Fretless Bass Conversion

Steve,
I really enjoy your website.
I'm curious... Do you happen to fretless bass conversions (i.e., converting a fretted bass to fretless)?
Many thanks,
Dave

David,
Sure. The most common, and the easiest way to do it is to pull the frets and fill the fret slots with a contrasting color of wood. This gives you a perfect set of note markers. This is the way to do it if you are in it for smooth slides and micro adjusting your intonation. But, from the audience, it still looks fretted.

We can also pull your whole fingerboard and replace it with an unfretted board. If looking unfretted is important to you, this is the way to go. We can mark finger placement with side dots. This is also a chance to deal with a poorly working truss rod or stiffen the neck with carbon fiber rods.

Filling the slots is about $200, plus an $80 action set, plus new strings. New board is about $350, plus action and new strings. Fretless basses go in and out of style. Most people who switch to them, switch back. There are lots of fretless basses in closets around the country. A cheaper option would be to find one of those and play it until you are sure of your next move. If you have already done that, we'd love to do the work for you.

Steve Mason

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