Listen to a delicate, measured Mozart composition on piano, and then put on Beethovenâs brooding Fifth Symphony, with its dramatic, sustained âDa-da-da-daaaaaaaâŚâ
They couldnât be more different, and yet it was more than the sensibilities of the artists to account for the differences. It was also technology, because the dramatic sustained note of Beethovenâs piece wasnât possible until 18th-century inventors, such as Gottfried Silbermann and Johann Stein, came up with a device known as a damper pedal, which allowed pianists to let piano strings vibrate over a sustained period of time.
Jump ahead a couple hundred years in music history, and youâll find inventors tweaking musical instruments in the mid-20th century to create equally dramatic effects, and perhaps one of the most important of them was Lester William Polsfussâbetter known to the world as Les Paul.
Les Paulâs brilliance emerged early, when, at only eight years old, he started playing music on the harmonica, then taught himself how to play banjo and guitar. However, frustrated that he could only play one instrument at a time, he invented a neck-brace to hold his harmonica to his mouth while he strummed his guitar.
He was not yet a teenager, yet he had invented a device that helped such later artists as Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen become household names.
By the time he was 25, he turned his attention to re-inventing the guitar. Early attempts to increase the volume of guitars had been made by others to turn acoustic guitars into modified electric, hybrid instruments, but Les Paul wasnât satisfied with their sound. He wanted a fully electric guitar that didnât depend on acoustic resonance.
The result came to be known as âThe Logâ because it was little more than a length of 4×4 lumber with strings, frets, and electric pickups mounted to it. Although it was about as ugly and ungainly as it sounds, The Log proved that guitar music could be played without an acoustic âboxâ to amplify the sound of vibrating strings.
And the rest was history.
Solid-body electric guitars revolutionized the world of music by the mid-1950âs, and a new art form was bornâRock and Roll music. Today there are several body styles of electric guitars available, but perhaps the most beautiful and prized style of all is known as the Les Paul guitar, manufactured by the Gibson guitar company. It has been played by virtually all the electric guitar greats, from Eric Clapton and Pete Townsend to Jimi Hendrix and Chuck Berry.
But Les Paul wasnât finished innovating, because he also pioneered the art of multi-track recording, which allowed recorded music to be âlayeredâ one track at a time. For the first time in music history, songs could be recorded anywhere, without the need of large recording studios roomy enough to house all the musicians playing at one time. A symphony could now be recorded in your living room, with only one musician playing at a time.
Virtually all recorded music today is laid down in multiple tracks, which allows studio technicians to âtweakâ the end result by increasing or decreasing the sound of a single track in the overall mix, or even to delete an unsatisfactory track and re-record it, blending it seamlessly into the mix later on.
In 1948, when Paul was only 33 years old, his right arm was horribly mangled in an automobile accident, and doctors wanted to amputate the arm. Paul refused, for it would mean the end of his guitar-playing days. The doctors informed him that they could save the arm, but only if the elbow were fused into one position for the rest of his life.
âCan I pick the position?â Paul asked.
When he was told that he could do so, Paul asked for his arm to be set permanently in a âguitar playingâ posture, bent at almost 90 degrees.
And that is the way his arm was set, allowing Les Paul to continue to play guitar all the way until his death at age 94, on August 13, 2009.
It was the least you would expect from a man so dedicated to music that he would re-invent his own arm, just to keep the music going.
