(Fr. touche, ton; Ger. Bund, Tonbund, Griff, Band; It. tasto).
A strip of gut, bone, ivory, wood or metal, placed across the fingerboard of certain bowed and plucked instruments. The sound of a plucked string stopped by the finger against a fingerboard without frets is unsatisfactory: the flesh of the fingertip does not make a sufficiently sharp cut-off point on the vibrating string, which is consequently partly damped and sounds with less of an ‘edge’ to the musical tone. The hard ridge of the fret, against which the finger presses the string, forms a small nut and restores something of the ‘open string’ quality to the sound. The presence of frets also aids the intonation of chordal playing.
In the 16th and 17th centuries instruments with gut strings such as the lute and the viol were most often fitted with movable gut frets, tied round the neck and fingerboard and fastened with a special knot – either as a single fret (one thickness of gut) or a double fret (two thicknesses side by side), as shown in fig.1. Double frets keep tight more easily and are very satisfactory on bowed instruments such as viols. On lutes and guitars, however, where the strings should lie very close to the fingerboard, the initial impetus at the moment of plucking can give a less satisfactory tone with double frets. The string, sharply pressed down on the strand of gut nearest the fingertip, buzzes slightly against the other strand. Mace (1676) mentioned both single and double frets, saying that the latter were ‘after the old fashion’. Many modern makers and players use frets all of one thickness, but a useful pointer to early practice is given in John Dowland’s ‘Necessarie Observations’ in Varietie of Lute-lessons (1610/R), edited by his son Robert:
… let the two first frets nearest the head of the Instrument (being the greatest) be of the size of your Countertenor, then the third and fourth frets must be of the size of your great Meanes: the fift and sixt frets of the size of your small Meanes: and all the rest sized with Trebles. These rules serve also for Viols, or any other kinde of Instrument whereon frets are tyed
Such a grading in fret thickness, from the equivalent of the fourth string (Countertenor) to the first (Treble), has important implications for the height of the action on these instruments.
On lutes and guitars, frets beyond the fingerboard were generally made of wood, glued to the soundboard. Instruments with metal strings, such as the cittern and bandora, usually had fixed metal frets, made from thin strips of sheet brass, held in tapering slots by thin wedges of hardwood. Bone or ivory was sometimes used, and modern instruments such as the guitar and mandolin have frets of specially extruded wire let into slots cut in the fingerboard.
On Western instruments frets are usually placed at intervals of a semitone (though on the cittern some semitone frets were omitted (for further discussion see Cittern). The fixed frets of modern instruments are usually arranged for an approximation of equal temperament, to give an octave of 12 equal semitones. Perhaps the commonest such approximation is the ‘rule of 18’, where each fret is at 1/18 ; of the distance from the previous fret to the far end of the string. Some early 16th-century composers for the lute or vihuela may have preferred an instrument in some form of mean-tone temperament. In any case the use of adjustable gut frets on Renaissance and Baroque instruments enabled the player to accommodate particular compositions or prevent unwanted irregularities of intonation owing to variations in the density of the gut strings (see Temperaments, §8).
On certain Asian instruments, for instance the Indian sitār, the frets are several centimetres high (fig.2), so inflections in intonation can be obtained by pulling the string along them (see also Sitār, §3). The frets of the sitār are movable: e.g. the first fret may be positioned either a whole tone or a semitone above the open string (the tonic drone), resulting in two different scale patterns.
Although frets appeared on some Asian and Middle Eastern plucked instruments as early as about 2000 bce, they do not seem to have been known in Europe before the Middle Ages. By the 14th century, however, both bowed and plucked instruments were frequently fretted. One of the miniatures in Alfonso el Sabio’s Cantigas de Santa Maria depicts two rebecs, one with frets and the other without (see Rebec, fig.3). In the 16th century frets became characteristic of the viol family. They have also occasionally been used on the violin to help the beginner play in tune. Playford wrote: ‘It is the best and easiest way for a Beginner who has a bad Ear, for by it he has a certain rule to direct and guide him to stop all his Notes in exact tune’. The most important function of frets, however, was the special tonal quality that they provided.
A clavichord in which more than one tangent strikes a given pair of strings, producing different notes according to the distance from the bridge, is called ‘fretted’ (Ger. gebunden), since the tangent positions are determined in the same way as the fret spacing on a fingerboard.
J. Playford: An Introduction to the Skill of Musick (London, 1654) [many later edns]
T. Mace: Musick’s Monument (London, 1676/R)
H.G. Farmer: Studies in Oriental Musical Instruments, i (London, 1931/R), 45ff
A. Baines: ‘Fifteenth-Century Instruments in Tinctoris’s De inventione et usu musicae’, GSJ, iii (1950), 19–26
M. Remnant: ‘The Use of Frets on Rebecs and Mediaeval Fiddles’, GSJ, xxi (1968), 146–5
L.P. Grijp: ‘Fret Patterns of the Cittern’, GSJ, xxxiv (1981), 62–97
P.S. Forrester: ‘Citterns and their Fingerboard’, LSJ, xxiii (1983), 15–20
IAN HARWOOD