I'm on my second Larrivee. The first one cracked (even though I had a 'Dampit' in place regularaly). I phoned Larrivee and talked to Jean Larrivee and he said that I should get the guitar lots of humidity until the cracked closed in and that I was with putting the guitar in the bathroom with the shower going to really get the proccess started. By the way, I was living in Saskatoon where the weather is 20 below most of the winter with two or three weeks at a time in Feb and Jan being 30 or 40 below. Well I got the crack closed and then the next bar I had to go play in was another dry place so by the time the gig was over it just opened up again and this went on for the whole winter until the top of the guitar started to go all wavy.

So Now I has an arch/ripple top Larrivee (to my knowledge they have never made arch tops) so the next fall my wife and I were planning a trip to California and where going to go down the coast from Vancover to LA so when we were in Van I stopped at Larrivee's new shop in Van (this was in the nov of '85) He said the guitar was wreck'd.

So, now I'm on my second Larrivee and it is a 'D' style and I just let the front of it crack where the sound board join (Larrivee's suggestion) and it closes up in the summer and then opens again in the winter. My point is that ... it's really hard to keep a guitar like that humid enough in a northern climate if you plan on playing it. All my guitars are working instruments (for work) and they have to be able to climatize to the sitruation that i'm working in. I can't leave guitars in their cases all the time. They have to be where I can get at them. It's too bad but most of the instruments have to go throug some ruff treatment. They go from a truck where it's thirty below to a country dance hall where it's hot and dry and have to climatize in a matter of minutes.

So far the only real trouble I've had was my Larrivee. I have a few fiddles (chek fiddle about 100years old) a mando and a banjo and a couple of solid body electrics that all go with me to every gig and they seem to be surviving.

Too bad the larrivee cracked.

It is not that the humidity or lack of humidity has to do with hurting the instrument. It has to do with the day that the instrument was glued up. If you take a Larrivee that was glued up on a wet Vancover day and stick it in Saskatchewan pubs for the winter then it is going to dry out thus shrinking the wood and probably crack. Although if you take a Saskatchewan built guitar, one that was built in a heated shop in the middle of January, one in which there is no humidifier it will not crack in any of the driest places on the planet. But, you get just as big a problem with the reverse situation happening when you take the Saskatchewan guitar and stick it in Vancover on a rainy day. The wood starts to expand and it may warp.

For Saskatchewan built guitars check out Timeless Instruments.

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