Fretless Guitars and Alternate Tuning Systems

The idea of a fretless guitar has been interesting me lately because of its capabilities to play outside of the conventional western equal temperament tuning system. Regular fretted guitars of course can only play the note that the fret allow. This divides the audible hearing spectrum into twelve repeating notes, but I see no reason why we shouldn't want to use the sound possibilities in between.

I think most people would agree with this, but the problem is that the equal temperament system has been so ingrained into our culture that it is hard to escape its draw. Even with the advent of computers, notation and music production programs are built around the standard tuning system.

Many composers have dealt with this by composing in just intonation, and that is fine, but it is still limiting in its own ways. Now is the time, i believe, to start looking for ways to create music without tuning system constraints, and instruments like the fretless guitar can help in that pursuit.

What can benefit this cause is to focus on more ear based and non-tuning-system subjective musical learning methods. Meaning the focus on learning a fretless instrument should be one based on learning the relationships between notes by ear, and when I say notes, I mean playing any frequency in the spectrum.

The great thing about learning music like this with instruments like the fretless guitar is that they can still play all of the music that has already been written for fretted instruments. They may be a little more difficult to play, but the benefits they offer are great. It is time to start examining the possibilities that are out there with fretless guitars and getting into some different tuning systems in order to keep music moving forward.