Les Paul Guitars - What Makes Them Special?

The Gibson Les Paul guitar was conceived at the very beginning of electric guitar history and has held its place at the forefront of guitar technology ever since. The two key elements that make the Les Paul guitars special are the vision of Les Paul himself, an eminent guitarist and enthusiastic inventor and the fact that the Gibson guitar company has always held extremely high standards of excellence for its instruments.

Les Paul is often credited with inventing the solid body electric guitar, and his involvement with the Gibson models was more or less just a happy accident. When he was a teenage performer he tried amplifying an ordinary acoustic guitar so that he could be heard by the audience. The feedback that resulted was finally eliminated by attaching the neck of an Epiphone guitar onto a block of wood. This was so strange looking that Les' musical talents were not taken seriously so he attached wings to the side of the wood so that it resembled a conventional guitar shape.

The moving force behind the financial and artistic success of the Les Paul guitar was the desire of the Gibson Guitar Corporation to market a solid body model electric guitar under the name of an established guitarist. By this time, the early 1950's, Les Paul was the most popular electric guitar player of the time. It would be a great triumph for Gibson to snare the endorsement of this guitarist who had conceived and made his own electric guitar which had become the basis for a solid electric guitar sold by his friend, Leo Fender. Eventually, after recommending some changes to the appearance of the new Gibson guitar, Les Paul allowed it to be released under his name.

There are a couple of design elements that stand out in the Les Paul range of guitars. The strings on a Les Paul guitar are mounted "hollow body style" on top of the guitar instead of passing through the body as is common with other brands of solid body guitars. This is merely a stylistic distinction, not affecting the sound of the guitar. The characteristic warm tone of the Les Paul guitars is due to the types of wood chosen by Gibson for these models. As we should expect from a guitar endorsed by the man whose own guitar design was nicknamed "the log", Les Paul guitars are also heavier and thicker than other solid body guitars. Both Les Paul and the Gibson corporation were fans of starting with substance and piling on heaps of style, so most Les Paul model guitars feature flashy inlays on the neck and headstock.

The Gibson Guitar Corporation has made many models under the Les Paul brand. Featuring names like Classic, Supreme, Standard, Studio Baritone, Studio, Goddess, Menace, New Century, Vixen, Special, Doublecuts and Melody Maker, each one has its own individual sound. Between 1969 and 1979 Gibson even marketed a range of Les Paul bass guitars. The Gibson Les Paul guitars have also been imitated by other companies such as Ibanez and Tokai. The legal wrangles surrounding these attempts at copying Les Paul guitars have only added to their collectibility.

How A Head Cold Got Me Married -- Short Version

Now that I'm settled, I must reflect on my past as a happy-go-lucky single. How can I forget the many times I've misled myself into a man's loving arms, and how much I loved every minute of it?

Why, I squirm as if caught in a velvet trap…well, I could, but my second husband is standing right behind me and might ask me what I'm sitting on.

I loved my first husband, a wonderfully funny Jew whose parents had fled the Holocaust as kids. After a dozen roller-coaster relationships before my first real commitment, he was the only man I ever truly loved (Remigio, don't look over my shoulder!)

Anyway, several years and sanity-defying relationships later, I landed in a seat in front of Him 2 in a Certified Nurse Aide class, next to a perking coffee pot.

My first husband thought he lucked out marrying his attendant. Gary was dying. I fell in love with his stubborn courage. He was the first person who ever needed me. After he died, I had a tragically brief affair. If I write about everything that happened, it'll make an excellent trashy novel.

But Remigio stopped my new single life cold by kicking the back of my chair-HARD! He distracted me from talking to a middle-aged black lady, catching me in the middle of sniffling at her. I had a head cold.

I had been "taking it out" on Grace, who was overweight, casting her sidelong glances and sniffing loudly, while considering fetching her a cup of coffee. The pot was brewing close to me. It would've been hard for her to squeeze between the plastic seats. I began getting her coffee.

Sometimes I added creamer. I stirred it with the plastic stir sticks. She would ask me to add a sugar packet, please. But our relationship was rudely interrupted by the entrance of Remigio's foot through the back of my plastic chair.

Turning around after the "kick-off," I faced a flatly Philippino cold stare. The face, however, reminded me of a Middle-Eastern teacher I'd noticed at Ohio University, back in the 1970s.

I gulped, "So how're you doing?" My Mom told me to be friendly to handsome strangers. And then Remigio smiled back. We got married, and near Christmas day three years later we were blessed by our Princess Angela, nut-brown as her Daddy and sporting my chipmunk cheekbones.

I guess I'd suggest more single ladies try sniffling at people to see whose attention they attract. If so, it helps if you fetch cups of coffee. It soothes people's tired, ruffled feathers.

Be sure and add cream and sugar.