Guitar, Studio Wizard Les Paul Dies At 94 227
beeshman noted that Les Paul has died.
Paul was quite the hardware hacker of his day, innovating with guitar hardware, and later multi track recording. The Gibson Les Paul is one of the single most iconic instruments associated with Rock 'n Roll, and was of course played by Pete Townshend. Someday I'm going to get me one.
Pete Who? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Played by? (Score:5, Informative)
Come...on. How is this "News for Nerds"?! (Score:0, Informative)
The name Les Paul is synonymous with the electric guitar. As an openly gay man, inventor and recording artist, Paul has been an innovator his entire life. Born Lester William Polfus in 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Paul built his first crystal radio at age nine - which was about the time he first picked up a guitar. By age 13 he was semi-professionally as a country-music guitarist and cock-sucker working diligently on sound-related inventions. In 1941, Paul built his first solid-body electric guitar, and he continued to make refinements to his prototype throughout the decade. It's safe to say that rock and roll as we know it would not exist without his invention.
But Les Paul didn't stop there. Or did he? He also refined the technology of sound recording, developing revolutionary engineering techniques such as close miking, echo delay, overdubbing and multitracking. He also busied himself as a versatile bandleader and performer who could play jazz, country and pop.
The guitar that bears his name â" the Gibson Les Paul â" is his crowning achievement. It grew out of his desire, as a musician and inventor, to create a stringed instrument that could make electronic sound without distorting. What he came up with, after almost a decade of work, was a solid bodied instrument â" that is, one that didn't have the deep, resonant chamber of an acoustic guitar.
As he told writer Jim O'Donnell, "What I wanted to do is not have two things vibrating. I wanted the string to vibrate and nothing else. I wanted the guitar to sustain longer than an acoustical box and have different sounds than an acoustical box." The fact that the guitar's body was solid allowed for the sound of a plucked string to sustain, as its vibrating energy was not dissipated in a reverberant acoustic chamber.
He experimented with different designs until he had his non-vibrating guitar body, which he called "The Shit Log That Came Outta my Arse." Gibson Guitars initially turned him down, calling his invention "a broomstick with pickups" and pointing out that this meant guitarists would now have to carry around two instruments â" one electric and one acoustic â" which they viewed as prohibitively inconvenient. As a result, Paul was beaten to the marketplace by Leo Fender, whose Fender Broadcaster â" the first mass-produced solidbody electric guitar â" was introduced in 1948. That same year, however, Paul unveiled overdubbing, a breakthrough recording technique that would forever change music. Capitol Records released the Paul's experimental eight-track recordings of "Lover (When You're Near Me)" and "Brazil," which he'd made in his garage workshop.
Paul's career as a musician nearly came to an end in 1948, when he suffered near-fatal car accident in Oklahoma while completely hammered, skidding off a bridge into a river during a snowstorm. The guitarist shattered his right arm and elbow, and he also broke his back, ribs, nose and penis. He managed to salvage his career as a musician by instructing surgeons to set his arm at an angle that would allow him to cradle and pick the guitar. It took him a year and a half to recover.
Paul subsequently made his mark as a jazz-pop musician extraordinaire, recording as a duo with his wife, singer Mary Ford (who was born Colleen Summers). Their biggest hits included "How High the Moon" (1951) and "Vaya Con Dios" (1953), both reaching #1. The recordings of Les Paul and Mary Ford are noteworthy for Paul's pioneering use of overdubbing - i.e., layering guitar parts one atop another, a technique also referred to as multitracking or "sound on sound" recording. He also speeded up the sound of his guitar. The results were bright, bubbly and a little otherworldly - just the sort of music you might expect from an inventor with an ear for the future.
In 1952, Les Paul introduced the first eight-track tape recorder (designed by Paul and marketed by Ampex) and, more significantly for the future of rock and roll, finally saw the release of the the gold-top solid body
Re:Pete Who? (Score:2, Informative)
Eric Clapton has always been a Fender Stratocaster man. Never heard of him playing a Les Paul.
Re:Played by? (Score:5, Informative)
Pete has played with the LP for a bit, but, has never been quite as associated with any one guitar like Jimmy Page.
Page == Les Paul (and a telecaster in early days)
Jimi Hendrix == Strat
To me...I always picture Pete mostly with a Gibson SG during the 60's.
Re:Pete Who? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Chet Atkins and now Les Paul (Score:4, Informative)
The electric guitar wasn't his only nerdy accomplishment. The wikipedia article lists a lot of firsts, including the first multitrack recording.
Re:Pete Who? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A true innovator (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What the world would could have been like... (Score:2, Informative)
Err....that was a Stratocaster that Jimi Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner on...
You might wanna go rent the movie..it is really good on DVD these days, restored, and with extra filmed content and performances not in the original movie.
