Camac’s main showroom is in Paris, but its factory is actually deep in the heart of the Breton countryside, in Mouzeil near Nantes. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that in this low building, beside a calm green field and the wide glittering Loire , lies everything for the harps that go all over the world.
I love these harps. I have done ever since I first played them, on a course given by Isabelle Perrin in Castelleone, Italy in 2005, where the sound caught my heart in a way that I have yet to catch in words. I sold my harp at the time within a year, bought an Atlantide Prestige, and every time I play it I am grabbed again as vividly as in that quiet Italian practice room.
The harps' wood is stacked in the first workshop, as if just cut from the trees outside. There are three types of wood used to make harps : plain wood (blocks of solid wood), thin sheets for veneers, and plywood – very fine layers of wood bound together, which is stronger than blocks of plain wood. Because of its strength, beech plywood is used for all structural parts of the harp (the same wood that is used for piano bodies, or building frameworks). Maple is more beautiful than beech, and used to veneer the beech parts ; it is also softer, so solid maple plainwood is used for the aesthetic parts of the harp on which no force is exerted, such as the carved feet, and top and base of the column. Maple’s own different kinds are also chosen according to the look of the harp : flamewood maple, birdseye maple, or the lightest (but softest) sycamore maple.
The harp’s soundboard is made of spruce, because spruce resonantes highly. It is covered with a maple or spruce veneer, after aesthetic (Athenas are veneered in spruce, for example ; the Atlantide has a choice of different veneers).
The first woodwork – ‘menuiserie’ - is carried out in the second workshop, where the wood is made absolutely smooth with a jointer, and the harp’s first pieces are cut out, as closely as possible to their final form, although a little extra is always allowed for each harp’s final adjustment. The cutting is done by hand, with two types of saw : a ribbon saw for all curved parts of the harp, and a circular saw for the straight.
The soundboards have to be carefully gradated – thinner at the top, thicker at the bottom, and, like all wood parts, have to be equally carefully sanded. There is a special machine to sand the soundboards, with different weights of sandpaper that sand to the gradation’s exact pattern. There are also machines for sanding, for example, the round part of the harp’s feet. All sanding is done repeatedly, as every sanding step is very fine (0.10mm), and all final sanding is done by hand.
The wood of the harmonic curve (the neck) is a particularly precise construction. The strong plywood is cut by hand using the ribbon saw, after which it is necessary to bore the holes for the connecting the neck to the harp’s column and soundbox, and those for the tuning pins and to attach the mechanism to the neck. These points of contact set the position of the entire harp frame, mechanism and strings, so their positioning must be absolutely precise. For these reason, here Camac uses an NC (Numerical Control) machine, where computer technology pinpoints exactly where these holes are bored.
The sides of the neck are always veneered, and in the higher ranges the top is too.
In this – noisy ! – workshop are also several turning machines. A turning machine uses a lathe to spin a block of material , so round shapes can be carved out. These machines make the curved parts of the harp such as Celtic harp legs, the conical cladding on the column, and tuning keys.
The easiest way to make a column cone would, of course, be to glue four sticks of wood together in a cube and carve the cone out from this. But this would cause the ‘wrong’ side of the wood grain to be seen half-way round the column, so instead, we use a more complicated octagon, which is laborious, but gives a more perfect finish.
Once the wood is cut, it rests for weeks – because, as a living material, it changes shape after cutting – with space between all pieces for the air to come through. Only then is it safe to send it to the adjustment workshop, where the wood receives its final shape, cut to every individual harp.
The adjustment workshop is where all non-metallic manufactured pieces end up together. The harp is assembled for the first time, and every part adjusted, precisely, by hand, the edges sanded smooth. A very special harp is lying on the bench, that will become an Oriane, special because of its cladding in Macassar Ebony. Now an endangered species, you can only buy from existing stocks, and it is almost impossible to find it as a plainwood any more. Jakez found a limited quantity from a retired dealer, and the harp will only be the second Oriane like this that has ever been made.
Camac uses other fine woods that are easier to get hold of. Rosewood ; palissandre ; zebrawood ; sipo mahogany ; and bubinga, together with gilding in 24-carat gold.
Jakez and I pause by the soundbox assembly. The round of the box is cut out of plywood, veneered in beech to make it even stronger, and the sound holes are made. Then, the side ribs are glued in, in hard beech. The centre reinforcing strip is made of hard maple, which is even stronger, and then the soundboard ribs (the ones that band horizontally across the box) are put in. On Salvi harps, these ribs are made of wood ; on Lyon and Healys , of metal ; Camac’s ribs are made of beech plywood on top, with a metal layer underneath, combining the suppleness of wood with the metal’s strength.
