tellef ogrim's fretless guitar

the guitar

i use on "wagon 8" and "some dodos never die" is a Yamaha SG600 that I bought in 1981. It was my main guitar for a year or so until I got a Fender Stratocaster. The Yamaha sat unused in my basement until one day the urge (I inherited from my late father) to modify things, made me remove the frets using a hammer, a small and very thin screwdriver and a pair of small pincers . The operation was much simpler than I had thought, doing only minor and controllable damages to the fingerboard (I will not guarantee though that the frets of YOUR guitar is as this easy to remove). After removing the frets I filled the cracks left after them with wood repair paste, finally polishing the fingerboard with very fine sand paper. Actually, the hardest part was to adjust the strings and the microphones in order to get the sound I was after. As of May 2005, the guitar is played through an 18 Watts strong Budda Superdrive II 1 X 12 combo.

this is only one easy way to get a fretless guitar. there are many other projects out there in the fretless guitar world, some of them far more ambitious and experimental than mine. for more info go to this page.

this latest modification to the instrument comes from a need to have the ebow

available at all times. i simply took a piece of semi-hard plastic, made room for the ebow

and fastened it to the guitar body. not pretty, but seems to do the job.

3 weeks later): i used this ebow "crib" at a gig in cracow, poland (with joe fonda, franz hautzinger and jacek kochan at the club alchemia) and soon found out that it did not work at all. (AND it was very ugly) following the advice of my fretless friend (even my friends are fretless) gary corcoran i removed the ugly green plastic and replaced it with a little round metal plate (on the guitar body) and a small magnet on the ebow. this seems to work much better