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Jean talked to me
from his home last night and after thanking him profusely for making these
special guitars for us, we talked shop for a while. He has graciously
agreed to allow me to print a short excerpt from our conversation.
So Jean, are you still flying all over
the place hunting down tonewoods for your instruments?
Even now I just got back from Europe.
I just hand selected 2000 tops, unbelievable quality spruce tops.
Is that the Italian spruce that I've been hearing
rumors about?
Yes. I’ve already got around 1000 tops
that have been seasoned in the shop right now. I'm really impressed
with this wood. It has all of the properties I need to get the response
I’m looking for.
I remember that we used a lot of European spruce
back in the '70s.
This is much better wood than that though.
I switched to Sitka in the ‘70s because I was able to get much much better
quality and it made better guitars. Now if I am patient and go through
enough wood, I am once again able to get some European spruce
that is the quality I need. In order for me to pick 1000 guitar tops
though, I have to go through six or seven thousand and reject the
rest.
Are you still active on in the shop when you're
not traveling around the world searching for wood?
Of course! I still carve necks. I do
all the Bluegrass necks on the 50 & 60 series guitars and all the joining
of tops. I glue them up in California and then drive them up to Vancouver
where we have our big planning machine. I do all of the
grading of woods as well. I go through every top, back, side
and neck and grade it as a 03, 05, 09, or 10.
By "planing", do you mean abrasive planer,
like a thickness sander?
No. I’ve got a large thickness sander
but that’s a very antiquated way of thicknessing wood. We have a
rotorless planer with a 3 foot flywheel, weighs about 4000 pounds
with cutters. It doesn’t chip away like a regular planer, it’s
rotary.
Like a flying saucer motion?
Yeah. Get Johnny to send you a photo
of it.
I've never heard of anything like that!
It’s definitely not a toy. I can plane
around 4000 guitar tops in around 2 or 3 hours with that thing. It’s
an amazing machine. Rosewood, ebony, you name it … it just eats it
up like you wouldn’t believe.
It'll even handle flamed maple?
Flamed maple, quilted maple, it
doesn’t matter. It doesn’t chip out at all.
Just to change the subject for a second,
it seems to me that Larrivee Guitars today are even better made than back
when I worked with you in the seventies. Not only that, but
they seem to improve in small ways every year. Some companies feel
the pressure to come out with new models every year just to sell guitars
but you take your proven guitar designs and keep pushing the bar higher
& higher with regards to tone, playability, wood quality
and general fit & finish.
I’m always experimenting with new ways of building
better guitars. I went to this UV finish that makes the guitars sound
better and doesn’t sink into the pores over time like the old nitro did.
It’s like everything else, I don’t stop. Just because the guitars
are good doesn’t mean that I don’t want them even better. I keep going.
And you know, all of us … we keep our eyes open … Matthew,
me, Johnny … this is part of the family business. We’re all
looking for new & better ways to make Larrivee guitars even better.
| I would like to personally thank Jean, Wendy, Matthew,
John Jr.and Ricky Thompson for making this new 2008 Limited Edition OM-03R
series for our store! |
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