Les Paul
Les Paul (born June 9, 1915 in Waukesha , Wisconsin , USA ; † August 12, 2009 in White Plains , New York ; actually Lester William Polsfuss ) was an American guitarist who was instrumental in the development of modern recording techniques by he did pioneering work in the field of “ multitrack recording ” and numerous echo and reverb effects . He was also instrumental in the further development of the electric guitar ; , designed by him and by the company Gibson built solid body E-Guitar is one of the most famous models ever, and is after him Gibson Les Paul mentioned.
biography
Les Paul was born on June 9, 1915 in the city of Waukesha in the US state born Wisconsin as Lester William Polsfuss, later the family simplified the name to Polfus . His parents were George and Evelyn Polsfuss. Les Paul's interest in music began around the age of eight when he began playing the harmonica . His next instrument was the banjo , but he soon switched to the guitar . At the age of 13 he was already performing semi-professionally as a country music guitarist. Around the same time, the young Les Paul was already working as an electronics tinkerer, unscrewing microphones and record players to see how they worked, and then using specialist books from the city library to build an amplifier for his guitar and a simple recording device. At 17, he played in the country band Rube Tronson's Cowboys . A short time later, he dropped out of high school to join Wolverton's Radio Band in St. Louis .
In the 1930s, Les Paul was working in Chicago for a local radio station where he played jazz music . His first two records came out in 1936. One of the albums was released under the pseudonym Rhubarb Red , a name under which Les Paul played hillbilly music . On the second album, Les Paul was heard as a member of the backing band of blues artist Georgia White .
Dissatisfied with the quality of electric guitars as they were available in the mid-1930s, Les Paul began to design his own instruments. In 1934, to their astonishment , he commissioned the Larson Brothers instrument makers in Chicago to build a guitar without F-holes . The company advised Les Paul that such an instrument would not pass the sound resonances. That was exactly what Les Paul intended, however. The instrument should not vibrate in order to be insensitive to the effect of feedback during electrical amplification . Les Paul provided the guitar with two pickups he designed.
In 1938 Paul moved to New York and got a job on the Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians radio show . In 1943 Paul moved to Hollywood and formed a trio there. As a last-minute replacement for Oscar Moore played Paul with Nat King Cole and other musicians at the "Jazz at the Philharmonic" concert in Los Angeles on July 2, 1944. In the same year he joined the radio show with his trio Bing Crosby on . Crosby then funded Les Paul's recording experiments. Paul and Crosby also recorded tracks together and even had a number 1 hit in 1945 with It's Been a Long, Long Time . In addition to working as a backing band for Crosby and artists such as the Andrews Sisters , Paul's Trio also recorded a number of their own albums in the late 1940s.
In 1941, Les Paul designed and built the prototype of the solid body electric guitars, which would later achieve worldwide fame. He used the premises and tools of the Epiphone company , which made their factory rooms available to him on Sundays. The instrument was nicknamed " The Log " (German: Holzklotz ) because the body of the guitar was a simple, 10 cm by 10 cm thick block of wood, to which Les Paul attached a pickup, bridge and a normal guitar neck. This solved his two main problems: feedback, because the acoustic body no longer resonated and reverberated with the electrically amplified tone, and sustain (long-lasting tone), because the energy of the strings was no longer used up by the tone generation in the body. After negative public reactions because of the unusual appearance of this guitar, Paul cut one of his Epiphone guitars lengthways and embellished his "block" with the body halves.
In 1944 Les Paul worked with his musicians in the musical film Sensations of 1945 . In the mid-1940s, Paul offered his “Log” design to Gibson. However, at first they were not very enthusiastic about the concept of a solid body guitar and they only started working together in the early 1950s. In 1952 the Les Paul model was launched.
In 1947, Capitol Records released a recording that began as an experiment in Paul's garage. The track was Lover (When You're Near Me) , and Les Paul played eight different electric guitar parts on this recording. It was the first time that the multi-tracking method was used for a recording. These recordings were not made with magnetic discs but with wax discs. Paul recorded a track on a disc and dubbed it with a new part, which in turn was recorded. He made multi-track recordings with parts superimposed instead of playing them in parallel, as he did later.
In January 1948, Les Paul suffered serious injuries to his right arm and elbow in a car accident in Oklahoma , the mobility of which could not be restored. Paul instructed the surgeons to straighten his arm in a position that would allow him to hold and play a guitar. It took Paul a year and a half to recover.
In 1949 he married his girlfriend, the singer Iris Colleen Summers, for whom he chose the stage name Mary Ford and with whom he recorded a number of very successful records in the 1950s. Her biggest hits included How High the Moon and The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise . The special thing about these recordings was the use of technical effects such as overdubbing and taping , most of which were developed by Paul himself. Les Paul, who also dealt with guitar construction (the Gibson Les Paul is named after him) and recording technology, developed a reverberation process that can be heard for the first time on his home recording of How High the Moon on January 4, 1951 and has since been used the usual sound effects of the recording technology. With How High the Moon he put a total of eight identical tracks on top of each other with a time delay, whereby he had to accept a degeneration of the quality. Paul's version hit the charts on March 23, 1951 , where it stayed for 25 weeks and stayed at number one for nine weeks. No other duet stayed at number one on the US charts for nine weeks. His version also reached number one on the rhythm and blues hit parade as the first recording by a white performer . Les Paul's version sold 1.5 million copies. The musical success brought Les Paul and Mary Ford their own television show, which ran successfully on US television from 1953 to 1960 under the name The Les Paul and Mary Ford at Home Show .
