Fretless Right Hand Technique

[Sir Squier]

I've recently had my Jazz V de-fretted and it's the best decision I've ever made! My problem is, when I play a string with fingers, I'm getting an awful noise from the string actually slapping bottom most part of the fretboard due to the newly lowered action.

I've leant to play bass with my fingers going between the strings in a perpendicular way and pulling up, parallel to to body towards the top of the instrument. (I hope that makes sense). I've read articles that say ideally, I should be using the length or 'meat' of my fingers rather than mostly the tip. This would move the string in a direction even more parallel to the body rather than slightly towards it, causing the 'slapping' sound.

Doing this on a double bass is easy enough to understand, but trying to implement it on an electric bass results in trying to contort my hand into a really weird looking shape. Can anyone shed some light on this or provide some helpful resources?

 

[INTP]

I have this problem on my fretless, as well. A couple of things that help are to 1) turn up the amp, which naturally causes me to play more softly, and 2) pluck closer to the bridge. I also try to raise my elbow a bit more, but due to shoulder issues, I can't do this very long, yet.

I think the setup is important, although I'm still figuring it out. I've gotten used to a pretty low action on my fretted basses, but having low action on the fretless seems to exacerbate the buzzing problem. It's also inconsistent. I get a nice mwah on some parts of the neck, but get the clanking on other parts. I'm still tweaking the relief and action, trying to get the setup right.

I'm interested in what others say.

 

[Mushroo]

Setup is very important on fretless, so if the action is too low, that can be a big problem.

My recommendation is to find a teacher who specializes in fretless, and/or study Youtube videos of great fretless players: Jaco Pastorius, Michael Manring, Bakithi Kumalo, etc.

 

[Sir Squier]

Thanks for the feedback guys. It's reassuring to know that it's not caused entirely by my lousy technique and I can instead blame my instrument a little.