By Sue Baker
The inventor of today’s recording techniques—with multiple ways to manipulate sound—would have been 109 this June 9. That would be Les Paul, the man whose signature is blazoned on the famous Gibson guitar.
When Les Paul lost his hearing in one ear and then the other, he endured multiple surgeries to try to restore his hearing. He ended up wearing two hearing aids, but the quality was not good enough for the Wizard of Waukesha. He was determined to improve the sound.
Les spent the last years of his life experimenting, striving to create the perfect hearing aid. He worked with Marty Garcia of the audio and earphone company Future Sonics to create custom in-ear monitors for when he played onstage.
In his youth Les Paul invented the solid body electric guitar because he wanted to hear just the sound of the guitar strings vibrating, not the vibrations of his hollow body guitar, and he wanted more sustain for the guitar’s notes.
As a teen he began experimenting with constructing guitars in the 1930s. His “Log” guitar was a playable solid 4x4 piece of wood. While he presented the Log guitar to the Gibson company in the early 1940s, it took his diehard persistence to finally convince Gibson to build Les’s dream with the 1952 Gibson Les Paul solid body electric guitar.
When Les’s mother told him everyone playing electric guitars on the radio sounded like him, Les was determined to create a unique sound, one that his mother would recognize immediately, a sound that no one had heard.
It took Les Paul two years of nonstop experimenting, discarding unsatisfactory results and modifying results to make them better than their predecessors.
In 1948, Les Paul introduced his “New Sound.” His persistence had paid off. He had created an otherworldly sound, a sound different from anything else and everyone wanted to know how he did it.
His New Sound introduced his newly developed recording techniques including echo, phase shifting, reverb, sound on sound, and many other techniques that recording artists now use every day.
Les Paul, along with many of his musician friends, suffered from tinnitus. To continue Les’s desire to solve the frustrations of the constant phantom sounds, the Les Paul Foundation provides ongoing funding to Hearing Health Foundation through its Emerging Research Grants program to find better treatments and cures for the condition.
Sue Baker is the program director for the Les Paul Foundation. HHF is very grateful to the Les Paul Foundation for their longtime support of tinnitus research through our Emerging Research Grants program. For more, see the Les Paul Foundation.
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