An extended five-string violin with frets (discussed in chapter 6), produces a “quantized” glissando, in which the slide is broken into discrete half steps (fig. 2.53). This is the kind of glissando produced by a guitar.
FIGURE 2.53. Quantized glissando.Strange, Patricia. The Contemporary Violin (The New Instrumentation Series) . Scarecrow Press. Kindle Edition.
Well, yeah, of course. With all those frets there is no possible way of doing a glissando on guitar without hearing all the semitones. Right? The only thing is, way back when I was a young guitarist I heard a Segovia recording where he did a glissando from a fairly high note on the second string to a fairly low note on the same string and it was perfectly smooth. No discrete steps. It was so expressive and impressive that I set out to learn how to do it. Turns out that if you have exactly the right amount of finger pressure, it works. Too much pressure and you hear the "steps," too little pressure and you lose the note. The next step was to figure out how to do it on the wound strings without the whisking effect like wearing corduroy pants. The trick there is to turn your finger so you are sliding on a part that is away from the callus. Then, with exactly the right amount of pressure, you can do a smooth glissando even on the bass strings. There are lots of examples in my piece Dark Dream starting from around the one minute mark:
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