RIP Les Paul -- Inventor of the solid-body guitar & Gibson Les Paul

[Nut44x4]

RIP 1915-2009

Les Paul, the man who invented the solid-body guitar, passed away at the ripe old age of 94 due to complications with pneumonia (or... he was just really old).

After inventing the solid-body guitar in 1939, he designed the famous Gibson Les Paul in the early '50s, came up with various techniques for recording and performance, including overdubbing, delay, and multitrack recording, and won two Grammys.  He played with Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby, before serving in the military for a year.

But for those who didn't know, now is a good time for a lesson in music history.  Les Paul's solid-body guitar changed music.  In either 1940 or 1941 (around age 25) Les Paul (born Lester William Polfus) attached strings and two pickups to a piece of wood with a guitar neck.  Dubbed "the log," his makeshift guitar sustained notes longer than any other guitar at the time.  The solid-body guitar is now the standard in the rock world.

"You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be sounding," said Paul.

But other than his eponymous guitar, Paul contributed to modern music by experimenting with recording techniques.  He found that super-speed could be achieved by recording at half speed and playing the results at normal speed.  And his 1948 hit "Lover" was made by using multilayer recording, allowing Paul to be a one man ensemble. 

In 1952 the Gibson Guitar company hired Les Paul to design a guitar, which are still heavily used today (they were a staple for bands like Led Zeppelin). 

So to a great inventor and pioneer of modern music... thank you.

http://www.buzznet.com/musicnews/rip-les-paul-j4436751/#

[trimmonthelake]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,539288,00.html
Guitar Legend Les Paul Dies at 94

Thursday, August 13, 2009

NEW YORK  —  Les Paul, the guitarist and inventor who changed the course of music with the electric guitar and multitrack recording and had a string of hits, many with wife Mary Ford, died on Thursday. He was 94.

According to Gibson Guitar, Paul died of complications from pneumonia at White Plains Hospital. His family and friends were by his side.

He had been hospitalized in February 2006 when he learned he won two Grammys for an album he released after his 90th birthday, "Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played."

"I feel like a condemned building with a new flagpole on it," he joked.
As an inventor, Paul helped bring about the rise of rock 'n' roll and multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then carefully balance the "tracks" in the finished recording.

With Ford, his wife from 1949 to 1962, he earned 36 gold records and 11 No. 1 pop hits, including "Vaya Con Dios," "How High the Moon," "Nola" and "Lover." Many of their songs used overdubbing techniques that Paul the inventor had helped develop.

"I could take my Mary and make her three, six, nine, 12, as many voices as I wished," he recalled. "This is quite an asset." The overdubbing technique was highly influential on later recording artists such as the Carpenters.

The use of electric guitar gained popularity in the mid-to-late 1940s, and then exploded with the advent of rock the 1950s.

"Suddenly, it was recognized that power was a very important part of music," Paul once said. "To have the dynamics, to have the way of expressing yourself beyond the normal limits of an unamplified instrument, was incredible. Today a guy wouldn't think of singing a song on a stage without a microphone and a sound system."

A tinkerer and musician since childhood, he experimented with guitar amplification for years before coming up in 1941 with what he called "The Log," a four-by-four piece of wood strung with steel strings.

"I went into a nightclub and played it. Of course, everybody had me labeled as a nut." He later put the wooden wings onto the body to give it a tradition guitar shape.

In 1952, Gibson Guitars began production on the Les Paul guitar.

Pete Townsend of The Who, Steve Howe of Yes, jazz great Al DiMeola and Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page all made the Gibson Les Paul their trademark six-string.

Over the years, the Les Paul series has become one of the most widely used guitars in the music industry. In 2005, Christie's auction house sold a 1955 Gibson Les Paul for $45,600.

[trimmonthelake]

So Long Baby,So Long
http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=8164293&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,539288,00.html

[MuffyBee]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_LES_PAUL_BURIAL?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US
Aug 18, 4:23 PM EDT

Guitarist Les Paul to be buried in Wis. hometown

By CARRIE ANTLFINGER
Associated Press Writer



MILWAUKEE (AP) -- Guitar virtuoso and inventor Les Paul will be buried Friday in his Wisconsin hometown - but not before the public gets to pay their respects in Milwaukee at a science and technology museum along the shores of Lake Michigan.

