Today we learned the sad news of Les Paul'spassing; he was 94. Born Lester William Polsfuss in 1915 in Waukesha Wisconsin, he began performing country music semi-professionally at the tender age of 13. By the 1930s he was a well-known jazz guitar player playing with the likes of Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby.
But Les was dissatisfied with the hollow body guitar styles common in the 1930s. He experimented with solid body guitar shapes (one known as the "Log") and much of what he learned he passed along to the Gibson Corporation; in turn they named the guitar most of the world knows him for today in 1952.
That would be a full life by anyone's measure, but his continued experiments with the recording process lead to multi-track recording, tape delay and phasing effects. Truly, if there is one person who has had the greatest impact on how modern music is made and saved, it has to be Les Paul. His recordings made in the 1950s with then wife Mary Ford showed the world the wonders of multi-track over dubs, although one flaw in Les Paul's "Sound On Sound" recording system was that when a new track was over laid on a previous track the original was destroyed. If a mistake was made, Les & Mary would have to start all over again. Mary noted in a wonderful PBS American Masters episode called Chasing Sound that she broke out in tears a time or two while recording. The tears were worth it. Les Paul will forever be the "Wizard Of Waukesha".