[DAVID SCHWARTZ PERFORMING WITH THE GODIN MULTIAC NYLON FRETLESS SA AND THE BOSS ME-50]

DAVID SCHWARTZ: Hi. Welcome to Gearwire. This is David Schwartz, and this is the Godin Multiac Nylon Fretless SA guitar, and I'm running that into this Boss ME-50 and then going into this Roland Micro-CUBE.

The Godin guitar here, it's a chambered-body guitar. It's got a spruce top to it and mahogany back and sides. And also, another interesting feature about this guitar other than this fretless neck is it's got a 13-pin synth access on the back so you can use it any Roland or Fantom systems and you can use it as a MIDI controller or just control any softsynths or synth modules. The fingerboard is ebony, which gives it a really nice solid base for the strings to vibrate on. You know, usually with fretless guitars, you need a harder surface to play against so you get the maximum amount of sustain and resonance. And also, the handy feature on this guitar, something that I would probably die if I didn't have was this nice little inlay on the side here which tells you where the frets theoretically should be, although they usually aren’t there where you think they should be.

The Godin guitar here features a three-band EQ for low, mids, and highs, and then for the synth pickup, it has two controls here for changing your patches up and down, and then it's got the regular master volume's knob, and then it also has a synth volume so if you wanted to blend the two guitars, you know, if you keep them at an equal -- or I'm sorry -- blend the synth and the regular guitar sound, you can keep them equal or if you want to play with just the synth, you can turn the guitar's volume all the way down, just raise the synth pickup up, or vice versa. So, it provides some unique opportunities for blending different sounds and getting some different tones which, you know, are going to be kind for out there and stuff so it's fun for that. And then it also features a switch right here which you can use as a mid boost, so if you're having trouble cutting through the band or your backing track or whatever you're playing with, you can just engage the switch and it'll boost the mid frequencies a little bit for you.

And again, I have it running through an ME-50 and I just kind of a basic delay and, you know, just a nice ambient tone, and you know one of the great things about this guitar is that you can basically play in any sort of tuning that you want on the fly. You can alter the tuning of the guitar just by shifting your fingers over slightly.

Within the span of one fret or where one fret should be, you can play probably three to four different notes. So, let's say I play on the third fret where G usually is, and since there's no fret to lock the note into place, I can get a whole different assortment of tones just between just one span where a fret should be so, you know, I can start here [PLAYS A NOTE] and then slowly move up [PLAYS AND SHIFTS THE NOTE UP], and you know sometimes those changes are a little bit imperceptible but they're definitely there and when you're playing with a backing track or with a band, it definitely makes the difference.