In 1954, Paul continued to develop his inventions when he commissioned the Ampex company at his own expense to build an 8-track tape recorder. His idea, later known as "Sel-Sync", in which a recording head could record a new track and play previously recorded tracks at the same time, was trend-setting for the future of multi-track recording technology . During this process, the recording head had to be used temporarily as the playback head , which was then called the clock head (TK) or sync head (Sel-sync).
In the late 1960s, Paul withdrew more and more from the music business, although he occasionally returned to the recording studio, for example for the album Lester and Chester with Chet Atkins . In 1964 he divorced Mary Ford, who could no longer endure the nomadic lifestyle they had led.
1978 Les Paul and Mary Ford were honored with the induction into the " Grammy Hall of Fame ". In 1983 he received the Grammy Trustees Award for life's work. In 1988 Paul was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame . The eulogy held Jeff Beck , who admitted: ". I've copied more licks from Les Paul than I'd like to admit" ( "I have more licks copied from Les Paul than I care to admit.") Was in the same year Les Paul receives the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award . In May 2005 - shortly before his 90th birthday - he was accepted into the " National Inventors Hall of Fame " for the development of the solid-body electric guitar.
Since 1995 Les Paul has performed weekly at the Iridium Jazz Club on Broadway in New York. He often mentioned during his performances: "When I introduce myself to people, they are always surprised to find that I am neither a guitar nor dead!"
In 2005 the album Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played was released , which the 91-year-old recorded in a duet with many other famous guitarists such as Eric Clapton , Jeff Beck , Peter Frampton and Richie Sambora . For this album he was awarded two more Grammys in 2006, in the category "Best Pop Instrumental Performance" for the title Caravan and in " Best Rock Instrumental Performance " for the title 69 Freedom Special .
Les Paul died on August 13, 2009 at the age of 94 in a New York hospital from complications from pneumonia .
The Rolling Stone listed Paul in 2011 to rank 18 of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time . In a list from 2003 he was ranked 46th.
Discography
Albums
| year | title |
Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements (Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes) |
Remarks | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 DE
|
 US
|
|||
| 1976 | Chester and Lester | - |
US172 (5 weeks) US |
with Chet Atkins
|
| 2005 | Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played |
DE38 (4 weeks) DE |
US152 (2 weeks) US |
|
More albums
- The Les Paul Trio
- Swingin 'South
- Lover's Luau
- Warm and wonderful
- New sound
- Hits of Les and Mary
- Les Paul Now!
Singles
| year | Title album |
Top ranking, total weeks, awardChart placementsChart placements (Year, title, album , rankings, weeks, awards, notes) |
Remarks | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
DE
|
 UK
|
US
|
|||
| 1953 | Vaya Con Dios |
DE3 (16 weeks) DE |
UK7 (4 weeks) UK |
- |
with Mary Ford
|
| 1956 | Amukiriki (The Lord Willing) | - | - |
US94 (1 week) US |
with Mary Ford
|
| Texas Lady | - | - |
US91 (2 weeks) US |
with Mary Ford
|
|
| Magic Melody | - | - |
US98 (1 week) US |
with Mary Ford
|
|
| Moritat (Theme From Three Penny Opera) | - | - |
US49 (12 weeks) US |
||
| Nuevo Laredo | - | - |
US91 (1 week) US |
with Mary Ford
|
|
| 1957 | Cinco Robles (Five Oaks) | - | - |
US35 (14 weeks) US |
with Mary Ford
|
| 1958 | Put A Ring On My Finger | - | - |
US32 (10 weeks) US |
with Mary Ford
|
| 1961 | Jura (I Swear I Love You) | - | - |
US37 (10 weeks) US |
with Mary Ford
|
More singles
- Lover (When You're Near Me)
- How high the moon
- Bye bye blues
- I'm Sitting on Top of the World
Literature / source
- John Sievert: Les Paul . In: Donn Menn (ed.), Guitar Player Presents - Secrets from the Masters , San Francisco, GPI Books, 1992
Web links
- Works by and about Les Paul in the catalog of the German National Library
- Les Paul in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Les Paul Foundation
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jon Pareles: Les Paul, Guitar Innovator, Dies at 94 . In: The New York Times . August 14, 2009, ISSN 0362-4331 , Arts / Music ( nytimes.com [accessed June 9, 2011]).
- ↑ a b Producer & Engineer: Les Paul , SoundonSound from January 2007.
- ↑ Glen Jeanssonne / David Luhrssen, Elvis Presley: Reluctant Rebel , 2011, p. 70.
- ↑ 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. Rolling Stone , December 18, 2015, accessed August 8, 2017 .
- ↑ 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time - David Fricke's Picks. Rolling Stone , December 2, 2010, accessed August 8, 2017 .
- ↑ a b Chart sources: DE US DE / UK / US before 1958
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Paul, Les |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Polsfuss, Lester William (real name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American guitarist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 9, 1915 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Waukesha , Wisconsin, USA |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 13, 2009 |
| Place of death | White Plains , New York, USA |