This era spawned many unique inlays that were often aggressive and fit the sharper curves and angular sounds the players were dishing out. Jackson even offered these inlays as reverse shark fins, for those daring enough! Other models featured giant fins that stretched across the entire fretboard width. This inlay pattern was so popular, Jackson offered plenty of variants in materials and sizes to suit any shredders needs, from abalone, pearloid, and alumiloid to larger and small shark fins. You'll see these and all types of other shapes on the best guitars for metal nowadays.
Neoclassical fretboards use no inlays at all. While that sounds boring, some players prefer the sleek look of a clean fretboard. Most neoclassical fretboards still include the side dots, for the players convenience.
After this long discussion, you may be thinking that inlays are only for the fretboard or side of the neck, but that's not the case. The progression is where people began commissioning custom inlays along the fretboard, including space and science-fiction landscapes, dragons, Japanese cherry blossoms, and anything else you can imagine.
Guitar companies were already creating inlays to place their logos in the headstock, so it's no surprise that we soon began seeing inlays on the body, whether that be the front, back, sides, and around the sound hole. This extended all the way to inlays in the pickguards, bindings, more extravagantly on the side of the neck, in the purfling, and pretty much any where else it could be squeezed in. Of course, as access to guitars and amplifiers became cheaper, so did the methods of customization.
There are entire companies in existence who do nothing but produce high quality inlay stickers so everyone can get involved without having to hire or become a luthier.
To show you a quintessential example of custom inlay work, we've included the Tiger Tribute guitar above, by Phil Gawen. Inlays have gone thru many variations, even before guitars existed! The Renaissance era had many beautiful inlays that were precision crafted by luthiers of the past. Today we covered the modern electric guitar era, but the history of the guitar inlay runs deep into times past. It's a fun adventure if you have the time.
Otherwise, keep learning more about playing guitar! Features Columns. What are Guitar Inlays? The C Major Scale plays out along the E strings on the inlays, with a caveat at the 9th fret… Another reason the frets are so important is they help to define hand positions while playing the instrument. The math is as simple as this: Add 12 frets to your current position and keep shredding! Guitar Inlay Material Inlays are mainly made of a handful of materials: Clay Shells Wood Plastic Gemstones Stickers Luminlay These are the main top-level categories, but the names you'll hear reside within them.
Historic Inlay Types Inlays on the modern guitar find their roots, once again, in the historic companies of Fender and Gibson. Dots The inlaid position markers on a Fender Stratocaster are one of the defining characteristics of the instrument. While not dots, Jason Becker's numeral fret marker stickers show this layout well.
These are only reserved for the finest instruments the company offers. Neoclassical Neoclassical fretboards use no inlays at all.
Above is the inlay-less Parker P Join Our Mailing List. Josh H. Josh has been playing music for over 25 years and teaching students for over 15 years. His love of music, as a touring musician and recording artist, and woodworking drive his involvement in the industry.
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Contact us. Close Menu. Click Here. Home Forums Instruments Guitars in General. JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. Thread starter soulohio Start date Dec 16, Messages 10, How do you accomplish this? Do you need to take the fretboard off or can you do it with the guitars assembles?
Unburst Member. Messages 4, A proper neck rest will secure the neck near the nut and you may want to prop the neck joint up as well. For the second time, measure the existing size of the inlay dots and find the appropriate sized drill bit slightly smaller than the inlay you want to drill out. I prefer to work with a drill press because you can set up the press so that it only goes so far down, without worrying about drilling through the fretboard.
However, you can easily do this part with a hand drill; just go slow, make sure you are lined up before you start drilling and I highly recommend testing this process on a piece of scrap wood first. In the words of many a great craftsman: measure twice, cut once. You may need to clean out the inlay cavities by taking a drill bit that's the exact diameter of the cavity and chase out the inside of the cavity, if you find that cavity containers leftover detritus.
After drilling, you should now have a bunch of empty cavities on the neck where you can place new inlays. The new inlays should sit almost flush with the fretboard but not completely; if there is a bit of a lip, even better. This is OK because you are going to file down the excess. Now if the inlay is too deep in the cavity, you will need to fill the cavity to adjust it. This step may not be necessary for all the inlays but necessary for those in which there are gaps between the inlay and fretboard or if the inlay sinks too far into the neck.
In any case, it's useful to have wood dust around so you can place a little bit below the inlay when you glue it into place, so that the dust acts as a buffer between the fretboard wood and the inlay piece. You may also need to insert the dust around the inlay once it's been glued in, if there was any chipping when you started drilling.
Don't load up on the wood dust, but be sure that it packs in tightly use some type of pokey object like a chopstick to help it sit properly and then glue it with a thin layer of cyanoacrylate CA. You may need to make multiple applications. What you'll need: Various types of CA super glue with whip tips and potentially an accelerator.
Now that you have inserted the dust and each inlay sits in a cavity with a bit of a lip over the cavity, it's time to glue the inlays in.
Take your time and allow the glue to dry thoroughly, using accelerator or even leaving it overnight to make sure the inlays are secure. In this case, I would probably use a medium super glue applied with whip tips. A little goes a long way, so apply sparingly.
What you'll need: various types of small flat files like these StewMac Needle Files. Now the fun part begins. Get your respirator on and file the inlays down so that they lay flush with the fretboard. If you're unlucky and have frets in the neck already, you'll need to be careful not to nick the frets.
Create a solid motion where you are going back and forth until the inlay is almost completely flush, focusing on filing the top of the inlay so that it's even with the board. As the inlay approaches being flush with the neck, you may take off a little bit of the wood of the fretboard—be careful to do that minimally and uniformly, so the fretboard doesn't look uneven.
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