Inlays on Guitar or similar fretted instrument are visual elements set into the exterior wood
Inlays on Guitar or similar fretted instrument are visual elements set into the exterior wood. Typically, Guitar Inlays are located on the fretboard, headstock, around the soundhole and on the pickguard. Guitar Inlays range from simple plastic dots on the fretboard to fantastic works of art covering the entire exterior surface of a guitar (front and back).
Fretboard Inlays are used not only as decorations, but also as the markers to determine particular frets on fretboard. They are most commonly shaped like dots (circles), diamond shapes, parallelograms, isosceles trapezoids, shark fins or large blocks in between the frets. Dots are usually considered the easiest to make (and thus, somewhat less expensive), as making a dot only requires drilling a round hole and glueing a pre-cut piece of inlay material into it. Traditionally, major manufacturers have their own preferences in Inlay Designs and use them on overwhelming majorities of their guitar series: Fender uses dots, Gibson uses isosceles trapezoids — it's also a characteristic of rivalry between Fender and Gibson. Some manufacturers go beyond these simple shapes and use more creative designs such as lightning bolts or letters and numbers.
Smaller dots are also usually inlaid into the upper edge of the fretboard in the same positions, small enough to be visible only to the player. The simpler inlays are often done in plastic on guitars of recent vintage, but many older, and newer, high-end instruments have inlays made of mother of pearl, abalone, ivory, colored wood or any number of exotic materials. On some low-end guitars, they are just painted. Most high-end Classical Guitars have no inlays at all since a well trained player is traditionally expected to know his or her way around the instrument, however players will sometimes make indicators with a marker pen, correction fluid, or a small piece of tape. Fretless guitars may or may not have inlays that mark frets and intonation.
Another high-end solution involves putting LEDs or optical fiber in the freboard and make Inlays Illuminate. This is becoming increasingly popular among the rock musicians that play gigs at dark venues with constantly changing stage lighting, as it allows to clearly see the fretboard under any conditions.
Inlay Specialists for Custom Guitars, Basses and String Instruments. We provide Fretboard Inlays, Headstock, Neck, Soundhole and Pickguard, Purfling and Binding
www.thorninlay.com, 2002 - 2007
