Losing Les Paul, Losing a Legend
Originally published at The Null Device Blog. You can comment here or there.
I am not a guitarist. I have no real vested opinion is Les Paul’s guitar designs, although I have heard from reputable sources that they’re quite heavy.
But Les Paul died today, and even with me not being a guitarist, I honor his memory. He was a tremendous musical innovator whose work broke the ground for the eventual democratization of music that lets a guy like me record the kind of stuff I do.
Yes, the Les Paul guitar was an innovation - solid bodies were uncommon at the time the LP came out. The popularity of the Gibson Les Paul led to all sorts of other solid-body guitars and, importantly for me, violins too. But that wasn’t the half of it.
Les invented multitrack recording. He did it the hard way, with homebuilt acetate disc cutters.
Let me say that again: Les invented multitrack recording.
The modern digital audio workstation, with its insert effects and 1024 channels, has lineage right back to Les Paul and his homemade acetate cutter, sitting in a studio made from his garage. I guess you could say he was a pioneer of the home studio too. Hm. Never really thought about that before.
I also learned he was the father of the delay effect. I had no idea until recently. Given how integral delay is to modern recording, it kind of floors me that it’s from the same guy.
He also gave us the technique of close-miking. Seriously? The same guy? Almost every vocal is close-mic’ed now - it keeps the singer from having to sing like they’re on a big empty stage all the time. It allowed singers to record in rooms instead of giant halls. It made the ballad possible.
Any one of these achievements could represent a momentous change for the recording industry. And he was responsible for all of them. That’s stunning.
All that is almost a side note to me, though. I respected Paul because of who he was, not just what he achieved. He was a consummate music nerd - composer, producer, engineer, performer, all rolled into one. He was the first of us, the studio geeks who dominate indie music today with their bedroom studios filled with gear and heads full of minutiae. He was also performing right up to his death (despite his advanced arthritis), and even released an album at the age of 90. I am awestruck and envious - I should be so lucky to be able to be vital enough, healthy enough, and non-whiny enough to be cranking out tunes until the day I shuffle off my mortal coil (hell, some days I wonder if I’ll be able to keep making music next week, much less 50-some years from now).
Ironically, I don’t really know much about him as a person. Rumour has it that he was kind of a badass, and his stage persona was fairly flamboyant. But that’s almost irrelevant to a guy like me - his professional achievements pretty much defined everything a guy like me aspires to.