As a new Stick player coming from bass guitar, I find that I miss the fretboard markers I'm used to... so I added some to my Railboard today. Since I've got my instrument tuned to Matched Reciprocal, this will give me some familiar guideposts to help with finger placement and note acquisition.

Training wheels, yes, but for now I want to make the learning curve a bit less steep.

The only thing I don't love about the Railboard is that the frets are the same color as the fingerboard, which makes them hard to see sometimes. Also, the original owner of my instrument opted for silver sparkle inlays, which are kind of dark.

Since I'm still a beginner, I'm relying a lot on my eyes because muscle memory regarding hand position isn't quite there yet... so some added visual reference points ought to help.

My bass doesn't have a marker at fret 2, of course, but the others are all the same as on my guitar: frets 3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 15 and 17. I don't think they'd do much good above that.

Materials are some Brother pTouch 9mm plastic label tape that I had on hand, which I used to cover the inlays and make them more visible. The lines are 3mm plastic violin fingerboard tape.

Seems like a good idea to me, and positively restrained compared to what I added to my first Stick! https://www.stickist.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=16141 That Ironwood has now gone to a new home (with its stickers).

My graphite 10 now has individual position markers, but does still have sticker based linear inlays to supplement it's original 'dots'.

My bamboo 12 PASV4 does have position markers (some are birds & some are feathers), but a simpler arrangement (not "all the C's"); I find I hardly notice them anymore when playing, but I rather like the decorative effect so they remain for the present.

I hope to finally see my "ordered September 2021" bamboo 12 with Stickups in the not too distant future. I've not yet decided if it will get 'decorated' or not?

Looks pretty slick.

I only just noticed your sig line.

Nice.

and all the more reason to adapt the Stick to suit your own needs.

A follow-up...

The tape markers are helping to keep me oriented, though I'm going to have to re-apply more carefully... they're not, er, sticking as well as they should.

I'm still finding the near-invisibility of the Railboard's frets to be a slight impediment to learning, so yesterday I decided to try an experiment with a silver Sharpie: make the frets stand out like they would if it were a wooden instrument.

Before doing something I might regret later, I looked into how to remove metallic Sharpie ink. Turns out that if you draw over it with a dry-erase marker, it wipes right off with zero residue. I verified this... twice... on a hidden part of the instrument. It works perfectly.

I used a small steel ruler to protect the surface of the board and simply colored in the upper slope of each fret. It was reasonably easy to do this with the strings on, just moving them out of the way. Strings off, it'd be a snap and the result would probably be a bit more even.

I'll give it a try with just a few frets filled in and see how it goes before making the effort to do the whole thing. If it doesn't work out, I can always just wipe it off.

I'm sure that eventually these aids will fall by the wayside, but as I learn I appreciate all the help I can get!

Thanks for the update & images.

As a total aside that first image is a super one for illustrating the extra milling
done to the frets under the thickest strings on a Railboard.

I decided to try 4ths on both side of my SG12 so I took a hole punch and punched out dots from a material you use for putting stripes on model airplanes. The material is sticky on one side and comes in lots of colours. I just put a dot on every C it looks cool and takes the guess work out of finding notes. My other stock of regular classic tuning so I needed to do dots to try and not get confused. Using the SG12 for reading and playing piano music mostly.

Looks great!

My dark brown Wenge SG-12 turned out to be problematic at concerts where lightning is low. So I bought white paint and filled over the inlays to make them stand out. I also added dots on one side so that you would not have to bend your neck over the fretboard to navigate visually. It wasn't smart to order it with those dark turquoise inlays. For the Railboard I ordered 2.5 years ago I went with black and white glowing inlays, not the most beautiful but practical when playing out. (BTW, I hope that RB will be ready soon... I guess there is delivery issues with some parts.)

@adouglas, I'm in the same boat - bass player who just acquired a Deep Red Railboard, recessed inlays that are the same color as the Railboard. To cover the inlays with the label tape, did you take the strings off, or were you able to get the tape on with the strings on?

I'd like to try that trick, but am still intimidated by the different-ness of the Stick and want to mess with it as little as possible.

The scale is so long and the string tension so low that it's easy to move the strings enough to get your fingers in there even when tuned to pitch. De-tuned, it's even easier.

I really need to re-do the violin tape, or come up with different markers for the places where I want additional reference. I've learned that you can get sets of guitar fretboard inlay markers from Amazon in all kinds of shapes. I might give those a try just for fun... they're cheap and can be removed. It's all about making the thing easier for me to use.

Don't be intimidated by it, especially if you're comfortable tweaking your bass and have the basic knowledge of what the various adjustments do. Because the Railboard is not made of wood, it's darned near bulletproof. I've made every conceivable adjustment on mine... I changed tuning and string gauges, so I've done a full setup and it's great.

I've been surprised at how robust the strings are, even the thin ones. When I decided to do the final setup step (intonation), I had to de-tune and move strings off of the bridge saddle screws repeatedly. I fully expected to break one, but it didn't happen.