The Wrong Half

My guitar has been in a basement for about a month now, being taken apart on the strength of something I misunderstood.

Which sounds worse than it is, though not by as much as I’d like.

Why there’s a Schecter in my house at all

I’ve been an Ibanez player for years, which isn’t brand loyalty so much as a hands thing. The necks fit me. After enough time your muscle memory picks a shape and stops consulting you about it.

But the sound I’ve chased longest is a note that won’t die. Sustained leads, that liquid thing where a line keeps blooming instead of decaying out from under you. The reliable way to get it is a sustainer — a driver in the neck position that feeds the string energy so it rings until you decide otherwise.

So the obvious move was to put one in my Jem 7VP.

It’s also the move Steve Vai made, incidentally, which I want to flag now because it comes back later. Flo was the first guitar he put a sustainer in, and it’s a Jem, and he’s been playing it ever since. He’s said in interviews that Flo and Evo are the two he reaches for, that Flo’s the one he’s used most over the past decade, and that the sustainer gives it a noticeably different voice even though the two are basically the same instrument underneath.

I wasn’t going to do it. Routing a cavity for an electromagnetic driver is not a decision you get to take back, and I love that guitar too much to bet it on a maybe.

Then I found out Schecter already built one with the system in it. Sun Valley Super Shredder FR S — mahogany body, maple neck, ebony board, twenty-four X-jumbo frets, a Floyd, an EMG Retro Active in the bridge and a Sustainiac driver in the neck. Roughly what the Jem modification would have cost, minus the part where I might wreck something irreplaceable.

I bought her feeling faintly guilty about it, like I was cheating on a partner. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing to feel about an instrument, and if you do, you’ve probably never had one.

Her name is Dragonfly

Green Reign is what Schecter calls the paint. The name is mine.

My sister loved fireflies. Something about that particular green kept turning into dragonflies in my head instead, and once the association formed it wasn’t going anywhere. So: Dragonfly. She’s been mine for three years and some of the most emotionally connected playing I’ve ever done has come out of her. I don’t have a technical account of why. Most guitarists have one instrument that gets more out of them than the spec sheet can explain, and this one is mine.

The only thing about her that’s ever bothered me is the active pickup.

I understand why people love actives — quiet, consistent, they hit the front end hard and they behave identically every night whether or not you’re having a good one. But they feel different under my hands. There’s a politeness to an active pickup, a built-in compression, a certain refusal to get ugly when you dig in, and after three years I still hadn’t made peace with it.

So swapping the bridge to passive had been sitting on the list for a while. Nothing urgent. Just one of those things.

Then I heard a video

A couple months back I was scrolling my music feeds and came across Dweezil Zappa showing off one of the odder instruments in a collection made almost entirely of odd instruments.

Half-fretless.

Now. I should be clear about what I was actually working from here, because it’s the whole reason any of this happened. It was a clip about forty-five seconds long. I did not see the guitar. What I had was a man holding an instrument up to a camera, presumably gesturing at the part he meant, saying the words half fretless out loud.

If you can see a neck, that phrase isn’t ambiguous for a second. There’s a line, your eye lands on it, done. Strip the picture out and it’s a description with at least two perfectly sensible readings, and I picked the one my hands wanted to be true.

Which they did, instantly and with enormous confidence: frets down through the twelfth, bare board above it. Cut across the neck at the midpoint. Chords and rhythm down low where my hands already know what they’re doing, and up top you slide around like a cellist.

I could not stop thinking about it, and specifically I could not stop thinking about what that would do sitting on top of a sustainer. A note that keeps singing while you move through it. No fret to stop the pitch and re-articulate it — just continuous motion and endless sustain, which is a great deal closer to how a voice behaves than how a guitar does.

I gave it about a week. Then I walked down to Logan’s.

Rock Bottom

Rock Bottom Guitarworks is less than three blocks from my front door, in the basement of a long storefront at 1055½ Madison. Next door is a hearing aid store. I want you to sit with that arrangement for a second, because I have, repeatedly, and I still don’t know what to do with it.

You go in the door. Down the stairs. At the bottom, the shop is through the door on the left.

You have to hit rock bottom to get there. I’ve never asked whether that’s deliberate because I don’t want to find out it isn’t.

It’s two rooms and it’s cramped in the correct way — used guitars on the walls and standing on the floor, a few amps, some pedals, a keyboard, and the working inventory every tech alive keeps out front: strings, picks, capos, cables, whatever it is you came in for and forgot you needed. Logan doesn’t sell new gear. He buys instruments off the used market and nurses them back, so whatever’s hanging up on a given day is whatever he’s currently rescued, which means sometimes you walk in and there’s something genuinely strange in the corner with a story attached to it.

Logan Burns runs it. He’s a working multi-instrumentalist as well as a tech, which matters more than people give it credit for — a guy who gigs sets up an instrument the way somebody does who’s going to have to play the thing later.