Discovery World museum President Joel Brennan said Tuesday said some of Paul's family would attend Friday's tribute and he expected many other will come to honor his life.

"We are honored to have been asked by the family to be a part of a celebration of his life," Brennan said Tuesday.

Paul died in White Plains, N.Y. on Aug. 13 of complications from pneumonia. He was 94.

A private funeral service was planned Wednesday in New York City, followed by a reception at the Gibson Showroom, according to his manager Michael K. Braunstein.

Born Lester William Polfuss in 1915 to a German immigrant family, Paul built his first crystal radio at age nine in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha, about the time he first picked up a guitar. In his early teens, he left home to travel with a country band.

guitar based on his design in 1952, and the electric guitar went on to become the lead instrument in rock 'n' roll.

Friday's public viewing will be from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. at the museum. A private family service will be held afterward at the Prairie Home Cemetery in Waukesha, located about 15 miles west of Milwaukee, Brennan said.

Cemetery manager David Brenner said some of Paul's other family members are buried at the cemetery, including his mother. His plot, which will be larger, will be in another area to allow for the public to easily view it.

Discovery World's exhibit on Paul's life and contributions to music will also be free to the public Friday, Brennan said.

The museum will also on Friday show Paul's final Wisconsin concert, held at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee last year. The guitar Paul used at his weekly gigs at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City will also be display, Brennan said.

Paul built one of the first prototypes for the solid-body electric guitar in 1941, but his work was rejected numerous times. Gibson finally began mass-producing a

[Nut44x4]

The Les Paul style
by Kinloch Nelson
10/04/09

Les Paul’s inventions, the Les Paul electric guitar and multitrack recorder are with us today and will long be remembered, but his other great legacy, his music and playing style have drifted into the shadows and may well be forgotten. Ironic in a way because Les came up with these inventions in order to make great music, develop his own sound and pursue his first love: music and show business.

Les’ playing was rooted in the jazz era. A lot of his ideas come from piano players, clarinet players and other guitarists of the day, particularly Django Reinhardt whose penchant for arpeggios and speed is noticeable in Les’ guitar lines. But Les wanted his own sound, so he began to craft guitar licks nobody else was playing, developed an elegant solid body guitar, dreamed up primitive but effective multitrack recording techniques (inventing the multi track recorder along the way) all in an effort to push the envelope and make something different.

His innovations and musicianship led to a string of hit records of quirky and upbeat guitar instrumentals, unique in their sound and delivery. But, anticipating the public would tire of instrumentals he started looking for a singer, found Mary Ford, teamed up with her and eventually married her.

Les knew a good pop song when he heard it and he and Mary set out to make records that appealed to the masses.

Hence, you have songs as divergent as “How High The Moon” on the one hand and “Mocking Bird Hill” on the other. They would go on the make over 120 recordings that is if you include the Robert Hall and Reingold Beer radio commercials, and the weekly radio spots. This doesn’t count the 15-minute TV shows they did for a while in the early days of television. But as is often the way with pop fads the Paul/Ford song selections and their artistic voice and style were of an era, of a generation, and of a wave of pop culture that would pass out of favor. Luckily for them it was right around the time they ran out of steam anyway.

Folk Music, beach music, the British Music Invasion, Folk Rock and Motown would eventually push the jazzers and the pop crooners aside, and Surf Music, the instrumental music of the period, would take over where Les had left off.

These new kids on the block, would ultimately become the predominate music engine, serving the next generation of fans, record executives, fan magazines, instrument manufacturers, radio, TV, movies, pop culture and politics (“Think young Wild Thing!”). Youngsters in the boomer generation beginning to come of age simply forget all about the quirky songs from Les and Mary that were prevalent on AM radio or in roller-skating rinks in the late ‘50s and early ‘’60s. The incredible guitar driven music legacy the Baby Boomers eventually focused on was the psychedelic era, then its aftermath: hard rock, jazz rock, Southern Rock, various forms of the blues, Country rock etc. Les Paul vanished.

