Les Paul dies at 94

[ReCycled]

After a very long and distinguished career... Les Paul wasn't just involved in the design of the iconic guitar, but also pioneered the creation of multi-tracking recording. In the late 50's and earlier the standard method for producing a record was live, in the studio, in one take. Then the best "one-take" was chosen and that became the vinyl record that was issued for sale. That's one reason I like classic jazz from the early 60's and back. Great musicianship done in one take.

[peewee_RotA]

Now there truly is less Paul... 

[Mask]

...so after the barbecue, he wired the guitar directly, making a pickup (a sensor to transmit the sound frequency from the plucked spring) by jamming a phonograph needle into the neck, mounting the telephone mouthpiece inside the instrument and hooking it all up to the radio.

It worked, "but the feedback was terrible," Paul said. "I took towels and shirts and stuffed them in the guitar. No good. Then I poured in plaster of Paris. It improved, except there were still problems."

But he had had the crucial insight: The box -- the very essence of an acoustic guitar -- was the problem. "I went to the railroad yard with some friends, and we stole a 2 1/2 -foot length of steel rail. I stretched a string the length of the rail and held it down with a spike at each end. Then I put the telephone mouthpiece underneath the string."

This was much better. "I have it," he told his mom. "An electric guitar!"

Mom wasn't impressed. "I'm waiting for the day you see a cowboy on a horse playing a piece of railroad track," she said. "And where do you plug it in?"

Paul grew into adolescence and beyond and became a full-fledged pro. He played acoustic. He put pickups on an acoustic. He miked the acoustic. "I tried everything," he said. It wasn't right yet.

Finally, late in the 1930s, he fretted up a length of four-by-four lumber and took it to a nightclub. This one really worked, but "there was no reaction." People didn't know what he was supposed to be doing.

"You have to have a beautiful piece of wood," Paul concluded, "something you can caress, and hold, and love." So he cut two sides off an acoustic guitar and attached them to the four-by-four "so it looked like a guitar." He called it "the log." Today it resides in the Smithsonian.

link

[sinner]

He truly changed the face of music forever.

[|iR|Focalor]

I may be incorrect, but I seem to recall reading something about him basically inventing the first incarnation of the fuzzy overdriven electric guitar tone by slashing up the speaker cone material in an amplifier. After that, I suppose it wasn't too difficult to figure out how to properly juice and saturate a signal between the preamp and power amp sections of amplifiers.