He’s the sort of tech every self-respecting professional keeps in their back pocket, and around here he’s a bit of an open secret. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you end up at the other shop in town, getting glared at for lingering too long without buying anything, and taking your chances on whether your guitar comes home the way you handed it over. Ask me how I know.

Logan restored an Ibanez RT for me that I’d more or less written off. I gave him lateral freedom on that one and he chose pickups based on how I actually play rather than what a spec sheet said belonged in there. It’s one of my favorite guitars now. That’s the whole basis of the trust, and it’s most of the reason I was willing to do what I did next.

He’s also the person who gave me happy trees make happy notes, which has been rattling around my skull ever since. As far as I can tell that’s an entire philosophy of lutherie compressed down to something you could put on a shop sign.

Anyway. I went down there with my partner and a friend, having smoked a bowl beforehand, carrying my favorite guitar and a work order that involved defretting half of it.

I explained what I wanted. Passive bridge in place of the active. Sustainer wiring re-pointed. Every fret above the twelfth, gone.

Logan looked at me like I was nuts.

“Are you sure about this?”

Yeah.

He gave me a funny look, shook his head, and said he’d do it. We worked out details and left. He’s had her three or four weeks now, and the last time I checked in he told me it was going to take a while, which from Logan is less a warning than a forecast.

What the video actually said

Dweezil’s half-fretless neck isn’t cut across the twelfth fret.

It’s split down the length of the neck. In a 2021 Guitar Player interview he describes it as a Roxy SG with a neck customized by Echopark — low strings fretted, high strings fretless, the dividing line running nut to body rather than crossing the board at the midpoint.

Same guitar’s got a Sustainiac in it too, as it happens. And he owns a second, fully fretless SG with a Sustainiac and a MIDI bridge with autotune, which he uses for glissando and microtonal work and something he calls the Cher effect.

So I had the geometry backwards and the physics dead on. That pairing I’d gotten so excited about is a conclusion he arrived at independently, twice, across two instruments. I just drew the line the wrong way across the neck.

My first reaction was a short unpleasant drop in my stomach, because I had handed over a guitar I love to have something irreversible done to it on the basis of a thing I’d invented.

Then I sat with it for a few days.

Necks are replaceable. Expensive and annoying and a real hassle, but replaceable, and nothing here is the one-way door I’d briefly convinced myself it was. More to the point, I’ve wanted to play fretless for years and nobody’s building the thing I accidentally ordered. Zappa’s version runs fretted and fretless side by side, in parallel, the whole length of the neck. Mine is a fretted guitar that turns into a fretless one when you cross the twelfth. Two instruments in series rather than in parallel, which is a different musical idea entirely — the low register stays exactly what my hands already know, and the upper register, where I’m doing lead work anyway and where the sustainer earns its keep, becomes something with no fixed pitches in it at all.

I would love to present this as methodology. Some deliberate practice of productive misreading. Disability as generative constraint, the ambiguity of verbal description as a design tool, that entire genre of essay.

It was a forty-five second clip and a wrong guess.

But I’ll take it. I’ve spent a lot of years on the losing end of information that only exists in pictures, and this is the first time the gap has handed me something I actually wanted. I’m not going to be precious about how it arrived.

So I’m keeping the mistake. It stopped being one somewhere around day three.

The work order

For anyone who wants the actual spec.

Bridge pickup. The EMG Retro Active Hot 70 comes out. A passive DiMarzio Evolution — the DP159 — goes in.

This is the deliberate part, and it’s where the Vai thread from earlier ties off. The Evolution is the pickup in the Jem. It’s most of the reason I love how that guitar sounds, and I’ve wanted that voice in Dragonfly for a long time.

Which means when this is finished I’ll be holding a guitar with an Evolution in the bridge and a sustainer in the neck. That’s Flo’s configuration. Not an approximation of it — the actual pairing, right down to the pickup model.

So I’m not building a Jem. I’m building the other one. The guitar Vai reaches for when he wants a note to hang in the air, assembled from a Schecter and a work order, with an ebony fingerboard that stops having frets in it halfway up.

I did not plan that either. It’s just where the parts landed.

Pots. Bridge volume to 500k for passive operation, plus checking whatever else the active circuit was quietly determining on my behalf.

Sustainiac. Sensing wiring re-pointed to the new passive bridge, per Sustainiac’s own documentation rather than by assumption, then the loop rebalanced — driver height, intensity trim, phase — until it engages clean and doesn’t squeal at me.

Batteries. Both nine-volts stay in. The passive bridge draws nothing now, but the second slot buys longer sustainer runtime and I’d rather have that than an empty cavity.

