"The neck is hollow all the way up from the body, this is all hollow... all the way up and down the back and the top. It's fretless : you can't play like this at all (holds it up like playing a standard guitar)... there's no frets, just markers. It's only a lap slide guitar. And you can't play bottleneck slide on this guitar because it's too bulky. You can't get around and you can't get up to the important 12th fret... 'cause you gotta reach, it's really uncomfortable."


To resolve this problem, Hermann Weissenborn designed the Weissenborn style Kona.

Weissenborn Style Kona

Ben Harper : "The Kona's probably about 5-10 years earlier than traditional Weissenborn. He built Kona with a hollow neck halfway and halfway with a standard neck. So if you wanted to, you could lower the nut. You could lower that down and you could play regular guitar with chords 'cause it has frets. You could chord it up the neck and still have somewhat of a hollow neck sound. Now since it's not all the way hollow he deepened the body. As you can see this one's much deeper than the traditional Weissenborn, to sorta make up for the resonance loss from the half-hollow neck. And it's quite a different sound, so Weissenborn made some different models and he experimented a lot. His bridge is longer and wider. He had this bridge probably from the start. So this bridge dates this particular guitar. It has a different finish as well, you can see traditional Weissenborn's quite shiny, this one's quite dull, it's called a satin gloss."

Weissenborn Style Teardrop

Ben Harper : "This one's a teardrop shaped Weissenborn, or a pear-shaped Weissenborn with a hollow neck. There are very few of these. Very few, I know of 3, including this one here."

Dimensions: total length: 95,5 cm (37,6") - scale length: 63 cm (24,8") - maximal width: 39,2 cm (15,4") - depth: from 3,5 to 8 cm (1,37" to 3,14").

In 2003, luthier Bill Asher started to build accurate reproductions of rare Weissenborn Teardrop model | read more

Canopus

Ben Harper : "This one is not a Weissenborn but it's a copy. This one is new. This is called a "Canopus". And there are few makers, quite a few makers now that are remaking the Weissenborn and this is one of them. None of the new ones really sound like the originals though. This one sounds really good, this is a good sounding one. But this wood... since the guitars were built in the 19teens-1920's the wood is probably 100 years older than the date it was built. 50-100 years. The older the wood I've found the better the sounding instrument. The older the wood the better the sound from the instrument."

Canopus steel guitars are made in Japan by luthier Yas Kamiya. Yas worked at the Sho-Bud factory in Nashville in '70s, then came back to Japan and started making his own steel guitars (both electric and acoustic). The Canopus acoustic Hawaiian guitars are made from several kind of materials (mahogany, maple, bubinga). There are Weissenborn style hollow necks or Kona style solid round necks with 6 or 7 strings. His guitars are played by David Lindley and Ben Harper among others. — source : www.well.com/user/wellvis

Luthier | Yasu Kamiya