15Aug

Les Paul My Hero Dies At 94

Posted by Steve Renner as Music

It’s a sad day for guitarists everywhere, one of our biggest heros Les Paul has passed away. I got my 1st Les Paul back in the 70’s…

Les Paul - Somewhere Over The Rainbow

Known as “the father of the electric guitar,” and it wasn’t just hype. Not only did he invent one of the first electric guitars in the early 1950s, the Gibson Les Paul electric guitar became one of the standard instruments for rock and roll guitarists for decades.

The famous musicians who played Les Paul electric guitars is endless, from Eric Clapton to Peter Green, Duane Allman to Jimmy Page, Slash to The Edge. Les Paul died Thursday at the age of 94, and guitarists the world over were in mourning.

Les Paul is a pioneer in the invention of the solid body guitar, (along with Leo Fender) he also was the father of Multi-Track recording.

A musician since childhood, Paul experimented with guitar amplification for years before coming up in 1941 with what he called “The Log,” a 4-by-4 piece of wood strung with steel strings. He later put the wooden wings onto the body to give it a traditional guitar shape.

The Associated Press Reports:

Born Lester William Polfuss on June 9, 1915, he began his career as a musician, billing himself as Red Hot Red or Rhubarb Red. He toured with the popular Chicago band Rube Tronson and His Texas Cowboys and led the house band on WJJD radio in Chicago.

In the mid-1930s he joined Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians and soon moved to New York to form the Les Paul Trio, with Jim Atkins and bassist Ernie Newton.

His first records were released in 1944 on Decca Records. Later, with Ford, his wife from 1949 to 1962, he earned 36 gold records for hits including “Vaya Con Dios” and “How High the Moon,” which both hit No. 1.

He had met Ford, then known as Colleen Summers, in the 1940s while working as a studio musician in Los Angeles. For seven years in the 1950s, Paul and Ford broadcast a TV show from their home in Mahwah, N.J. (Ford died in 1977, 15 years after they divorced).

In 1948, Paul and Ford were seriously injured in a car crash. Among other injuries, Paul’s right elbow was crushed and doctors set it at an angle so he could continue to play guitar, Robb Lawrence, a former concert tech for Paul, says in the 2008 book “The Early Years of the Les Paul Legacy.”

Paul had made his first attempt at audio amplification at age 13. Unhappy with the amount of volume produced by his acoustic guitar, he tried placing a telephone receiver under the strings. Although this worked to some extent, only two strings were amplified and the volume level was still too low.

By placing a phonograph needle in the guitar, all six strings were amplified, which proved to be much louder. Paul was playing a working prototype of the electric guitar in 1929.

His work on recording techniques began in the years after World War II, when Bing Crosby gave him a tape recorder. Drawing on his earlier experimentation with his homemade recording machine, Paul added an additional playback head to the recorder. The result was a delayed effect that became known as tape echo.

Tape echo gave the recording a more “live” feel and enabled the user to simulate different playing environments.

Paul’s next idea was to stack together eight mono tape machines and send their outputs to one piece of tape, stacking the recording heads on top of one another. The resulting machine served as the forerunner to today’s multitrack recorders. Many of his songs with Ford used overdubbing techniques that Paul had helped develop.

Paul’s use of multitrack recording was unique. Before he did it, most recordings were made on a single tape. By recording each element separately, from the vocals to instrumentation on different tracks, they could be mixed and layered, adding to the richness in sound.

In 1954, Paul commissioned the first eight-track tape recorder, later known as “Sel-Sync,” in which a recording head could simultaneously record a new track and play back previous ones.

In the late 1960s, Paul retired from music to concentrate on his inventions. His interest in country music was rekindled in the mid-’70s, and he teamed with Chet Atkins for two albums. The duo won a Grammy for best country instrumental performance of 1976 for their “Chester and Lester” album.

In 2005, he released the Grammy-winning “Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played,” his first album of new material since those 1970s recordings and his first official rock CD. Among those playing with him: Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Richie Sambora.

“They’re not only my friends, but they’re great players,” Paul told The Associated Press. “I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.”