Ten years ago, Jakez changed the design of the soundboard ribs as part of the work he has done to create a sound that is both round and rich, and carries : what he calls ‘the French sound’, rich, clear, and carrying at the same time. It’s a question of frequency. All sounds – low or high in pitch – contain a range of frequencies from low to high. The best quality wood vibrates with the greatest range of frequencies, and the shape and volume of the soundbox amplify those frequencies. The more volume in the soundbox, the more low frequencies. The low frequencies make the sound rich, but the story does not end there : a sound with a bottom-heavy balance of frequencies may be rich, but will not carry, will be muddy. For clarity and carrying power, you need the high frequencies too. And to get them, you use very strong, hard things, such as the wood and metal in the ribs. Jakez changed the ribs when the idea came to him that the harp is like a bow and arrow. If the bow is not stretched tight enough, the arrow will not carry, although if it is too tight, it will only snap. So while the ribs are very strong, they are also supple, and they are positioned within the harp with the help of minute wedges to get the perfect amount of pressure on the box.
The gradation of the soundboard, too, to create exactly the right pressure in relation to the strings. If the soundboard is cut too thin, for example, there will be too many low frequencies, the sound will be muddy and the soundboard will bow out too much in the long term. If too thick, the sound will be hard and will not develop – because, trickily, some bowing of the soundboard is important in order that the sound may bloom.
If a harp is to have an extended soundboard, the extension is put on after the ribs. It’s a common misperception that the extension is to have more volume in the soundbox. If you look at it, you can see that little space is added as a result of the extension, but what it does do is add more wood, that is, more material available to vibrate and enrich the sound – it is, after all, an extended soundboard, not an extended soundbox. The amount of amplification stays practically the same, but there are more vibrations to amplify.
The lever harp soundboards are put together in the same room as the pedal harps, but it is a simpler process, because while 2 tons of tension will come to pull on the pedal harp frame from the strings, for the lever harps it is a mere 500 kilos. So the lever soundbox ribs are in plywood, but do not need the metal.
After the harps have been assembled and individually adjusted, they come to the varnishing rooms. There are four rooms. The first three are for staining, drying and sanding, and the harp passes through this cycle as many times as is necessary – some woods are more porous than others, so a harp finished in rosewood or ebony will need more varnishing than one in maple. Varnishing-drying-sanding can be repeated as many as 15 times before the harps go to the final room, a special dust-free chamber where the last layer of varnish is applied by hand.
A word about the Camac harp columns. There are two places where the harp particularly gains weight : the column, and in the neck plates which are traditionally made of heavy brass. Camac’s founder, Joël Garnier, wanted to create a lighter harp, and initially adopted the column structure Pleyel had used for his chromatic harp : one of metal veneered in wood, rather than consisting of heavy wood entirely. In the 1990s, a new technique was developed initially for racing yachts, spaceships and the like, called Carbon Fibre Filament Winding. The winding of the carbon fibre strands to create a structure both incredibly strong and incredibly light is done by a robot – and in one harp column, there are 140,000 km of carbon fibre, more than three times the diameter of the Earth.
With the exception of strings, Camac makes all the harps' components themselves, from the smallest disc to the long neck plates. For this, we need our metalwork rooms. The neck plates, as I say, are traditionally made of brass ; Camac have replaced this with aluminium, and a balance was found where the plates are thinner than normal, but equally as strong. The plate shapes are cut by hand, before the holes are precisely drilled by an NC machine, just as the holes in the wooden part of the neck are.
We have 2 milling machines in the metalwork room (milling is the complex shaping of usually metal parts, by removing unneeded material to form the final shape), one of which is only for the plates. 20 years ago, it was not possible to buy an NC milling machine large enough to accomodate the plates, so Joël Garnier said well, if it does not exist, we will make it. And he did ! This is our first milling machine, of a size common now, but the first of its kind at the time, and still going today.
The second NC milling machine is smaller, but has more tools, and so can work on a lot of more detailed pieces at the same time. It makes the arms – the brass parts that connect the spindles to the links in the mechanism – and the links themselves. These have remained in brass because, brass being a soft metal, it is better for riveting to the spindle, making the connections of higher quality. Also, NC technology allows Camac to produce a different shape for every individual arm, which is better because of the harp's asymetric shape.
