Les Paul - A Lifetime of Legend

Musician, inventor, pioneer. Most people can only hope to claim one of these identities throughout their lives, but Les Paul embodied all three, and many more.

Les Paul began performing under different stage names from age of thirteen, recording one of his first records as country artist “Rhubarb Red” in 1936. These early Americana roots would lead Paul down a life of earnest songwriting, jazz virtuosity and rock powered blues guitar playing that revolutionized the music world. Over the course of nearly seventy years, Paul released dozens of albums, appeared on dozens of compilations and performed with hundreds of the music world’s best musicians.

Born Lester William Polsfuss in 1915, Les began playing music around eight years old. Fortunately, he failed at his initial attempts at playing the piano which led him to explore other instruments like the harmonica, banjo, and guitar.  At ten, he invented the neck-mount for a harmonica, a design that is still used today as a means of playing the harmonica while keeping ones hands free to play the guitar.  He continued tinkering and began creating modifications to the acoustic-electric guitar in the 1930s. It wasn’t until the early 1950s that Gibson Guitar Company began to take note of his unique innovations.  Eric Clapton popularized the solid-body electric guitar revolutionized by Les Paul (in the wake of Leo Fender) in the 1960s.  Although it has undergone dozens of functional and aesthetic renovations over the past 60 years, the Gibson Les Paul model guitar remains a coveted and classic solid-body guitar.

Les Paul’s musicianship is hardly the end of his legacy, for the way in which he completely transformed the world’s understanding of music is truly what he will be remembered for. In creating a guitar that could only be heard when electrically processed, his creation directly contributed to the revolutions of rock and roll in the 1950s.  But Paul’s inventiveness reached much further than simply creating the solid-body electric guitar.

In the late 1940s, Paul and Capitol Records embarked on experiments with completely new and unexplored recording techniques. Overdubbing, a process easily used with today’s digital technology, was innovated by Paul using disks. During an era of magnetic tape, Paul would record himself on a disk, and then play it back while recording a second part over the first. This could be done many times over, and eventually led to Paul’s use of multi-track recording. To that point, all music could only be recorded on one single track, but by the 1950s Paul and Amex began using a multi-track recorder. This process was revolutionized by The Beatles and George Martin for 1969’s classic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  This led to Paul’s groundbreaking creation of echo chambers. Found within the catacombs that lie underground at Capitol Records, they have been used to make uniquely high quality recordings for almost half a century; most notably by artists Frank Sinatra and Brian Wilson.

Les Paul’s groundbreaking production techniques, ceaseless inventiveness, and prodigious musicianship have more than left their mark on the music world and how we as the end listener have come to know it. Les Paul has fundamentally altered our perception of music for over half a century, and his legacies will continue to live on and inspire musicians and inventors alike for many more.