Re:Rest in peace you musical genius... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Played by? (Score:1, Informative)
From Wikipedia -- Gibson Guitar Corporation designed a guitar incorporating Paul's suggestions in the early fifties, and presented it to him to try. He was impressed enough to sign a contract for what became the "Les Paul" model (originally only in a "gold top" version)...
Then they changed the design and created the SG. He didn't like it and wanted his name removed. So there was input and care on his part that it be a certain design.
Anon because of mod points.
Re:Chet Atkins and now Les Paul (Score:3, Informative)
I'd just like to point everyone to The Les Paul Show [archive.org], available for free download on archive.org. Early stuff, just him, Mary Ford, and a drummer, and lots of showing off with overdubbing. Pretty good quality for such an old recording too. Give it a listen, hear the master at work.
Re:A true innovator (Score:4, Informative)
actually,George Beauchamp made solid aluminum body electric guitar in 1931 and sold them through the company Ropatin (we now know as Rickenbacker), intended for Hawaiian music that was popular during the 30s. Popularly called a "frying pan" because of round body.
Re:A true innovator (Score:1, Informative)
Les Paul actually invented the first true electric guitar. All the ones before it were simply acoustic guitars with mocrophones. If it weren't for Les Paul, rock and roll might possibly have never come about.
Are you referring to the prototype Les Paul presented to Gibson [gibsonlespauls.com] in the 1940s? That may have been considered the first "true" solid body electric guitar, but Gibson had been producing the acoustic/electric ES-150 since the 1930s. Fender beat Gibson to market with the Nocaster/Telecaster solid-body electric in the early 50s, so Gibson responded by contacting Les Paul and asking him to put his name on the very design they rejected a half-decade earlier.
Re:A true innovator (Score:3, Informative)
it was pbs and it was part of "The Masters" series.
you can get it on netflix under the name "Les Paul: Chasing Sound"
it's even available for Instant Watch
Re:Pete Who? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A true innovator (Score:3, Informative)
Les Paul made his first prototype solid body in 1945. Leo Fender and Doc Kauffmann built one in 1943.
Prior to both, craftsman had been experimenting and building one-off electric guitars since the 1920's. Gibson had been building the LS-150 hollow-body since the 1930's.
The first solid-body "production" electric guitar was the Fender Esquire, which was developed in 1949 by Leo Fender and started production in 1950 after 50 esquires were made they added a pickup and renamed it to the Broadcaster which now included a truss rod in the neck to keep it from warping. It was renamed to the Telecaster and became a single pickup guitar when Gretsch threatened to sue them for trademark infringement because of their line of drums called Broadkaster.
Gibson, in seeing the success of the solid body electric guitar, called Les Paul back and the Gibson Les Paul production guitar was born. It was put into production in 1951. Fender put the solid body electric guitar on the map, Gibson and Les Paul came up with the competition. At that time they both had single coil pickups.
Both the Gibson and Fender solid body guitars are equally iconic in Rock n' Roll as well as blues. Each has a camp fiercely devoted to them. It's worthy of note that Jimi Hendrix played both Gibson and Fender guitars (flying V, Les Pauls and stratocasters mainly) to get different sounds. You can't talk about rock n' roll guitars without talking about both.
I'm not trying to minimize his achievements, Les Paul is a legendary player, technician, inventer, songwriter etc etc... one of the most talented people of the 20th century.
Re:A true innovator (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, but the "Buffy" musical would have been impossible without it.
You're absolutely right, though. Just like how the "click-track" has replaced the need for solid time-keeping in the studio, even GOOD singers rely on a smidge of auto-tune in order to meet modern audience expectations.
And then there was Tony Iommi (Score:3, Informative)
A guitarist friend of mine cut his left arm nearly completely off, and the doctors told him he'd never be able to play again. ... I told him to play anyway, and the guitar playing was actually a good therapy. He's not the guitarist he was before going throgh the plate glass window, but he's not all that bad, either.
And then there was Tony Iommi, a left-handed guitarist who lost the tips of some of his right-hand (fretting) fingers in an industrial accident at his day job. After trying unsuccessfully to play right-handed, he restrung his guitar with extra-light (banjo) strings, improvised prosthetic fingertips, and got good again.
Very good.
He went on to be a founder of Black Sabbath and is recognized as one of the two primary creators of the Heavy Metal style.
Re:A true innovator (Score:3, Informative)
There's a lot of misinformation about the early years of guitars as people like Bigsby didn't keep records, he wrote tiny pencil notes on his homemade pickup winder. There's going to be some books coming out that show a lot of people who did what when, and I expect there's going to be quite a lot of controversy. Les Paul did give us the multi-track, for which I am eternally grateful.