>Have you ever tried to play a fretless bass?

Sure.

>Do you think you could play a regular guitar if it were fretless?

With practice, sure. It might be challenging, especially at first, but it has more to do with skills that aren't exactly musical. Perhaps quasi-musical, but it certainly has nothing to do with music, and everything to do with applications that don't necessarily have all that much to do with music in general.

>Putting your fingers in exactly the right spot for the proper, in key note, is harder than you may think.

No, I do know how hard it is. I never said it was easy. But the frets are there for a reason. I have nothing against skill. But my feeling is that a performer should be focused on what it is that they're playing, not the hoops they have to jump through to play it. What's the point? It's an unnecessary multitasking exercise that only players are going to truly appreciate in the first place. I noticed a long time ago that people who play such things never seem to make music that I think is any damn good. It's like seeing drummers loading roto-toms onto a stage, I know I won't like the band. After you see 500 bands with certain types of equipment, and you think they're all terrible, you retain biases. I'm sorry that it goes against the idea of being open-minded, but the next fretless player I see in a band that I actually think is good will be the first...at best, the second or third.

>I tought myself how to play a fretless bass as a teen. I can't read music but could listen to a line and play it.

That's nothing to sneeze at; it's just that for me personally, the fretless is generally used only to create stuff I have no use for. By the way, having the ear to pick up parts is very important. I was reading music at a young age but haven't spent but a few hours looking at charts in the past 20 years. My ear has always been what I use to learn music on guitar & bass.

>I also know a guy who builds custom exotic bass guitars. He made a 9 string bass for someone covering all the notes on a piano. Try playin that monster. If anyone cares, I can point you to his site and beautiful works of art being played by alot of top performers.

Well, that's great, and some of these things are beautiful works of art. My issue is with them musically, as they're generally used by people who make music I just don't like. Which is not to say that I care whether or not they spend their time creating art I don't like, as I'm fully aware they're going to do it whether I approve or not. Go, play, create, wank, whatever, to yr heart's content. But I don't think it's a coincidence that I've never found myself playing with people who use those sorts of instruments. There's a philosophical/musical divide & I take the time to call attention to it because I have nothing better to do, so I don't see the problem in illustrating the difference to those who otherwise might not realize.

I realize that I'm setting myself up as the musical equivalent of some stick-up-the-ass paint-and-brush artist who has all this disdain for people who use unconventional methods to paint--such as rolling around naked in the stuff, using yr pecker, whatever. Such people didn't look too kindly on Jackson Pollock for his drip technique. But I'm more interested in the final result, so in truth I don't care if a player uses a fretless or a 5-string or whatever. But I know that precious few non-traditional basses have been used to create music that I enjoy, which is all that I care about. If a band uses all this fancy nonsense & comes up with something that I think is good, then I'll know it can be done & not care about what I see as the ridiculous nature of these instruments & how they appeal to players who make music I think is horrible, self-indulgent garbage. But I'm still waiting.

>Oh and before I forget. This post was not intended to be a pissing match about who overplays and underplays. It was just something to get folks talking about music, myself included. Nobody cares who's the best or better, just who you like and why. I still do enjoy your essays anyway.

Oh, hell, I'm sorry if I turned this into a pissing match. That wasn't my intent. It's just that, you know, there's a best bassists or best guitarists or best drummers thread once a year or so. Yeah, a 'favorite' thread is & should be a little different. Maybe I shouldn't have opened up my big mouth but I did kinda want to make the point that even 'favorite' (as opposed to 'best'--for instance, Neil Peart is 'best' to a lot of people when it comes to drummers, and he may be, but it hardly matters if I think his band is the worst, which they're threatening for the title of for the past 30 years) doesn't have all that much to do with what I like about music. In other words, I certainly have no problem with the admiration of individual ability, but I never bought a Beatles or Who or Elvis Costello record thinking how much I'd like it because I liked the bass players in those bands so much. So I just felt I'd go ahead & make the point that the admiration of an individual player that's supposed to be part of a whole is something that's taking into account individual ability over music, which is not what music's about to me. I certainly didn't mean to be pissy about it. If overplayers would take the time to do some work in a non-overplaying idiom (as Flea has done), I'd have a lot more respect for their understanding of music outside the realm of what it is that their abilities allow them to exploit.