Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The guitar player and inventor Les Paul died on August 13th, 2009 at age 94. He influenced my life in several ways and continues to influence the lives of others in an American family. For information on Les Paul, start at the Wikipedia article.

It was the summer of 1975. I was attending a Jazz Band camp at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. In an afternoon session, a saxophone player was demonstrating the use of electronics in jazz. He had an array of analog electronic devices that altered the sound of his saxophone.

The one device that caught my ear and eye comprised a small loop of magnetic recording tape. The sax player would record five or ten seconds of himself playing a background riff. The loop of tape would play that riff over and over while the sax player would improvise. This was so simple – a loop of tape. This was so powerful – a background played over and over. A musician could practice improvisation – the heart of the original American art form – for hours alone.

The looping device that the saxophone player demonstrated  on that blistering Louisiana summer day was a descendant of an innovation by Les Paul. The same could be said for the vast majority of electrical and electronic devices used in music today.

I didn’t know the name Les Paul or anything about him. What I did know was that I liked music and now liked electronics related to music. I looked around for a college major that would get me into both. I settled on something called Electrical Engineering. I had big plans for what I would do with music and Electrical Engineering. None of them came to fruition. Instead, I fell into computers as a subset of Electrical Engineering. I eventually graduated with a Bachelor, Master, and PhD in Electrical Engineering. Three degrees, several  books, and over a hundred published papers came out of that afternoon mesmerized by a Les Paul innovation.

Thirty summers later, my second teenage son wanted an electric guitar for his birthday. He ordered it from Guitar Center and waited six months because it was back ordered several times. It was blue instead of some other color, and blue was in short supply and high demand that year. It finally arrived with the name Les Paul on the label (an Epiphone, not a Gibson, but still a Les Paul).

My third teenage son became enamored with the guitar and music. He is now in his junior year of college as a music major. He has a dozen different electronic devices to supplement his guitar, bass, and his own band of friends from high school. One of his devices is an all-digital “looper.” Funny how they still refer to that simple yet powerful little loop of magnetic recording tape that I saw in the summer of 1975. This son often makes multi-track recordings on his laptop computer. Les Paul invented the multi-track recording technique.

Les Paul’s innovations enabled something called Rock n Roll (a mixed blessing 😉 and forever altered the courses of popular music, jazz, and just about every other kind of music today. He also influenced the paths taken by two generations of one American family. For that, I am grateful.