Les was more -- a lot more

Writing about music, rock star Elvis Costello once said, is like dancing about architecture.

So you can see our predicament in penning an editorial to memorialize phenomenal musician and inventor Les Paul.

The simplest thing would be simply to ask readers to treat themselves to the recordings of Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Chet Atkins or Duane Allman, to name a scant few masters of the electric guitar. All of those men are Paul's musical descendants.

Paul didn't invent the solid-body electric guitar, but he was one of its pioneers, building one in the late 1930s out of little more than a 4-by-4 chunk of lumber. But that piece of wood became the springboard into 20th-century musical innovation.

Paul's work in the recording studio developed such innovations as multitrack recording, overdubbing and tape delay. It's not too far of a stretch to say that if you just listened to a piece of recorded music, that music was made possible in some way by the work of Les Paul.

The electronic sophistication of musical recording made leaps and bounds since the days of Thomas Edison, but the basic concept remained the same -- musicians crowding around a microphone that would pick up the sound as well as possible.

Paul changed all that. With his innovations, music could be recorded in separate tracks, and layered and manipulated to produce effects that are industry standards today.

Couple his technical prowess with the seeming ubiquity of the electric guitar and, well -- what tune on the radio these days hasn't been touched in some way by the legendary Les Paul?