classicals normally (not always) don't have any marks and you learn by feel. The advantage is that your do it by feel, arm postion, feel of the neck etc.

Seriously, close your eyes and jam! (try this at home of course, but you'll quickly overcome the problem. Bear in mind that if you rely on the fret inlays that much, you are probably looking at the guitar too much)

(I know, Zen and the art of the guitar1)

Oh, and then have the side marks added. 5 and 7 will work great. :D

Regards, Steve
 
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Light said:
There is no need to refret if you are doing something as simple as dots.
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Really? Man, I let myself get talked out of doing dots because somebody said I wouldn't be able to level it without pulling the frets. Grrrrrr. :mad:
 
Those fretware samples from lbanks post don't really do it for me - talk about overkill!

I can remember the first gig of the last band I was in, first time I had to look at the fret board I realised I'd pointed a floor gel light so it would point straight into my eyes when I was looking at the frets... didn't do much soloing in the first set, which probably wasn't a bad thing!
 
You could do like a friend of mine did yrs ago. He painted between every other fret with different colors of irridescent paint and had a black light lying on the floor in front of him. It was cool but it made his teeth green.
 
I am spoiled on having some sort of fret markers on my guitars.

When i got a classical that had no fret markings of any kind, I took some white nail polish and dabbed a dot of it on the binding on the top side of the neck in the appropriate places.

I have no interest in ever removing them, but you may want to find something that will be able to be scraped off if the need arises. The binding isn't too porous, so nail polish should come off clean, I think. Just find a color that contrasts your binding enough that you can see it in low light, and make them big enough so that you can see it better than the existing ones.
 
That's what the Fretware product is...marblized tape. You can remove it without scraping, also.
 
Try some whiteout. You can bead it up as big as you like, then scrape it off at the end of the night.
 
EddieRay said:
Try some whiteout. You can bead it up as big as you like, then scrape it off at the end of the night.
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Don't they sell a flourescent White-out?
 
I'd say go with glow-in-the-dark paint. Can't beat that. White out will flake off pretty easily. Just make sure if you do use glow in the dark paint you let it sit in the light long enough before going onto the dark stage. Alternatively you could use thin glow-in-the-dark tape on the sides to mark it as well.

It's a good idea to learn to play without fret markers though. I played a classical for awhile, and the lack of fret markers helped me a lot with finding the frets I wanted faster without having to rely on my eyes, not to mention you can rock out a lot more if you don't have to spend your whole set looking at your fretboard :cool:
 
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