https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqwVGsmxFec

Les Paul’s name is eternalized by guitar fans and music technology nerds alike for the impact that he had on guitar-forward music, and sound recording techniques in general. His signature guitar, the Gibson Les Paul, was the primary electric guitar of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, Guns N’ Roses’ Slash, Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, Neil Young, Bob Marley, and me. His name is ubiquitous in the world of rock music, but Paul’s background is substantially influenced by jazz. 

Les Paul was born as Lester William Polsfuss in 1915 in Waukesha, Wisconsin. After a piano teacher reportedly told his mom that he’d never be able to properly learn music, he picked up a guitar, banjo, and harmonica, and started playing with Midwestern country bands in his town as a teenager (Pareles, 2009). He found recognition with those country groups. They performed on WLS (World’s Largest Store) in the mid 1930s, which was the Sears-owned radio station that broadcast a program called National Barn Dance, one of the most popular country radio programs of the decade (Hautzinger, 2019.). Still, as he explained in a 1996 interview with NPR, he was more into jazz music from artists like Earl Hines and Coleman Hawkins (Cole, 2009). 

He was also listening to guitar players like Django Reinhardt and Eddie Lang, who played single-note solo lines that worked like a horn’s melody, rather than strumming chords behind a band, as was typical of jazz music in the 30s and 40s (Pareles, 2009). He was inspired and started playing both country and jazz at the same time, performing under the name “Rhubarb Red” for his country acts, and “Les Paul” for his jazz music (Library of Congress, 2019). Because the appetite for jazz music from the general public of Wisconsin was low, he would end up earning multiples more on the weeks that he performed country music than when he played primarily jazz (Cole, 2009). This background in less commercial music, and willingness to take chances in pursuit of passion, is foundational to his developments in guitar and recording technology. 

In the early 1940s, Paul put strings and two pickups on a wooden board attached to a guitar neck. He called it “the Log,” and it was one of the first solid-body electric guitars ever made, and arguably the most influential one (Pareles, 2009). The guitar had no acoustic resonance on the body alone, unlike the semi hollow body guitars that musicians like Reinhardt were playing, so “the Log” was meant entirely to be plugged into an amplifier. He paused this technological craftwork when he got drafted for the military in 1942 for World War II, where he served in the Armed Forces Radio Service (Pareles, 2009). His reputation started getting more widespread, and when he was discharged he performed with popular acts such as the Andrews Sisters, Nat King Cole, and Bing Crosby. Together with Crosby he recorded “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” in 1945, which became a number one hit, and Crosby was the person who encouraged Paul to build a music studio in his garage in LA (Library of Congress, 2019; Pareles, 2009). 

That home studio was where Paul recorded “Lover,” a Rodgers and Hart song that he reinterpreted using revolutionary recording techniques. The original song by Rodgers and Hart was written for the 1932 film Love Me Tonight as a waltz (Rodgers & Hart, 1932). Paul’s version has no vocal, using instead electric guitars throughout the song that mirror the lead melody lines, but abandoned the sentimental Broadway-style waltz and used it as the basis for a high speed, electronically integrated song. The most immediately notable quality about “Lover” is that Les Paul recorded all instrument parts himself using a recording technique called “overdubbing” (Gross, 2015). Overdubbing is the process of recording a new musical part on top of previously recorded music, usually listening to the already recorded music through headphones to prevent microphone bleed. In a 1992 interview, Paul explains that “Lover” was not the first time that he overdubbed, as he’d been experimenting with it since 1933. As a boy he would also punch holes in his mom’s player piano rolls to add parts (Gross, 2015). The idea behind overdubbing his music in the 40s was so that Paul could keep on recording full arrangements even after his band went home, so the writing process didn’t have to end just because he was alone. 

Paul started “Lover” by recording one part on an acetate disc machine, then listening back on headphones while simultaneously recording a new part. An external custom mixer would then layer the playback of the first disc with the part that Paul was actively tracking, and the product of the two would get “printed” onto a second acetate disc machine (Pareles, 2009). He would bounce back and forth between both acetate disc machines until all parts were recorded, keeping in mind that each new bounce of the previous disc playback would slightly degrade its sound quality. To make the difference in sound quality less obvious, he recorded the rhythm section instruments first, since they functioned more as supporting roles than focal points (Kane, 2011, p. 217). He saved the topline melody tracks for last, since they would be the recordings least damaged by repeated overdubbing and bouncing, and that was where the listeners’ attention would be drawn. Basically, instruments were recorded in order of least to most important in terms of what Paul felt valuable to be hearing in highest fidelity (Kane, 2011, p. 217). 

Beyond simply overdubbing and bouncing though, what made “Lover” particularly mindblowing to listeners in the late 40s and early 50s, and even still, is how certain instruments were sped-up or slowed-down for effects. When a guitar drops an octave, it halves in speed, and jumps an octave when doubled in speed. In either case though, the harmonics from the original recording of the guitar are attached to the edited versions. What that means is that the recording of the sped-up guitar sounds brighter, fuller, and clearer than if it was simply played an octave higher on the neck, because it has a different harmonic composition than if the part was actually performed an octave higher. Similarly, a slowed-down guitar meant to access the same pitches that a bass guitar can, does not sound exactly like a bass, since it maintains the timbral and harmonic qualities of the guitar. Paul leaned into this effect and recorded the bass part in “Lover” with a slowed down electric guitar. He had recorded the drums and rhythm guitar parts first, so when he overdubbed the “bass” part on top, he sped up the disc to double speed so that the entire rhythm section sounded fast and pitched up (Gross, 2015). Then, he recorded the bass part on an electric guitar, twice as fast as it would sound at the original speed, so that when he bounced the product and returned it to the original tempo, the guitar part sounded pitched down like a bass. For the topline melody and solo section played on guitar, he did the opposite. He slowed down the previously recorded parts to half speed, and played the entire guitar part alongside it, so that when he bounced the product and returned it to the original speed, the guitar melody sounded fast and unnaturally high pitched (Gross, 2015). 

