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Guitar, Studio Wizard Les Paul Dies At 94
beeshman noted that Les Paul has died.
Paul was quite the hardware hacker of his day, innovating with guitar hardware, and later multi track recording. The Gibson Les Paul is one of the single most iconic instruments associated with Rock 'n Roll, and was of course played by Pete Townshend. Someday I'm going to get me one.
Pete Townsend did play a Les Paul, but only from 1972 to 1979. If you are looking for an iconic posterboy for the Gibson Les Paul, try Jimmy Page. Other notables include Slash, Joe Perry, and Ace Frehley. Here is a list of of 15 iconic Les Paul players from Gibson.
Actually, he used to put his good les pauls on a stand behind the amp, pull out a cheap copy and smash the crap out of it. He wasn't totally stupid.
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Pete has played with the LP for a bit, but, has never been quite as associated with any one guitar like Jimmy Page.
Page == Les Paul (and a telecaster in early days)
Jimi Hendrix == Strat
To me...I always picture Pete mostly with a Gibson SG during the 60's.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The electric guitar wasn't his only nerdy accomplishment. The wikipedia article lists a lot of firsts, including the first multitrack recording.
Free Martian Whores!
I always thought of Leo Fender as the true innovator of the electric guitar. AFAIR, Les Paul was even opposed to the idea of solid body guitars, and only did the classic Les Paul after seeing Leo Fender's huge success with Telecaster et. al.
Roman Kennke
Err....that was a Stratocaster that Jimi Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner on...
You might wanna go rent the movie..it is really good on DVD these days, restored, and with extra filmed content and performances not in the original movie.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'd just like to point everyone to The Les Paul Show, available for free download on archive.org. Early stuff, just him, Mary Ford, and a drummer, and lots of showing off with overdubbing. Pretty good quality for such an old recording too. Give it a listen, hear the master at work.
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actually,George Beauchamp made solid aluminum body electric guitar in 1931 and sold them through the company Ropatin (we now know as Rickenbacker), intended for Hawaiian music that was popular during the 30s. Popularly called a "frying pan" because of round body.
it was pbs and it was part of "The Masters" series.
you can get it on netflix under the name "Les Paul: Chasing Sound"
it's even available for Instant Watch
Les Paul made his first prototype solid body in 1945. Leo Fender and Doc Kauffmann built one in 1943.
Prior to both, craftsman had been experimenting and building one-off electric guitars since the 1920's. Gibson had been building the LS-150 hollow-body since the 1930's.
The first solid-body "production" electric guitar was the Fender Esquire, which was developed in 1949 by Leo Fender and started production in 1950 after 50 esquires were made they added a pickup and renamed it to the Broadcaster which now included a truss rod in the neck to keep it from warping. It was renamed to the Telecaster and became a single pickup guitar when Gretsch threatened to sue them for trademark infringement because of their line of drums called Broadkaster.
Gibson, in seeing the success of the solid body electric guitar, called Les Paul back and the Gibson Les Paul production guitar was born. It was put into production in 1951. Fender put the solid body electric guitar on the map, Gibson and Les Paul came up with the competition. At that time they both had single coil pickups.
Both the Gibson and Fender solid body guitars are equally iconic in Rock n' Roll as well as blues. Each has a camp fiercely devoted to them. It's worthy of note that Jimi Hendrix played both Gibson and Fender guitars (flying V, Les Pauls and stratocasters mainly) to get different sounds. You can't talk about rock n' roll guitars without talking about both.
I'm not trying to minimize his achievements, Les Paul is a legendary player, technician, inventer, songwriter etc etc... one of the most talented people of the 20th century.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Yeah, but the "Buffy" musical would have been impossible without it.
You're absolutely right, though. Just like how the "click-track" has replaced the need for solid time-keeping in the studio, even GOOD singers rely on a smidge of auto-tune in order to meet modern audience expectations.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
A guitarist friend of mine cut his left arm nearly completely off, and the doctors told him he'd never be able to play again. ... I told him to play anyway, and the guitar playing was actually a good therapy. He's not the guitarist he was before going throgh the plate glass window, but he's not all that bad, either.
And then there was Tony Iommi, a left-handed guitarist who lost the tips of some of his right-hand (fretting) fingers in an industrial accident at his day job. After trying unsuccessfully to play right-handed, he restrung his guitar with extra-light (banjo) strings, improvised prosthetic fingertips, and got good again.
Very good.
He went on to be a founder of Black Sabbath and is recognized as one of the two primary creators of the Heavy Metal style.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
There's a lot of misinformation about the early years of guitars as people like Bigsby didn't keep records, he wrote tiny pencil notes on his homemade pickup winder. There's going to be some books coming out that show a lot of people who did what when, and I expect there's going to be quite a lot of controversy. Les Paul did give us the multi-track, for which I am eternally grateful.