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Thursday March 1st, 2001
2001 Technical Grammy Award Recipient Les Paul: The music industry's Ben Franklin
Guitar and recording technology legend Les Paul recently received the 2001 Technical Grammy. Technical Grammy awards are special merit Grammys that are awarded, by vote of the Recording Academy's National Trustees, to individuals and/or companies who have made contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording field.
Following is an exclusive feature written by Hillel Resner for grammy.com. Mr. Resner is the former editor-in-chief and publisher of Mix magazine and currently serves as president of the Mix Foundation for Excellence in Audio, which annually presents the Les Paul Award to a distinguished musical artist.
by Hillel Resner
If the music industry has a Ben Franklin, surely that man is Les Paul. Besides helping to shape American popular music through his brilliant guitar playing and chart-topping records, he also shaped the development of both the guitar itself and the technology of music recording. Not only has the name Les Paul become synonymous with the electric guitar, but multi-track recording -- which has propelled the careers of everyone from the Beatles to 'N Sync -- literally began in Les's workshop.
Born Lester Polfuss in Waukesha, Wisconsin on June 9, 1915, he taught himself to play guitar and banjo at an early age, and by the time he was a teenager was performing country music as "Red Hot Red" -- a name conferred upon him by his mother. His talent for music was matched early on by a penchant for tinkering -- especially if the results made his music easier for audiences to hear.
By the age of 13, Les had fashioned his first electric guitar, a feat accomplished by jamming a phonograph needle into the top of his Sears Silvertone and amplifying the sound with a telephone mouthpiece connected to a radio. This early experiment would lead in the '30s to the infamous "Log," a radical instrument consisting of a maple four-by-four with two pickups, a metal bridge and an Epiphone guitar neck. The first solid body guitar, it foreshadowed the Les Paul model which Gibson would later introduce to the world -- and which rock and blues guitarists would adopt as their own from the '50s on.
Les Paul's career as a musician has been long and illustrious -- from his early days as a radio performer, to leader of his own Les Paul Trio, to world-famous guitarist and one-half of the act that made him a superstar: Les Paul and Mary Ford. If you were anywhere near a radio in the early 1950s, you could not avoid hearing their hits: "Mocking Bird Hill," "The World is Waiting for the Sunrise," "Tiger Rag," "How High The Moon," "Vaya con Dios." Upbeat, lyrical, swinging music, made even more transcendent by the magic of Les Paul's seminal inventions: "sound-on-sound" and multi-track recording.
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Driven to create a sound that was more than the sum of its physical parts, Paul had begun experimenting in the mid-1940s (the days of direct-to-disc recording) with bouncing takes from one recording lathe to another, adding a new instrumental or vocal part each time to create a montage of sound. The result was the hit record "Lover," (1948) featuring eight guitar parts played in harmony. When, shortly thereafter, his friend Bing Crosby brought him one of Ampex's new Model 300 mono tape recorders, Les had an inspiration that would change recording forever.
"I must have had the machine a couple of hours when it dawned on me that I could put a fourth head on the son-of-a-gun," Paul recalls, "and I got the tape delay, the sound-on-sound, and the whole damn thing!" It was this innovation, enhanced by the technique of close-miking (also a Les Paul invention) that allowed Paul and Ford to record the multiple parts that gave music listeners a truly new experience.
By 1953, Paul had developed the first 8-track recorder, thus paving the way for the multi-track revolution that continues to this day. In 1976 he received a Grammy for Chester and Lester (Chester being the legendary Chet Atkins), and in 1983 the Academy recognized him for his achievements with a Trustees Award. Now, with the advent of the Technical Grammy, it is only fitting that Les Paul be honored again for his monumental contributions to the art and science of recording. The next time you listen to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, tip your hat to Lester Polfuss.
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