Grimalkin

I haven't bought myself a different fretless for a few years, I bought this yesterday, Sire V2 M7. Give it a whirl.

Wants and needs. Do you want to look cool? Or do you want the ability to intonate well over the full range of the board? I'd love to see and hear this played on an unlined board, with the same intonation.... From 0.30:

Pino brought fretless into the pop mainstream, I think it was Guy Pratt remarking about fretless that after Jaco, anytime you played fretless on just the back pickup everyone thought "Jaco!" You couldn't get away from it, still can't. Pino kept the presence of the sound, but rounded it out nicely.

"Stevie Wonder's left hand." That's what he said quite a few years ago. Some of the '80s lines sound like they have a synth influence.

I've owned a few unlined in the past, Wal, MusicMan, whatever. It's when you want to play things up the board that things get tricky. Take John Giblin's parts in Kate Bush's 'Babooska'. I think trying to recreate that about 25 years ago on an unlined, convinced me that lines were the way to go.

He should have been asked both fretted/fretless influences. I don't think Jamerson would have been his biggest fretless influence.

Jamerson had something else, I can't remember if it was German. That experience is briefly written about in 'Standing in the Shadows of Motown.'

I would say Pino made his name because of his fretless sound/lines. Jamerson had a fretless at one time but he didn't take to it at all. IIRC he nearly threw it against a wall while saying: "Don't let me play this piece of s*** again!"

I would have liked to become a good pianist.

The bottom line is, do you want to go for style? Or substance? The main reason for an unlined board IME of asking, was that they looked cooler.

Jaco was Pino's and Franklin's biggest influence. The lines are there to allow someone to play in tune along the whole scale length of the board. The problem with unlined basses, is that woodpeckers tend to burrow in and build a nest above the twelfth fret. Nice an quiet up there.

I leave frets or skimming to someone else but I've set-up for years with the rest. One of the first things I look at if I'm interested in a bass is to see how much travel is left in the bridge compared to the action I'd like. Especially on fretless, mass producers don't drop the neck pocket by 1.2mm to accommodate the lack of fret height from my experience. So that has to be accounted for too. Anything that's close to bottoming out and still needs lowering, I'll look for another one.

Diamante dogs.

Come on, or the machines will take over, and the audience will undoubtedly love them, and that will be us done...

If you're ever really bored, put your hand palm flat on a table top and try lifting pairs of fingers in different combinations while keeping the rest flat. Thumb and index are easy, try index and ring, mid and pinky and so on. If you're bored.

If you are going to be a purist, go large or go home I say...

"But now... We're today's scrambled creatures, locked in tomorrow's double feature Heaven's on the pillow, its silence competes with hell It's a twenty-four hour service, guaranteed to make you tell..."

"This is the end, my electric friends, the end..."

A guitarist friend played me the John Scofield album 'A Go Go' not long after it came out in '98. As soon as I heard the rhythm section on the first track I thought it was class. Very organic, great sense of time, lovely feel: