The Expanding Fretless Guitarscape: Practice and Progress

The fretless guitar inhabits a range of musical genres and cultures around the world. Its application ranges from sonic or aesthetic novelty to ‘serious’ artistic experimentation, to routine engagement within niche idioms. Due to its physicality, the fretless guitar affords the guitarist alternative performance possibilities, including innovative techniques, diverse forms of articulation and distinctive timbres. By examining the fretless guitar in relation to different performance environments – from concentrated idiomatic, cultural and/or geographic locales, to global interconnectivity realized primarily via online dissemination, social media and virtual networks – this chapter considers an array of playing approaches and techniques, highlights any recent developments and offers possible explanations for the instrument’s increased pervasiveness of late. In addition, using ‘affordance’ (Gibson) as a critical lens, the author presents an autoethnographic account of his experiences of working with the fretless electric guitar and provides insights into the ways in which ‘fretlessness’ – when viewed as a ‘state of practice’ – might benefit the modern guitarist.