The fretless guitar (by E. Powell)
In 1997 Edward Powell succeeded in his experimental attempts to create a fretless guitar. The result is essentially a marriage between the steel-string acoustic guitar and the Indian sarod in that it is basically a guitar with a flat metal fingerboard.
The sarod is a well-known instrument of North Indian classical music popularized by great exponents such as Ustad Allaudin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, Amjad Ali Khan, among others. The sarod's origins stretch back to the ancient Afghani "rabab", which has a goat-skin face, a wooden body and fingerboard, and uses catgut or nylon playing strings. The rabab has also a set of sympathetic "tarif" strings similar to those of the sitar. The sarod's characteristic features are it's goat-skin face, steel playing strings, "tarif" strings, and metal fingerboard.
Until very recently the fretless guitar has not enjoyed any mentionable notoriety. Currently this new instrument's popularity is rising dramatically, however it has yet to penetrate the mainstream to any significant degree. The fretless guitar's recent rise in recognition is due largely to the unprecedented enthusiasm and efforts of Jeff Berg and his creation of the international fretless guitar resource web site, www.unfretted.com. This site has linked together the widespread and various efforts to develop the fretless guitar. Jeff, a clearly unbiased individual, has included everyone and anyone doing something significant with the fretless guitar, on the site.
However, the recent explosion of fretless guitarists is largely made up of electric guitar players in no way connected with the deep musical traditions of instruments very closely related, such as the oud and the sarod. The oud and the sarod have been around for centuries and centuries and both have an astonishingly large repertoire of classical, devotional, folk, and even pop music.
The creation of the fretless guitar is often credited to the Turkish musician Erkan Ogur. Turkey is not an unlikely birthplace for the fretless guitar since fretless instruments in general are ideally suited to Turkey's music so rich in micro-tones. The Turkish fretless guitar is in fact a Spanish guitar without frets, however recently many young Turkish players have also turned electric.
Edward Powell is to-date perhaps the only fretless guitarist to play Indian classical music in "sarod" style. Edward's most recent self-built fretless guitar is in fact a combination of a sarod, an oud, and a guitar, having 3 necks (one being solely for sympathetic strings). The idea behind this instrument is that if you want to play ragas and makams in the same concert it is easier to carry around one triple-neck fretless guitar, than to haul around a sarod (or sitar), and an oud! Not only that but having 33 strings all in one instrument, aside from putting a tremendous strain on the soundboard, gives a wonderful natural resonance.
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