Thursday, August 13, 2009

Les Paul dead

The most influential guitarist ever---Les Paul died yesterday, at his age of 94. Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as an inventor, He played guitar with leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby.
In the 1930s he began experimenting with guitar amplification, and by 1941 he had built what was probably the first solid-body electric guitar, although there are other claimants. With his electric guitar and the vocals of his wife, Mary Ford, he used overdubbing, multitasks recording and new electronic effects to create a string of hits in the 1950s.
Mr. Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock ’n’ roll. For all his technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose main goal, he often said, was to make people happy and to change the way people saw the guitar.
All along, he refined musical inventions in his workshop. He was an early designer of an electric guitar that had a solid body, and his model managed to reduce sound distortions common to acoustic instruments. He did leave us is famous electric guitar named after him, which can fit the entire requirement above, became one of the favorite guitars of musicians. He actively promoted such guitars for the Gibson company, and the Les Paul line of guitars became commonplace among such musicians as Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend and Jimmy Page.
Les Paul’s devotion to music is more than that, was a visionary, a genius, a pioneer and a legend, far more than I can tell.

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