Gibson Les Paul guitars are by far the greatest and the most acoustic instruments of all time. The creator of these wonderful electric guitars are none other than the legendary guitarist Les Paul. Apart from being an established musician, Paul was quite an innovator too. His innovative concepts like sound on sound, over dubbing and multi tracking are a milestone in the history of music.

Lester William Polfuss, known commonly as Les Paul, was born on 9th of June in the year 1915 in Waukesha locality of Wisconsin. Paul began to take music lessons when he was very young. When he was in Barstow school, he saw a ditch digger playing harmonica, which he picked up immediately. Later on he started his own band and played for private dances and beach parties. He had a brief sojourn with banjo before he moved to guitars. He later designed his own guitar, the Les junior guitars.

When he started playing guitar, he was not very satisfied with the electric guitars that were available during the 30s. So he started making his own variations and designs. “The log”, one of his famous creation, was a fence post of length 4″x4″ with pickup, bridge and guitar’s neck fixed to it. To give it a feel and the look, he used the hollow guitar body of Epiphone sewn over the log. There were two problems he faced earlier, the feedback and the sustainability, which was taken care after using the guitar body. He conducted his experiments with guitars for sometime. Later he presented his views on designing an electric guitar to Gibson company in the year 1940. There wasn’t much enthusiasm or welcome for his ideas initially. Only in the 50s, did the Gibson company take some interest in the prototype presented by Paul.

The first of the Gibson Les Paul guitar was produced and marketed in 1952. Paul had suffered an injury in his arm due to an accident. But he was still on the career high, when the first of the Les Paul electric guitars, were released into the market. He collaborated with Chet Atkins to make an album of instrumental duets in the year 1977. He had to slow down his pace owing to some heart related issues. It was in 1988, when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame for Rock and Roll.

The Fat Tuesday club in the hub of New York saw a regular appearance of Paul on every Monday night in 1984. The late 80s saw Paul making active performances every week in the city of New York. The 48th annual Grammy awards awarded Les Paul with two Grammys for the album “Les Paul & Friends: American Made World Played” in 2006. Paul was 90 years when he received this award. He still gives performances with John Colianni on piano at the Broadway’s Iridium Jazz Club in New York. This is in spite of the fact that except for two, all his fingers in the left hand are stilled with arthritis.

Paul is seen making performances occasionally even now. He was not only a big influence in the designing of junior electric guitars but is also the brains behind concepts like echo effects, reverberation techniques and multiple track recording.

Do you want more information on Les Paul? Paul’s Guitars has great information on History of Gibson Les Paul. It also has great information on buying a Les Paul Electric guitar. Also if you are buying a les paul guitar you need to be careful to ensure your not buying a Fake Les Paul guitar, which have saturated the guitar market.

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