TARIO 39 Inch Fretless Classical Guitar Full Size Acoustic Guitar Spruce top Ovangkol back and sides Okoume neck laurel fingerboard

Fantastic guitar for the price. The top is loud, resonant and responsive and the tuners are of good quality. The fretless nature completely changes the playing dynamic. Suddenly, all these eastern sounding scales and tonalities pop out of your playing. Overall, great guitar - very pleased with purchase.

If you’re here you are probably Oud-curious, a proto-classical player, or play jazz. This is a full sized acoustic guitar and the cheapest fretless you can find anywhere, which makes sense because this is bare-bones basic relatively unchanged for thousands of years. The finish is simple, there is no strap button to be found, the truss rod might not actually work, and you have just 3 dots to give you crude visual reference where you are on the fretboard. These give you all that the ancients ever needed and you are given the option to redevelop thousands of years of stringed instrument innovation if you so desire. The mild finish gives the instrument a beautiful resonance and punch as you carry overtones into intervals not normally present in Western scales (with exception to slide guitar and jazz). Strap button is an easy add. Truss rod? Intonation? Both irrelevant because you are not constrained to frets. If you want frets you can tie some on. The 3 dots are adequate to navigate without giving you a “cheat sheet”. Buy a small piezo pickup and as long as you run fx through headphones then there is zero feedback. This instrument is therefore excellent for experimentation, studio, and clean live playing. If you want to play live and bump up the fx then you probably need to stuff it with rags, but you don’t care because it’s so cheap. Heres the best part…… because it’s a quirky imperfect fretless you can use that as an excuse for why you didn’t nail that chord perfectly, and that lends itself to experimentation and having more fun overall.

OK, for $150 it's a nice little guitar. Well built, nice, big sound, and it comes with some nice Savarez high-tension strings. It has that matte finish that always looks to me like they forgot to put the varnish on, but even some top-brand models do that, so no big deal. The tuning machines are astonishingly nice and smooth working for a guitar in this price range. All in all, an nice way to experiment with a fretless guitar, without having to take out a second mortgage to buy one. My one gripe: There are three side position markers on then neck, and they are all in the wrong place. On a fretted guitar the markers go between the frets, because if your finger hits anywhere in that range the string contacts the fret and the note sounds in true pitch. On a -fretless- guitar, however, your fingertip essentially IS the "fret". That means the dots should be located exactly where the fret would be, and not "between" frets. If you play where the dots are on this instrument, you will be a 1/4-tone flat. What they should have done is either moved the dots up a bit to the correct positions, or left the dots off entirely -- misplaced dots are a distraction. I'll be removing the factory dots and installing my own at the correct locations. Other than that, it's a nice little guitar. If you get one, use a black Sharpie to cover up the side dots, and you'll be fine.

I changed the strings and had to adjust the truss rod, lift the nut on the treble side, but it sounds good and plays well. Good value for the price.

It is a very nice guitar for the price. Only complaint is it does not have fret marks. It is more difficult to play than expected. I will use a tuner to find the exact location of certain notes, and mark the spot with a white fine point marker. In general, I am happy with this purchase. It is now my responsibility to play it well.

This is a very good lil guitar. Main cons is that dots are between frets and not where fingers must apply pressure as it is the same for fretless and fretted… this is the only reason for the 4 stars maybe as well with having no pickup and smaller sound hole won’t accommodate most in sound hole ones… at this price tho you can pay between 2 and 10 per show fee so it got paid for itself very very quick :)

This is a nice-sounding and super fun instrument for the price. I've been playing guitar for 20 years and I've dabbled in fretless instruments like the Indian sarod and fretless bass. I got this to approximate the sound of an oud, and it does sound similar (in alternate tuning). The only things some might have an issue with: 1. There's no easy way to attach a strap, no strap button even on the right side. In theory you might be able to nail one on, I'm not handy and I have no idea if that would damage this guitar or not. 2. The fret marker dots are placed where they'd be on a fretted guitar -- in between the two frets, not on the actual fret lines themselves -- so they aren't as helpful for easily fretting in the correct location. You have to imagine where the fret line would be in relation to the fret marker on a fretted guitar. I'm guessing these guitars were manufactured as regular fretted guitars and then they simply skipped adding the frets -- but honestly at this price I really don't care. It's just fun to play around with, sounds great, and I bought an inexpensive external pickup to electrify it and add some reverb. Would recommend

This is an excellent guitar for the price (I paid $159). It would be pretty meh for a $350 guitar, but that's fine; I knew I was buying a cheap guitar and I'm quite happy with the value for money! Sustain is poor, but that seems to be a general issue with fretless guitars, not something specific to this one.