The fretless baritone.
Bacci GuitarsPescia, Tuscany
Two of the most expressive ideas in guitar rarely meet. A fretless neck lets a note slide and sing like a voice or a bowed string, with no metal to stop the pitch. A baritone drops the whole instrument into a deep register. Put them together and you get one of the rarest voices a guitarist can own: a fretless baritone.
It is rare for a reason. A fretless demands intonation from the hands, and a baritone's long scale and low strings make that even more exacting. Build the two together and tolerances get very small, which is exactly the kind of problem a one-at-a-time workshop is built to solve.
The appeal is immediate the moment you hear it. On a fretless, notes glide between pitches, vibrato widens into something vocal, and chords breathe because nothing clamps them to a fret. Drop that into a baritone register and the slides happen down where a cello or a fretless bass lives.
It is a sound for players who think in phrases rather than positions, who want the instrument to inflect a note the way a singer would. In jazz, in world music and in cinematic writing, a fretless baritone says things a fretted guitar simply cannot.
A fretless baritone is a one-at-a-time instrument. Bruno builds each Bacci around the player it is for.
Fretless playing has long been the domain of specialists, and in the Bacci world that spirit runs through players like Cenk Erdoğan, a pioneer of the fretless guitar who carries ideas from Turkish instruments onto frets that are not there. It is the perfect illustration of why a fretless is less a gadget than a lifelong voice.
A fretless baritone is not a first guitar. It is the instrument you reach for once you know exactly what you want to say in the low register and you want nothing between your hands and the pitch.
Because intonation lives in the player's fingers, a fretless baritone has to be built around them: the scale, the fingerboard radius and material, the string choice and the setup all decided together. That is only possible one instrument at a time.
At Bacci, that is the normal way of working. Bruno designs, builds, voices and sets up each instrument himself in Pescia, so a fretless baritone is not an off-menu special, it is simply another build shaped around the sound and the hands it is for.
It is a baritone guitar, with a longer scale and lower tuning, built with a fretless neck. The player sets each pitch with the hand, so notes can slide and sing in a deep register with nothing stopping them at a fret.
Because they combine two demanding ideas: fretless intonation, which lives entirely in the hands, and a baritone's long scale and low strings, which make precise intonation harder. Building both together takes a maker working one instrument at a time.
A singing, sliding, vocal voice in a deep register, somewhere between a fretless bass and a cello, with wide vibrato and smooth glides between notes that a fretted guitar cannot produce.
It asks more of the hands than a fretted instrument, because you place each pitch yourself. Players who already think in phrasing and slides take to it; it rewards intention and listening.
Yes. Every Bacci is handmade to order, so the neck, scale, strings and setup can be built fretless around the player. It is commissioned directly with Bruno.
A fretless baritone joins a sliding, singing neck with a deep register. Handbuilt to order in Tuscany, around the player it is for.
Every Bacci is designed, built and set up by Bruno, one at a time, in Pescia.