The Revolutionary Les Paul
Every so often, I go into a frenzy of record cataloging.
This started back in the '80s when I realized I couldn't find anything. It was easy enough
to find a classical recording of a particular work by scanning the shelves (my classical
selection is respectable but not huge), but when it came to pop singles, they were all
over the place.
Some were neatly filed in my wall of 45s, but there were
just as many buried in various LPs (and, to a very small extent in the '80s, in CDs), some
dedicated to the individual artists and filed alphabetically, others stored separately in
various compilation records. There were also a few 78s and a few EPs, all scattered
throughout the collection. Many songs existed in more than one format.
In order to find out what I had and where it was, I began a
systematic listing of all this stuff. When I started, I was working on a first-generation
Mac, and the only way I could proceed was to list everything in the rather primitive
word-processing program I had, and then cut and paste like crazy to get things into order.
The project took more than a year, and was completed in
1987. Ever since, as the collection expanded and the vinyl was gradually replaced by CDs,
I have tried to keep the listing up-to-date, although months -- years, even -- can pass
before I sit down and hit the keyboard.
Computer sophisticates will be amazed to learn that the
listing is still in word-processed form, although as soon as I figure out how to paste the
information into a database without having to enter each item separately, I'll probably
upgrade.
In the meantime, several weekends ago, I decided to catch
up on a year or so of purchases. With a pile of CDs on the desk, and some innocuous music
playing in the background, I began typing.
Sometimes little bits of serendipity occur in the course of
such brainless activity. In this case a song came on the radio that struck a chord with
the disc I happened to be cataloging at the time, and although they were utterly
different, there was a connection.
The song was Cher's single "Believe" and,
whatever you might think of it as a piece of music, it is a marvel of high-tech pop
recording. Special effects and sonic layers abound, and it's easy to imagine the recording
engineer pulling out all the stops in his recording software.
As Cher churned away in the background, I began going
through the recordings of an artist whose effect on popular recording can hardly be
overestimated: guitarist Les Paul.
For one thing, every time a musician -- rock or otherwise
-- picks up an electric guitar, he owes a debt to Les Paul. When he was only a teenager,
he cannibalized a radio headset to make a guitar pickup, and by 1941 had built the first
solid-body electric guitar. The body was an unadorned chunk of lumber, and Paul dubbed it
"The Log." It was the standard from then on.
At first, he kept it to himself, but in 1952, Paul allowed
Gibson to market a commercial version, which is a staple of guitarists the world over to
this day. Paul also developed something called the Les Paul Recording Guitar in the '50s,
but he reserved it for his own use until 1971, when Gibson began to market it as well.
Perhaps even more remarkable was the way Les Paul
revolutionized the way recordings are made. Before his time, the only way to do it was to
assemble all the musicians and singers together in a studio and perform the music in
real-time. Before tape recorders, the result was cut directly into a master disc, but even
after the advent of tape in the late 1940s, techniques changed little.
But Paul -- always an electronic tinkerer -- built a studio
in his garage, where he experimented with multi-layer recording, building the sound track
by track as he accompanied himself over and over. He also experimented with artificial
reverberation, off-speed recording, and a host of other techniques.
The first fruit of all this work, which was mastered on an
acetate disc rather than tape, was a very peculiar recording of the Rodgers and Hart song
"Lover," which used all the instrumental and technical tricks Paul could muster
in the late '40s, and a very strange-sounding (to my ears) recording resulted. It did
convince the record industry that these new techniques were viable, however.
By 1951, Paul had begun a string of hits featuring either
his guitar work alone (but much multiplied), or the layered vocals of his wife and
collaborator, Mary Ford.
For Ford, he also developed a technique of recording with
the microphone close to the singer's mouth, which gave a very different quality from that
of the more distant conventional techniques where the singer really had to project. Such
landmark records as "How High the Moon," "Mockin' Bird Hill," and
"Vaya Con Dios" resulted from this activity.
Originally, the only way to create such multi-layered
recordings was to bounce the sound back and forth between two tape recorders, adding an
instrument or voice with each pass. Now that all this material is available in digital
form, the noise this technique created is quite apparent (I didn't notice it on the
original 78s I bought back then). Ultimately, Paul overcame that limitation by developing
a new tape recorder that had eight side-by-side tracks, which reduced the amount of
old-style "overdubbing" considerably.
Multitracking didn't catch on immediately; the first
notable rock hit to be made using such a machine was Bobby Darin's "Splish
Splash" of 1958. A decade later, virtually all rock records, and some in other genres
-- even classical -- were made this way, on machines with up to 24 tracks.
There aren't many people who can claim to have changed
fundamentally both the way music is made and the way it's recorded. Les Paul is one of
them.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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