les paul – a living legend

Since my sweetie, Steve has been diligently playing and practicing the guitar for the past four years, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see the famous Les Paul perform live at the Iridium Jazz Club in New York during our recent stay.

At age 92, this living legend plays two shows every Monday and signs autographs afterwards.  What a gracious guy!

Here’s an entertaining segment of a wonderful PBS special about Les.

Some quick facts about this talented guy…

– Though he couldn’t read music, Paul had a magnificent ear and innate sense of structure, conceiving complete arrangements entirely in his head before he set them down track by track on disc or tape.

– Paul was unsatisfied by the electric guitars that were sold in the mid 1930s and began experimenting with a few designs of his own. Famously, he created "The Log," which was nothing more than a length of common 4" by 4" fence post with bridge, guitar neck, and pickup attached… this design was the beginning of the solid body electric guitar.

– Paul was the first musician to use multi-tracking in a recording. Amazingly, these recordings were made, not with magnetic tape, but with wax disks. Paul would record a track onto a disk, then record himself playing another part with the first. He built the multi-track recording with overlaid tracks, rather than parallel ones as he did later.

– Paul had over 40 hit singles in the 1950’s