Hi all,

Starting the building of my first bass and fretboard, i am making it fretless (mainly due to machinery restraints), but I am trying to add 'inlaid' or faux frets made of mother of pearl to create a line effect throughout the board.

Now i am wondering, i have the ability to cut the Mother Of Pearl roughly to size and fit into thin inlay slots where the frets are normally located. This will allow the player to see where the notes are on the board, but still sounding fretless.

Now onto my question, how difficult is the Mother Of Pearl to sand down? Would i have to cut the inlay strings to the correct 12" radius or would i be able to sand the mother of pearl down while i am radiusing the whole fretboard?

Or, am i completely crazy?

MOP is brittle but not difficult to sand. It's also not something you want to breathe in so use an adequate respirator/dust collection setup when you do it.

MOP is going to be much harder than your fingerboard. You will probably get a different tone out it as you slide up and down the neck. It may have a bit of a fretted sound when you slide.

Hi all,

Starting the building of my first bass and fretboard, i am making it fretless (mainly due to machinery restraints), but I am trying to add 'inlaid' or faux frets made of mother of pearl to create a line effect throughout the board.

Now i am wondering, i have the ability to cut the Mother Of Pearl roughly to size and fit into thin inlay slots where the frets are normally located. This will allow the player to see where the notes are on the board, but still sounding fretless.

Now onto my question, how difficult is the Mother Of Pearl to sand down? Would i have to cut the inlay strings to the correct 12" radius or would i be able to sand the mother of pearl down while i am radiusing the whole fretboard?

Or, am i completely crazy?

MOP will sand, file, or grind very easily. But here's your problem. MOP only "flashes" when it's surfaces are exposed to light - not the edges. The edge of MOP is simply a color - brown, grey, whitish. But there isn't any rainbow coloring in the edges of the shell. Now, fret slots are about .025" thick. That is an extremely narrow and flat piece of MOP to be laying into the slot and there isn't likely to be enough reflection to see the lines very well. Remember, MOP doesn't reflect across it's entire surface all the time. The polychromatic characteristics come from the alignment of small reflective particles in the shell and how light hits them. Very similar to how flame figure wood catches light.

I was planning on making the fret markers 1mm wide, to accomodated the pre-thicknessed m.o.p sheeting. I guess i will order a sheet of mother of pearl, and see how reflective it is on its side, i may get lucky. Or i could try vegetable ivory.

Otherise i will just go conventional fretless and try my hand at a nice inlay design.

I was planning on making the fret markers 1mm wide, to accomodated the pre-thicknessed m.o.p sheeting. I guess i will order a sheet of mother of pearl, and see how reflective it is on its side, i may get lucky. Or i could try vegetable ivory.

Otherise i will just go conventional fretless and try my hand at a nice inlay design.

You want some 10,000+ year old mammoth ivory? :)

Yeh, how about i just make the entire neck piece out of a large, antique tusk?

Hahha, onto another question, ive seen nut blanks made out of mother of pearl, and i think that would tie in well with the m.o.p fret lines and inlay dots.

How useful is mother of pearl for making nuts? Is it suitable for bass guitars?

how about making 0.1" wide MOP fretlines? plastic "mop" can be bent to the fingerboard radius, I don't know how the real MOP behaves..