Yet oddly, the Les Paul guitar, out of production at Gibson for many years, began to show up in the hands of the players of the era (Clapton, Duane Allman Dicky Betts, Keith Richards, even George Harrison). So the Les Paul guitar eventually went back into production, and the old Les Paul guitars became ridiculously expensive. Everybody wanted one. This went on for years, eventually leading to a curiosity about the man himself. Who was that masked man? For the first time in decades Les could get a gig. And so started his Monday night gigs at Fat Tuesdays and later the Iridium in NYC. Once again some folks at least began to remember and go hear him. And Les enjoyed a deserved and long laid-back comeback, teaming up at one point with Chet Atkins to put out a live-in-the-studio album now considered a classic. So what then of his legacy now that he is gone?

Les’ inventions are everywhere. The guitars, the recording gear, and sound effect gadgets dominate the music and recording industry. But where is his music? Les Paul’s guitar playing itself as an influence on the Baby Boomers, and today’s players really just isn’t there. You don’t hear it in the pop music of Baby Boomer heroes (Clapton, Hendrix, Richards, Harrison, Page, etc). Even now barely anyone is trying to play like Les.

One could argue an exception that some of the early Rockabilly guitar players and today’s country players got something from Les’ style. For example, a lot of players use echo gadgets on their guitars, so the influence of his sound can be found in the gadgetry. But his jazz guitar lines, vocabulary and quirkiness simply aren’t to be found in the mainstream. To some degree this is because they were doubled, or overdubbed at different speeds and couldn’t be replicated live by most players. But more to the point the mojo that drove Les’ guitar lines came from the man himself and from a music vibe that was on the way out due to a generational changing of the guard.

But Les did have some devotees and copiers. There were and are a few players who really set out to learn from Les, or took what he was doing to heart and built on it. I’ll mention a couple.

First up: one-hit-wonder Jorgen Ingman. This player was from Denmark, and had a big hit in 1961 with “Apache.” At least one LP calls him Denmark’s answer to Les Paul. If you play the flip side of the “Apache” 45, a song called “Echo Boogie,” you can hear the use of echo and the cascading lines of Les’ approach. It’s also multi tracked: one guy plays all the instruments. The song is a composition, so it doesn’t have the element of jazz improvisation (a hallmark of Les’ recordings), but it shows the Paul influence on a player from that period.

Secondly and quite importantly: Danny Gatton. Danny was born in 1940 and grew up on Les Paul/ Mary Ford records. Gatton set out to memorize many of Les’ solos and licks and managed to learn verbatim on one guitar things that Les played on multitracked guitars (Danny didn’t know about multitracking at the time). Danny, now deceased, was and is a player’s player whose adaptations of Les’ work can be heard in a lot of today’s prominent country guitar players’ vocabularies.

At some point, one may read about Les’ “Les Paulverizer,” a tape-recorder remote control box that Les used, sometimes mounted on his guitar to do various studio tricks while playing. It functioned like today’s loop machines. Again Les was there first. Danny built one of these way back in 1977 and made great use of it at gigs and in the studio, much to Les’ delight. Danny would often quote from Les at live gigs, and on studio albums. He even did a Les Paul/Mary Ford style recording with a female singer handling multitrack vocals, like Mary Ford did all those years ago. Les loved the recording, and asked “who was the singer?”. If you look around you’ll probably find a few other great players out there who took what Les did and built on it. But most of them like Danny, and like Les himself are below the radar of public music awareness.

So where do we go from here? Back in the early 1990s a 4-CD box set was released containing the 120 recordings of Les and Mary’s songs, instrumentals, radio shows and commercial jingles. It’s been out of print for quite a while but with Les’ passing there may be a re-release.

But if you can’t find any of these or the original recordings there is always Youtube. A number of the 10 or 15 minute TV shows Les and Mary did in the early days of black and white TV can be found on Youtube. It’s classic stuff. These were really short visits with Les and Mary in their home where something domestic would happen for a couple minutes and then they would break into song (prerecorded and over dubbed), then there would be a commercial, then a quick goodbye from L & M.

