Never a dull(cimer) moment in high-stress world of playing, making and driving harps
Published 5:14 am Thursday, March 4, 2004
By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Carl Payne's life making cherry, walnut and maple harps for customers scattered from Ohio to California and Canada might not seem stressful.
The thousand pounds of pressure exerted, however, is the equivalent of five people the Benton Harbor man's size inside the sound box, pushing out.
One of his friends likes to live on the edge. Meg drives to performances with her harp in her car.
Payne, who supported himself for seven years as a classical guitarist, also demonstrated his dexterity Wednesday evening as the second of The Museum at Southwestern Michigan College's four spring lectures by performing on harp and hammer dulcimer.
The group he plays in, Willow, met at last year's Dogwood Fine Arts Festival at SMC.
Willow will be opening for Sue Richards June 19 at the Box Factory in St. Joseph. Richards will also be performing at Goshen College and doing harp workshops.
Payne learned to make mountain dulcimers with a kit and scraps of wood from his shop floor.
Payne not only makes music, he makes musical instruments he sells for $400 to $2,200 after investing about 100 hours of labor in each.
A "master companion" is designed for travel with its wide-bottomed sound box.
You might say he builds harps one demolished house or old door at a time, since he scrounges wood for sound boards.
Boards from old steps yielded old-growth redwood, quarter-sawn so the wood grain is straight up and down.
Besides harps and hammer dulcimers, he constructs mountain dulcimers, solid poplar roundback harps from a mold and last summer tackled his first electric guitar.
He mostly builds with cherry. "I'm planning on starting soon on some sassafras harps. Sassafras is wonderful wood. It's beautiful and lightweight."
Roundback harps are completed with several layers of veneer, which bends easily. Lashing has given way to a vacuum press -- "basically, an air compressor in reverse. It sucks air out of a contained area. You're taking all the air out of a thick plastic bag."
Roundbacks are more "complicated" to make compared to a squareback harp, where "you can do almost everything on a table saw, which is nice. You rip your pieces through and you're ready to put them together. There's got to be a back brace that runs the entire length of the sound box. It's got to be rounded to the shell to fit, which is all done with hand planes. All my harps I build now I design myself. When I first started, I used blueprints that I purchased. Even in the blueprints they told you to round it as best as you can because it's difficult. And it's not just the shell. The parts that go inside are more difficult, too, because everything's rounded."
Payne, a member of Mary City of David, the Christian communal church in Benton Harbor since 1903, passed around a sound board similar to one concealed in the harp he played.
He dared his audience to guess how much stress the wood a quarter-inch-thick at the base tapering to an eight of an inch could absorb without snapping. The correct answer: 1,000.
Payne said harps come in two types -- the large pedal models which play with orchestras and bear upwards of 3,000 pounds of stress and the smaller lever harps he makes for playing Celtic music.
With a lever harp, he must flip each lever manually. To play in the key of G, for example, "I have to sharpen all my F's. With the pedal harp, you do that with your feet, so your hands are free. You can do more," Payne said.
Payne compared a harp to a triangle. The three sides consist of a neck, a pedestal, or pillar, and the sound box.
A harp's neck holds each string's tuning peg in place. The pedestal, or pillar, serves one purpose -- propping up the neck to counter stress from the strings.
Stress will show up in a harp not made properly by bowing.
Wood grain becomes a consideration. "There's nothing that holds this sound board to the sound box, but glue. There's no screws. It's simply a glue joint, so it's got to be perfect," explained Payne, who sands his glue joints "until it's wood touching wood the entire distance. An instrument glued together properly, if you smashed it on concrete, it should break everyplace but where you glued it."
Sound holes in the rear of the instrument serve two purposes. They let sound escape from the box. "If this was all closed in, the sound would be compressed because it couldn't vibrate as well. But another thing, you have to be able to reach the strings."
Strings are color-coded. Red strings indicate C. Dark strings are F.
Simple is better. Holes are not covered with fabric, like speakers.
Payne said the lumber industry was a big part of his church's income. "We have a tremendous amount of wood stashed away in garages and barns. Up until last year I was getting all my wood from that well-aged wood. I couldn't buy any better, but I've used every bit of it up on my harps and other instruments. I'm having to buy it, but I buy it locally" in Buchanan and has it milled.