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Artist / Heroes,

Les Paul, RIP

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Posted by: Source Audio | Posted in: Artist / Heroes,

The guitar world and the music world in general today lost a great pioneer, Les Paul.

Les Paul was a true innovator - both in the fields of electric guitar, and multi-track recording.

Give a big "Thank you, Les" today, as he really paved the way for all of us.

Here's what the Los Angeles Times had to say:

Paul died of complications from pneumonia at White Plains Hospital in New York state, said a spokesperson for the Gibson Guitar Co. He had been in failing health for some time.

Paul was popularly known for a series of hit songs recorded in the 1950s with his wife, singer Mary Ford, including "How High the Moon" and "Vaya Con Dios."

One of the finest pickers on the American music scene, Paul was often cited as a major influence on other guitarists, including Chet Atkins, who called him "one of my idols."

But for many other music fans, it was Paul's innovations that will ensure his legacy. They include an early electric guitar as well as new ways to create multiple tracks and echo effects for recordings, which he used in his recordings with Ford and which were later were broadly adopted by other musicians.

"When most people think of the electric guitar, they think of Les Paul," said Dan Del Fiorentino, historian for the National Assn. of Music Merchants, a trade group for the music-products industry. "He wasn't the inventor of the solid-body electric guitar, but he certainly made it famous."

"Without him, it's hard to imagine how rock 'n' roll would be played today," the late Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records, said when Paul was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 for his early influence on rock.

Ironically, the onset of rock 'n' roll -- with its heavy emphasis on the electric guitar -- ended Paul's and his wife's prominence on the music scene. After they divorced in the mid-1960s, Paul continued to record, earning a Grammy in 1976 for "Chester and Lester," an instrumental album recorded with Atkins.

And in 1984, when Paul was nearing 70, he returned to the stage, appearing in clubs in New York City. He was joined in these weekly appearances by a parade of famous musicians, including Keith Richards, Tony Bennett and Paul McCartney, who told Les Paul that when the Beatles started out, they would play Paul-Ford hits in their gigs.

In 2005, as he was turning 90, Paul was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which said "his innovations led to his first solid-body electric guitar in 1941" and also recognized him for pioneering techniques "that transformed music-recording technology."

Many inventors and musicians were trying to figure out how to amplify a guitar as early as the 1920s, including George Beauchamp, whose "Frying Pan" is considered the first real solid-body electric guitar, Doc Kauffman and Adolph Rickenbacker.

Paul was tinkering with his own crude version of an amplified guitar as a teenager. His goal was simply to be better heard on gigs at the local barbecue restaurant in Waukesha, Wis., where he played as Red Hot Red, the Wizard of Waukesha.

To amplify the sound, he tried using a phonograph needle, a telephone mouthpiece and a radio speaker. The sound got stronger but, as he told Rick Landers for Modern Guitar magazine in 2005, "I ran smack into the problem of feedback." He realized that the acoustic guitar's hollow body -- which was designed to reverberate the sound of the strings and amplify the sound -- probably wasn't needed if the instrument was hooked up to power.

He tried filling his guitar with socks and shirts and even plaster of Paris, which caused other problems. Years later, he tried attaching electronic pickups and strings to a 4-by-4-inch piece of pine about 18 inches long, which worked well enough but didn't have the graceful look of a guitar. So he sliced a regular guitar in half lengthwise and bolted it to the wood, dubbing the contraption "The Log."

The Log gave Paul the sustained note he was seeking -- he said he could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be sounding.

Among the other important figures in the development of the electric guitar was Leo Fender, an engineer. In 1951, Fender began mass-producing the solid-body Broadcaster (later renamed the Telecaster), the first practical solid-body electric guitar and the instrument that would soon revolutionize the sound of popular music.

The famed guitar company Gibson also designed a solid-body guitar and, in 1952, released an instrument that was endorsed by Paul, who had by then made a name for himself in music. Various models of Gibson Les Pauls are still in production today.

Electrifying the guitar took the instrument from one used for background rhythm to a driving force in country music, blues, R&B and rock. Even the feedback Paul tried so hard to eliminate became a way for guitarists to create new effects that shocked the generation that had grown up on Paul and Ford's sweet and harmonic music. As Washington Post music writer Richard Harrington noted, the electric guitar "put the boom in the baby boom." It has, as Monica M. Smith, project historian at the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, wrote, "achieved iconic status as a symbol of American culture."

Perhaps even more important than Paul's role in the electric guitar were his recording innovations.

To get a fuller sound on some songs, Paul tinkered with one of the first tape recorders to figure out how he could record one track at the same time he was playing back another track. It was the beginning of multi-track recording and sound-on-sound -- without which it would be hard to imagine most of modern recording.

 

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