Raising The Tone Don't Fret

Frets have a huge influence on the feel of your guitar – but also its tone. Jamie Dickson finds out why...

We’re all familiar with the idea that your guitar’s hardware influences its tone, but it’s easy to overlook hardware that is built into the fabric of the instrument itself. Frets are a good example of this. The condition of your frets, the material they are made of and their size all have a powerful effect on the playability and tonal character of your guitar. We joined Scott Shiraki of Dunlop Manufacturing – one of the world’s biggest suppliers of high-quality frets – and British luthier Patrick James Eggle, to hear their expert views on how frets factor into the tone equation.

“The height and width of frets can obviously change the way a guitar feels and plays,” Scott explains, introducing the basics. “Players who favour vintage Fender guitars and basses from the 60s, for example, tend to prefer medium-height, narrow frets. Whereas players who like to play complicated, fastruns tend to prefer taller, wider frets to keep fingers up off the fretboard.”

These two poles are typically the starting point for discovering what kind of fret suits you best – and each extreme has its pros and cons. Typically, on a modern guitar designed to play well in a variety of styles, you’ll find frets that are somewhat taller and chunkier than the fretwire used back in the 50s.

“We use Jescar frets and the wire that we fit most often is called 55090, which is comparable to Dunlop’s 6105,” Patrick James Eggle says. “We put that on almost all our guitars and it’s medium-width and tall. The reason I started using that wire was because it was my personal favourite: I just like it because it’s not too big, but because it’s quite tall it makes string bending nice and easy.”