By Wes Frisii

 

It sat in a glass case, a ghost of a sound waiting to be freed. The Weymann Model A -Prototype—an unreleased electric guitar, rescued from some forgotten Philadelphia storeroom. It had a chunky neck, a flat fingerboard, and a body of African Anigre and Crystal Mahogany. To a collector, it was a museum piece; to me, a guitarist obsessed with oddities & one offs, it was a unicorn, a ghost.

 

I’d inherited it from my uncle, a luthier who had spent the last years of his life tracking down the obscure and the forgotten. He had believed that every instrument had a story, and the best ones had stories that weren’t finished yet. With the Weymann, he'd gladly show it off to friends, but always refused to play it, calling it "a promise, not a memory."  

 

So there I sat.  Do I play it, or case it?  Before I finished the thought, I had already plugged into my old Fender Twin.  Power on.  The pleasure was building, like a kid waiting for Santa on the 24th of December.  I strummed an open chord. The sound was not what I expected.  It was not bright like a Strat, nor was it muddy like a LP.  It was something else, something with a voice of its own.  It was a raw, almost acoustic sound, but with an electric edge, as if a ghostly parlor guitar had been given a new, semi-humbucking heart. The Crystal Mahogany hummed against my chest, a deep vibration that made the notes feel less like vibrations of wood and steel and more like echoes of something far older.

 

My fingers, used to more modern, rounded necks, felt clumsy on the prototype’s flat fingerboard. But as I played, the instrument seemed to teach me its language. A blues riff that sounded dull on my usual guitar was suddenly alive with a unique, brittle attack. The high notes rang out with a bell-like clarity, but with a sustain that lingered and bloomed, a quality Niko de Weymann, the company's luthier & director, had once attributed to the crystalline wood. The low E-string had a warm, almost woody heft that gave the simple progression a deep, haunting resonance.

 

I spent hours with it, trying different riffs and melodies. I was no longer playing a guitar; I was having a conversation. The Weymann pushed back, its voice demanding a certain kind of honesty. It didn’t hide mistakes; it revealed them, but in a way that taught you how to play better. It forced me to listen, to feel the vibrations, to understand that the instrument was more than just a tool. It was a vessel for the story of its own creation—a forgotten dream from a forgotten era.

 

I thought of my uncle and his unfinished stories. He had seen the potential in this strange, beautiful instrument, the way it straddled two different musical worlds. I realized that the true joy of playing the Weymann Model A prototype wasn’t in mastering it, but in the act of discovery. Every note was an excavation, a chance to hear a sound that had been silenced for decades, a chance to finish a conversation that had never truly begun. I picked out a simple melody, and as the music filled the room, the prototype felt less like a ghost and more like a living, breathing part of my own story.