One could argue that Les and Mary might have been the first popular guitar players (Mary played too) to make routine music videos. The Beatles have claimed this distinction but the truth is Les and Mary were there first. I think these even predate Ricky Nelson playing the guitar as part of the Ozzie and Harriet TV show.
Sometimes what goes around does come around. These days there is a huge resurgence in interest in Django Reinhardt’s gypsy jazz music. Maybe the same thing will happen with Les Paul. Gypsy jazz bands are popping up all over. They are even in the movies and on TV.

Somewhere in my record collection is an LP of Django Reinhardt being backed up by a combo of guitars orchestrated like a horn section, all playing in harmony along with solo tracks Django had made years before with another band. Django’s guitar is isolated on one track and this whole new guitar section is surrounding him in harmony years later. It’s a wonderful example of orchestrated guitars playing along with improvised guitar lines. And this is exactly what Les was doing all along: improvising a line and then playing harmony or counterpoint along with it.

Maybe the next big wave will be guitar orchestras playing Les Paul music, note for note from the old recordings; or better yet new compositions the way Les would have done them. All you would need then is an orchestra of Mary Fords. Until then, at least we’ve got all those wonderful recordings.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Kinloch Nelson is a member of the Guitar League. At 58 years old, he has been a guitar player since he can remember when, and has been a professional guitar player since circa 1973. He taught at Hochstein Music School in Rochester for 25 years, built electric guitars from time to time, even as a kid, and is now concentrating on life as a solo acoustic guitar player. Reach Nelson at kinlochnelson.com.

http://www.cnylink.com/cnynews/view_news.php?news_id=1254680136

[Nut44x4]

Why do I prefer a Gibson Les Paul?

I prefer the aesthetics of Gibson, and their ergonomics.

Aesthetics are found in things like the body shape and size and contours: the fretboard bindings, fretboard inlays, the tulip pegs. The Gibson vibe is classy, and elegant. I’ll come back to this later.

Mostly, it's a “feel” thing, and I love the way a Les Paul feels. When I get the strap length just right, I love how it hangs on my shoulder, and how it presents itself to my hands. I love how the string plane is up off the face of the guitar — makes it easier for me to dig in. And my right hand can rest on the perfect height of that tune-o-matic bridge, with the strings falling away towards the tailpiece, or curl my picking hand down around the bottom of the string plane, without a volume knob getting in the way. (Not great technique, I know, but I’m a leftie playing right-handed, so something had to give, and it’s my picking style, known as West Toronto Brutal Make-Do.) I always remove Gibson pickguards, and prefer having that open space below the 1st string, and I prefer that lovely gap between the neck and bridge pickups.

A Gibson Les Paul has the vibe of an old-fashioned arched top, 17-degree angled headstock, and four-degree neck-body angle. The guitar wraps around me: it's sexier, and a Les Paul is the right size for a 5’ 8” dude like me.

The 24 ¾” scale length makes bending easier, and also makes it easier for grabbing wider voicings/fingerings, plus things like thumb-wrapping-over-the-top voicings. (The slim taper ’60s neck helps with that, too.) Gibson frets, traditionally, were usually higher and wider. I also prefer having 22 frets instead of less. I do prefer the '60s slim-taper necks of Gibson. For my hands, that neck profile just feels soooo good:if the guitar is set up right, it plays like butter.

The chambered body of my Les Paul Classic reissue is a big plus for me: it’s not just a case of reduced weight (although that was a big concern for a middle-aged guy who spent too many years lugging doublenecks around on big stages and doing a lot of headbanging and mane-waving). Even the tone of the chambered body appeals to me: it starts to head towards a 335. The notes get a bit more “thunk” or “pop” to the front end of them, as opposed to the very even and smooth sustain from a full mahogany body.