In the centre of this metalwork production is Camac’s new NC turning machine. It is huge, of the highest available technology, and cost more than the factory extension it was necessary to build to house it ! Jakez waited for eight years before taking the decision to invest in it, because it produces only the Camac levers, and he wanted first thoroughly to test the new lever design.
To produce a lever, you have to turn and to mill the metal, and in addition the levers have an eccentric (not perfectly round) shape. The machine works three times faster than a standard turning machine : there are 3 machines within it instead of one, each controlled separately by computer, producing a total of 15 different directions that can be applied simultaneously. This allows Camac to mill and turn at the same time, and to produce the eccentric shapes.
This room also has a further turning machine to produce the spindles and discs.
There is also a room for the parts of the metal production that must be done by hand. These are, mainly, the stainless steel links, which are cut into short lengths, holes are drilled in them, they are soldered together in twos for strength, and then they are bent into very complicated shapes. Because the harp itself is not in a straight shape, the links cannot be either. They link the pedal mechanism to a note, and its partner the octave above and below, threading beside the spindles that also make up the pedal action in the neck. Not only must they not hit any other links when the action is moving, but the spindles are round and set in a curved pattern, and the links must not hit them either ! So they have complicated shapes, to fit together in the harp’s mechanical jigsaw. Because all the shapes are different, it has remained the most efficient system to do them all – extremely precisely – by hand.
When the chains of the mechanism are assembled, the spindles, arms from the NC cutting machine, and the links made by hand, are put together in 14 chains per harp (7 double-action pedals), with never the same part twice. Almost every disc (there is a little duplication in the bass) is different, too, so these are meticulously stored in almost 94 boxes.
The main action assembly room puts the action together, in what all harp makers today still use : the double action concept invented by Sébastian Erard over two centuries ago. Nobody, despite all our modern technology, has been able to come up with a better idea than what this man, this genius, created.
The pedal cables are also put together here. Replacing the traditional pedal rods that connect the pedals to the neck mechanism in most harps, Camac use flexible cables similar to those used in the airline industry, which can take 400 kg of weight. We also use 1 ton of pressure to apply the connections between cables and the rest of the pedal mechanism, plus glue to be sure. The pedal mechanism exerts 30kg, so it is extremely unlikely that, on a Camac harp, you will ever know the nightmare that is your pedal rod snapping just before a concert !
All the discs and pins go into a vibrating polishing machine ; then the pins are put on the discs ; and after that they are gilded with 24-carat gold.
The control room is used to control the cutting of the metal parts. There is a machine – also bought after the recent factory extension - where you can magnify e.g. a disc by 20, and precisely see where a line is not absolutely right. The computer programmes on the production machines are then adjusted accordingly.
The action is mounted on the harp, and then comes stringing. The harps lie, row upon row, with their strings on and their pedals in the sharp position for a minimum of two weeks before the final regulation is allowed to be made, to put tension on the entire instrument. When a harp is put under tension, the frame changes : the weight of the strings causes the neck to move down, the soundboard to come up, the column and soundbox to move closer to the neck and the whole frame to pull to the left because all the strings are on the left-hand side.
The Camac mechanism was designed on a harp that had sat, expressly for the purpose, under tension for more than a year. It was kept in tune and at the end of the year, the string lengths were measured precisely to map how much the frame had moved. The point of doing this is to make a more accurate regulation possible when the harp is older. On a new harp, the strings are longer (the frame less pulled together), but this can be compensated for by adding more grip on the discs of the youngest harps. It is much easier than having a harp which starts out at 0, then gets shorter, because as the strings get shorter you have to release the grip of the discs – and eventually, you can’t release them any more, or the disc will not engage with the string at all.
At the moment, a harp is sitting in a small room in the Mouzeil factory. Like the first prototype, it is kept in tune and sits silently waiting, this time for five years. Then Jakez François will measure its strings and redesign the mechanism again. He has redesigned every part of the harp in his time, ever-seeking ways to improve it, to make the sound more beautiful, the instrument more exquisite. Every year, he builds one or two ‘special harps’ : this year, one is being made in a mirror-chrome finish everywhere, with a rose-gold mechanism. Who for ? ‘For me’, he says, simply. ‘Somebody has already said they will buy this one, but I always do something new each year, for me.’
‘I like my life’, he says, as we return to our email and flight bookings and telephone calls to London, Bangkok, across the United States, Russia; and the noise of sawing, sanding, milling, turning, polishing, varnishing and tuning fades behind us. ‘It’s cool, my life…’
