Les Paul. The first thing that springs to mind is the iconic guitar, but a lot of people fail to look beyond that to consider the man behind it. Those that do, however, discover a man who changed how music was made and how it sounded perhaps more than any other single individual.

I had Les Paul on my list to do and, after his death this week, decided to bump him up and talk about him now.

Lester William Polsfuss was born in 1915, started playing the harmonica at eight and then moved onto the guitar. He ended up playing semi-professionally when he reached thirteen and then joined a radio band at seventeen. He regularly played country music and then moved on to jazz in the 1930's playing on the Radio and released a couple of records in 1936.

Despite this promising career it was all threatened when he had a car crash in 1948. His right elbow and arm were shattered and he was told that he wouldn't have movement in it. Determined to continue his love for playing the guitar he told the surgeons to set his arm in a position of holding and picking a guitar, they did this and that was the position his arm continued to be for many years.

In the 50's he and his wife Mary Ford sold millions of hit singles and where a hugely popular couple. Their recordings took full advantage of the technology and techniques that Les Paul was creating and perfecting. The rest of his life he made music on and off, semi-retiring, but when he was 90 he won two Grammys for his Album Les Paul and Friends: America Made World Played.

But his music was only the background to everything else he was well known for. His technique of playing, his timing, licks, trills and so on were fairly unique among other guitarists of the day and heavily influenced how they played and how later musicians would play music.

He made one of the first solid body guitars named The Log and went to Gibson with it in 1945/46 but they rejected it. It wasn't until the Fender Esquire, the first commercially successful solid body electric guitar, was made in 1950 that Gibson and Les Paul finally got together again and designed what would become the famous Gibson Les Paul. It is unknown how much of the design actually came from Les Paul, but it looks as though it was really limited as Gibson already made electric hollow guitars and already had their own ideas for how it should look. Indeed, some accounts state that other than agreeing for his name to appear on the guitar, he had no other contribution to its design. Needless to say, though, the Gibson Les Paul had a huge impact on music, it's iconic look can be seen in the hands of some of the most successful and important guitarists of the twentieth century.

Another innovation was multi-track recording. In 1948 Les Paul's "Lover (When You're Near Me)" became the first recording where multi-tracking was used. It involved eight different parts of Paul playing the guitar, some were played at half speed and sped up. During the years he perfected his technique and the technology used and would go on to co-design the first eight-track recording deck. As well as this invention he is also responsible for overdubbing, delay effects, phasing effects and many more, all which would open up a whole new world of how to create music in the studio.

Suggested Listening



The Millennium Collection: The Best of Les Paul

Trivia

His early aliases were Red Hot Red and Rhubarb Red

At one point he backed Bing Crosby

He is in the Grammy Hall of Fame, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, National Inventors Hall of Fame and the National Broadcasters Hall of Fame

Godfather of Steve Miller, from Steve Miller band, and also gave him his first guitar lesson.



A snippet of Chasing Sound, a feature length Les Paul documentary that can be found here