Let’s not forget tone. While other designs and makes may have plenty of cut, I find that Gibson punches, and is fatter and creamier. The shorter scale length is more conducive to darker, creamier tones, too. To my tastes, a Gibson has a better “pure” tone, unadulterated through a clean amp — which is probably why jazz players usually tend towards a Gibson-style guitar. A Gibson Les Paul’s powerful humbucking double-coil pickups can give you that range of old jazz tones, but can also go all the way up through the warmth and brighter punch of Clapton “Bluesbreaker” Cream-era rock sound (well – chasin’ Freddy King tone, right?) — and how about Allman Brothers, early Santana, early Lukather Toto, Gary Moore, Jimmy Page, and even Jeff Beck’s Blow by Blow tones? Robben Ford has been using one of Larry Carlton's old Goldtops for the last few years, and it sounds killer. Nowadays, Warren Haynes and Joe Bonamassa are doing great things with Pauls. That’s more than enough company to convince me.

But — having said all that — it's important to note that Les Paul invented the guitar because he wanted clean, bright, snappy, sustaining tone: the solid body guitar was designed originally to compete with the country snap and twang of Leo Fender’s bright ideas — and a Les Paul can give a satisfying amount of that clean country/jazz tone, too. But it becomes a game of what amp settings one employs, and what pedals and amounts of overdrive one uses. That game is infinite. So I prefer to try and get back to basics — what can my hands create on a straightforward amp setting? What guitar lends itself to that approach?

One of the huge reasons to love a Les Paul is sustain – no matter what, a Les Paul has what I would describe as an authoritative voice. Play it unplugged, and try notes all over the neck, playing it hard and soft, to see how it responds to dynamics, and you'll realize that a well set-up Les Paul has a kind of sustain and ring to it that other guitars just don't have. My Les Paul passes the blindfold touchy-feely-listening sessions. Check out guitars in this most basic way: play a note in first position, play it again up in the middle of the neck, play it again way up the neck — the guitar just has a good “voice” to it, no loss in output, or sustain, but with changes in color. Plugging it in will only enhance that, usually.

Finally — vibe. The intangible. This goes back to the aesthetics I mentioned earlier. I just feel right when I’m wearing my Les Paul, so it inspires cool things (the same thing I get from wearing a good suit and an expensive shirt — or a totally comfortable, relaxed ensemble — but mostly, the right shoes with the right outfit!).

Sometimes I can get that extraordinary feeling, playing a passage, and it just seems like it came from somewhere else ... like the notes are just channeling through me and the instrument. That's vibe ... it's that you have the right guitar in your hands at that moment. For me, the odds increase when I have a Les Paul in my hands. We are always in pursuit of an elusive quality: but I think we end up choosing a guitar because it suits our personality and character. I never got the chance to meet Lester, but like thousands of others, I think we share something special.

http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Rik-Emmett/rick-emmett-2010-1103/

[seahorse]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH8vjxFIUC4&NR=1

Les Paul - Sleepwalk

Uploaded by EqualMac on Jun 10, 2011

Music performed by Les Paul & the Les Paul Trio at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York City with Les Paul on 90th birthday

 

[MuffyBee]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/10/entertainment-us-lespaul-auction-idUSBRE8590G720120610
Les Paul guitars, items fetch $5 million at auction
June 10, 2012

The guitar, a rare 1982 Gibson Les Paul prototype recording model, was among several of the iconic guitarist's instruments that sold in Los Angeles over the weekend.

Other models included a 1951 Fender Nocaster that brought in a whopping $216,000 and a 1940s Epiphone Zephyr, known as "Klunker #3," which fetched $144,000. Research notes, a sign for the Les Paul Iridium Club, and a custom license plate were among other items being sold.
 ::snipping2::
The auction's proceeds benefited the Les Paul Foundation, which the guitarist founded to support music education, engineering, innovation and medical research.

 

[seahorse]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/10/entertainment-us-lespaul-auction-idUSBRE8590G720120610
Les Paul guitars, items fetch $5 million at auction
June 10, 2012

The guitar, a rare 1982 Gibson Les Paul prototype recording model, was among several of the iconic guitarist's instruments that sold in Los Angeles over the weekend.

Other models included a 1951 Fender Nocaster that brought in a whopping $216,000 and a 1940s Epiphone Zephyr, known as "Klunker #3," which fetched $144,000. Research notes, a sign for the Les Paul Iridium Club, and a custom license plate were among other items being sold.
 ::snipping2::
The auction's proceeds benefited the Les Paul Foundation, which the guitarist founded to support music education, engineering, innovation and medical research.