The sped up guitars sound especially inorganic because they reach notes that don’t exist on a traditional guitar neck, whereas the slowed down guitar operates in the same range as a typical bass. For about the first minute of the song, the melody is played by what sounds like just one sped up guitar, accompanied by drums, walking bass, and rhythm guitar in 6/8. Then at minute 1:06, the song erupts into an impossibly fast-paced solo section with multiple overdubbed guitars playing the same part. Because Paul tracked the guitars while the rest of the recording was slowed down, once he sped the song back up to its original tempo, the guitars moved at a speed that he wouldn’t have been able to perform live with the same clarity. The combination of unnaturally high pitched and fast moving guitars give the impression that the song isn’t even trying to sound realistic, and listening to it today those guitars sound closer to synthesizers in a mario kart theme song than they do to physical instruments. The pitched down guitar, on the other hand, is functioning as a walking bass that sounds similar to early 1940s jazz songs like Earl Hines & His Orchestra’s “Easy Rhythm” from 1940. That bass part is even more impressive than the lead guitar after understanding that Les Paul played it at double speed when he tracked it. 

When Paul released “Lover” in 1948, part of the marketing strategy was making the audience aware that he tracked all the instruments himself, but in explaining his process he was not transparent about the use of overdubbing or how he achieved the pitched-up sounds (Kane, 2011, pp. 218-219). He planted disinformation on various interviews about how the guitar sounds were recorded, attributing them on one of his 15 minute segments of NBC’s 1950 The Les Paul Show to a small guitar tuned an octave high (Kane, 2011, pp. 218-219). Other shows posited that he played seven guitars at one, or that a magic box called the “Les Paulverizer” made the recording possible. “Lover” is the seventh track on Paul’s 1950 LP The New Sound, which has a cartoon of him on the cover with multiple arms each playing a guitar. The album’s liner notes say that Paul plays eight guitars at once and how he does it is his secret (Kane, 2011, p. 220). The goal was to create a myth or at least mystique around the song and Paul’s techniques in general to keep the audience engaged and curious, but by the late 1940s, there were at least some music fans who were aware of the possibilities of overdubbing. In 1931, the RCA Victor label reported that their artist Lawrence Tibbett sang both the baritone and tenor part in The Cuban Love Song (Kane, 2011, p. 229). In 1941, Sidney Bechet played both the lead and rhythm parts on “The Sheik of Araby,” and in 1946, Nelson Eddy sang every voice in a Disney film segment. There were at least a few more examples from the 30s-40s of overdubbing that predated Les Paul’s recording. 

The novelty of “Lover” was the sound of high pitched and hyperspeed guitars that seemed impossible to match with live performance. While all of the other examples of overdubbing before him could have feasibly and easily been performed live with another person assuming the part that the artist had overdubbed, “Lover” was different in that it could not be replicated live. The notes that the lead guitar reaches at the speed it plays was not intended to be replicated in a live performance, and the song is therefore meant to be experienced solely as a recording. That intention reframes the concept of recording in general. Recording was largely treated throughout the 1940s as a technology meant to capture live performance and replicate it in the highest fidelity possible to represent the performance of the initial source. Les Paul subverted that general perception by treating the process of recording as its own artistic medium with the capacity to make a product that exists in its own atmosphere and conditions (Schmidt Horning, 2013). 

“Lover” doesn’t sound like it was recorded by a bunch of musicians playing together in the same room, and there isn’t an obvious atmosphere or space beyond the notes that was common of most studio recordings. When most musicians at the time were relying on their performance being captured and distributed through records as a means of promoting their live shows, “Lover” is a unique instance in which the product is only the recording itself. With a background in jazz music and a conflicting public artistic persona as a country artist, Paul had experience straddling his artistic and career interests. By relying on his proficiency and open mindedness as a jazz musician, and also his understanding of marketing and music distribution, Paul was able to catapult his inventiveness in music recording to a mainstream audience. The legacy of that is still obvious especially today, when the majority of popular music is made without regard for live creation with instrumentalists, and instead treats each song as its own creative product. “Lover” is the blueprint for so many artists that treat the music studio as its own instrument with its own creative capacities that go beyond live performance, and expand the meaning of recorded music. 

Citations

Cole, T. (2009, August 13). Guitar legend and innovator Les Paul dies [Radio broadcast transcript]. NPR. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/111845182

Gross, T. (Host). (2015, June 9). Remembering Les Paul, on what would have been his 100th birthday [Radio broadcast transcript]. In Fresh Air. NPR. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/413167563

Hautzinger, D. (2019, August 14). When Chicago was a center of country music. WTTW. https://www.wttw.com/playlist/2019/08/14/wls-national-barn-dance

Kane, B. (2011). Acousmatic fabrications: Les Paul and the “Les Paulverizer.” Journal of Visual Culture, 10(2), 212–231. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412911402892

Library of Congress, Music Division. (2019). Les Paul papers [Finding aid]. https://findingaids.loc.gov/repositories/15/resources/1473

Pareles, J. (2009, August 13). Les Paul, guitar innovator, dies at 94. The New York Times.

Rodgers, R., & Hart, L. (1932). Lover [Sheet music]. Famous Music.

Schmidt Horning, S. (2013). Chasing sound: Technology, culture, and the art of studio recording from Edison to the LP. Johns Hopkins University Press.