Several years ago I saw a post on Beau Hannam’s website showing a fretless ukulele that he made. Since then, I have contemplated having one made but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to invest in something that I had no experience with. The demos for fretless ukuleles are few and far between.
Recently, I took James Hill and Sayali Tank’s Ragalele class on Uketroplis and found some of the exercises difficult to play since it required a great deal of sliding over single strings. This reawakened my interest in a fretless ukulele. I have also been enjoying recordings played on fretless guitars lately so I decided to get one of my old ukuleles modified by having the frets removed.
The ukulele I selected for this experiment is a little bit crazy. It’s a Bruce Wei one-of a kind instrument that had so many decorative elements kluged on, which was the reason I bought it in the first place. A bit crazy, but it’s a solid body concert scale uke that sounds really good.
At first I was going to do it myself but I “chickened” out. I decided that if I was going to fairly test the instrument, I wanted it done right. It was time to call our local ukulele repairman, Daniel Flores.
When you remove frets from an instrument it will sound warmer and also quieter, so I asked Daniel to also install a MiSi undersaddle pick-up that I had already purchased.
As always, Daniel provides great advice, and makes thoughtful recommendations to consider. Since the ukulele I was converting had a lot of embellishments he recommended inlay material with a little sparkle to fill the fret rows. He was also thinking that a metal saddle might help with the volume. So that was our original plan. He hadn’t done something like this before but was up for the challenge.
This is what happened…
He had to make a custom fret puller to pull the frets. The metal saddle didn’t seem to make a difference so he kept the bone saddle. After making the modification he noticed that the strings were too high after removing the frets. Since there wasn’t much room to lower the saddle, he had to sand down the bridge a bit. He also warned me that the bridge pins were old. I definitely noticed this when I changed the strings. They seem really cheap.
Before and After…
I was thrilled with the result. But what did it sound like? Well, both good and bad. After about a week of trying to get consistent sound out of it across the entire fingerboard, I suddenly realized that I needed to use my fingernails on my fretting hand in order to get a clear tone. (I guess this is why we have frets in the first place.)
I also noticed that the original fret markers were useless since I actually need to press my fingers exactly where the frets used to be rather than between the frets. Duh! I pencilled in new markers and will eventually paint them in.
I love playing without frets so much that I have asked Hank Johnson to make me a fretless Baritone. I think the bigger body will help with the volume. We’ll see what he comes up with.
Noodlin’ around demo.You can hear the difference between nails and skin at the end.