Frets. Fretted through the twelfth, everything from thirteen up removed, slots filled, board leveled and finished across the fretless zone. It’s ebony, which is the traditional fretless board material for good reasons, and I’ve left the epoxy question entirely to Logan. Glassy doesn’t worry me — I’ve wanted a Morningstar glass guitar for years, so a fingerboard that sounds like glass reads as a feature rather than a compromise.

Full setup. Action across both zones, Floyd re-setup, intonation.

The part nobody builds

Here’s the piece I care most about, and the piece that took the longest to explain standing in that basement.

Fretless instruments are navigated by eye. That’s the convention — lines inlaid where the frets used to be, dots on the face of the board, players watching their own hands like they’re reading sheet music off the neck. It’s a visual solution to a pitch problem and it’s a perfectly good one, if you can see.

None of it is available to me.

So the work order includes something I haven’t found on a production instrument anywhere: a tactile pitch grid. Raised side dots at every fret-line position from thirteen up, along the bass-side edge, sitting where each fret end would have met the wood. Not a decorative row — a full chromatic reference I can find with the side of my hand while I’m playing. And the landmark positions, the ones any guitarist’s muscle memory already reaches for at twelve, fifteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-one and twenty-four, get physically differentiated. Doubled, or larger, or otherwise distinguishable. Something my finger can identify without stopping to count.

The material is Luminlay, so they glow, which is worth something to me because I have enough usable vision that a bright marker registers even when I can’t rely on it.

That last part is the design decision I want to underline, because it’s the one I keep making. The glow is a bonus layer. The touch system is the interface, and it has to work completely on its own, in the dark, with my eyes shut. The visual layer sits on top and never gets to be load-bearing.

Which is, I realized about two-thirds of the way through writing this, exactly how I built FreedomHawk. Screen reader first, complete on its own, low-vision mode layered over the top to enhance without ever replacing the workflow underneath. I made the same architectural call in wxPython and in ebony inside the same month and didn’t notice I’d done it twice until just now.

Accessibility isn’t a mode you bolt on at the end. Sometimes it’s a wiring diagram and sometimes it’s a row of bumps on the edge of a neck.

(And a guitar named after a firefly, getting markers put in that glow in the dark. I noticed that while I was writing this paragraph and then had to go do something else for a bit.)

What I’m not doing, on purpose

Dweezil’s fretless SG has that MIDI pickup with autotune, which will quietly correct your intonation while you play.

I thought about it seriously. I’m not doing it.

Not because it’s cheating — it’s a legitimate tool, and the Cher effect is a sound rather than a crutch. I’m not doing it because I’m learning this, and a guitar that fixes my pitch for me is a guitar on which I’ll never develop the ear or the hands to land it myself. I’d be installing a bad habit at the one moment where I could just not. I’ve got plenty already, and unpicking them later costs so much more than never forming them.

There’s a version of the same reflex in the FreedomHawk post, where I refused to transmit speculative bytes into a guitar pedal because two protocol constants were still inferred rather than confirmed. It’s the same instinct, applied to my own hands instead of somebody’s firmware.

I should also be honest about the difficulty I signed up for without meaning to. Zappa’s lengthwise split gives him fretless across the whole neck, including the low positions where the spacing is wide and being a few millimeters off is being a few cents off — forgiving territory to learn in. Mine gives me fretless from the thirteenth up, on a 25.5-inch scale, where an entire octave has been compressed into the top half of the board and the spacing is as tight as it ever gets. I managed to order the version where intonation error is most punishing and skip the version where it’s easy.

What’s working in my favor is that I’ve been teaching myself violin, which has no frets, no markers and no sympathy whatsoever. Every day on that is a day building the exact skill this guitar’s going to demand of me. I don’t think the two projects are going to fight each other. I think they’ll feed each other, and I’d rather have both problems at once than either one on its own.

Twenty-some years of muscle memory that puts my finger behind the fret is going to have opinions, though. On a fretless the note lives at the line, not behind it. I’m expecting a few weeks of playing flat and blaming the setup.

What I’m waiting to find out

Mostly whether crossing the twelfth feels like a seam or like a door.

Then there’s the sustainer — I’ve spent two months imagining what it does to a note you’re sliding through, and there’s a decent chance it does something stranger than what’s in my head and I end up liking that better. Same with the Evolution, which I know inside out in basswood behind a Lo-Pro and have never once heard in mahogany behind a Floyd. It might sound like the Jem. It might not. Both outcomes are interesting.

And whether I can actually find a pitch by feel up there, or whether the first month is humbling enough that I end up writing the follow-up from a defensive crouch.

Logan’s had her three or four weeks and says it’ll be a while yet. Given that the last time I gave him this kind of freedom I got back a guitar I now count among my favorites, I’m more curious than I am nervous.

Mostly.

I’ll write the other half of this when Dragonfly comes home.

Happy trees make happy notes. Let’s find out what the ones with no frets in them sound like.