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Re: Les Paul



At 05:07 PM 11/23/2002, Richard Zvonar wrote:
>And so myths are born...
>
>I have it from a reliable source that Les Paul's "Paulverizer" was 
>nothing 
>more than a Nakamichi cassette deck controlled by a Play/Pause button 
>mounted on the guitar. All the playback material had been recorded in 
>advance, so when he'd demonstrate the "live" overdubbing he'd perform the 
>passage that he'd already recorded in advance, play back the tape and 
>play 
>a new part along with it, and so on. He was pretty slick about it so most 
>people never caught on, but there was one performance where he sang along 
>with the guitar parts and when he played it back it was Bing Crosby's 
>voice!

That's funny.

I also saw a story from Les Paul where in his radio programs of the early 
50's the sound effect tricks supposedly created by his invention called 
the 
"Les Paulverizer" was in fact a hoax and there was no such device. But 
then 
when he had to go on tour a few years later, he really did need to invent 
something to pull it off. I haven't seen anything that really described 
what that "Les Paulverizer" he invented actually was.

I was poking around looking for more info on Les Paul since this came up. 
He gets credited with all sorts of inventions that he didn't invent. I 
think some of that is caused from others who are either clueless or 
exaggerating for their own reasons, but some of it seems to source from 
Paul himself. It's very difficult to distinguish between what is real, 
what 
is based in fact but exaggerated to various degrees, and what is complete 
nonsense. He's certainly a great and legendary musician, and was obviously 
fascinated with some technologies for music creation and recording long 
before a lot of folks picked up on them. And he probably did innovate some 
things with recording technology that hadn't been done before.

He comes across as a nice old fellow with a lot of great stories to tell, 
and he's good at telling them. I found a nice recorded interview here:

http://smithsonianassociates.org/programs/paul/paul.htm

But some of the stories sound a little bit fishy. It's always a good story 
and fun to listen to, but there are rarely any dates, the other people 
involved aren't around anymore, and when you see the same story elsewhere, 
the details seem to change each time. What's real and what's not? Probably 
nobody will ever know, although I guess it doesn't cause much harm to 
enjoy 
the mythology just for the entertainment of it. He's very entertaining to 
listen to. He seems to come from an old-school show business ideal of 
leading the audience on to believe what they want to believe for the 
purpose of entertainment. His audience seems to happily go along with it. 
Nobody has to know what really goes on behind the curtain.

For example, in looking around I saw that he either:
- invented the electric guitar
- invented the electric solidbody guitar
- had the complete idea of the electric solidbody and convinced the 
clueless Gibson company to make it
- had a sketchy idea of it that Gibson built upon without much conviction 
and to their surprise were very successful
- had a sketchy idea of it that Gibson ignored because they were already 
making one, but then the asked him to endorse it so his huge popularity of 
the time could get their sales going. They let him claim to be the 
inventor 
since it helped the sales pitch.

 From when I worked at Gibson, the latter seems to be closer to the truth 
as I understood from others there. There seemed to be an attitude that Les 
was a nice old fellow who had done some good for the company, and 
therefore 
should be treated well and shown respect, but there was also an attitude 
that it sure would be nice if they didn't have to pay him royalties for 
his 
"invention" anymore. I remember one key r&d guy who apparently had to deal 
with him a lot as saying, "according to Les Paul, he invented everything."

So was he looping or not? It would be interesting to ask him directly 
about 
it. At least you would get a good story. It seems possible to me that he 
did try out those ideas at some time, since it seems he really did 
experiment with tape recording a lot and was using the basic tape delay 
principles. It also seems entirely possible that he was not looping at 
all, 
but gave the impression that he was because that was more entertaining. 
 From the audience's perspective that would still be looping, wouldn't it? 
They would believe it was looping, so that would have been effectively 
popularizing the concept, even if he was fooling them. Certainly among an 
older pre-rock-n-roll generation I've heard much mention of the Les 
Paulverizer when the idea of looping is brought up. Since Les Paul's 
popularity faded rapidly as rock became popular, that could certainly 
explain the disconnect since "younger" people don't know who he is.

But even if his looping was "trickery", a lot of people today use that 
same 
trick of triggering prerecorded backing samples in real-time to play along 
with and manipulate as part of what they call "looping." So it's still a 
pretty innovative trick. Or to think of it another way, if what he 
actually 
did was not a pioneering use of "looping", then it was a pioneering and 
popularizing use of "sampling". Either way, he gets credit with something.

kim


______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                     | Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com    | http://www.loopers-delight.com