About 80 years ago, guitarist and inventor Les Paul built a home recording studio in his Hollywood garage on North Curson Avenue and began developing his “new sound,” which incorporated cutting-edge recording techniques such as overdubbing, close miking, echo and delay.
Dissatisfied with the quality of the day’s commercial recordings, Paul, who’d worked with pop stars including Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, and was a guitar virtuoso and bandleader, endeavored to push the practice forward — to make recording a kind of erudite art form. His instrumental single “Lover” became the first commercial pop record to incorporate multiple layers of music, all of which were performed by Paul’s dexterous fingers. “Sextuplet guitar-ing,” Billboard magazine declared in its Feb. 21, 1948, review, “… technique so good it’s ridiculous.”
Today, a new studio in Hollywood celebrates the former Angeleno’s legacy as a recording pioneer. Over the last three years, the Les Paul Foundation and a team of engineers have gone to extraordinary lengths to build the Les Paul Recording Studio, housed in United Recording on Sunset Boulevard. The facility includes Paul’s original equipment, such as the first-ever multitrack Ampex tape machine and multitrack recording console, as well as a selection of Paul’s customized guitars, including his namesake model for Gibson.
Paul’s recording equipment is monumental for its historical value but also because it still works. “We have the Wright Brothers’ plane in there and it actually flies,” said Michael Braunstein, executive director of the Les Paul Foundation, by way of comparison. The new studio is essentially a rare hands-on museum where students and commercial artists may study and perform the same techniques Paul employed, using his tools.
Los Angeles-based musician Dweezil Zappa interviewed Paul on MTV in 1987, which created a fondness between the pair. During a phone call from the road — Zappa was on a tour celebrating his father’s album “Apostrophe” — he explained the importance of Paul’s innovations. “He was so far ahead of the game in so many ways, not only as a great guitar player, but also how he figured out ways to record music live,” he said. “The foundation of the sound capture is still better than anything else that you would find today. The products that were put into use and the way that it was machined … it’s unmatched.”
Zappa says he’s visited the new studio and intends to use it to record some of his own music after his tour concludes. The studio also has an educational mission.
“This is also a real opportunity for students to learn about analog recording from the master,” said Steve Rosenthal, a Grammy-winning producer who serves as the head archivist and music producer for the Les Paul Foundation. Rosenthal’s also known for his Manhattan recording studio the Magic Shop, which closed in 2016, where he worked with David Bowie, Lou Reed, Sonic Youth, Ramones and many others.
Tom Camuso, director of audio engineering at the Les Paul Recording Studio, is photographed in Hollywood on May 15.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Groups from Carnegie Mellon University and Syracuse University have already participated in seminars at the studio led by Rosenthal and Tom Camuso, a Grammy-winning engineer who’s also the Les Paul Foundation’s director of audio engineering. “The console looks like it’s from a battleship, and we let students record on it and see how hard it is compared to today’s digital audio workstations,” Camuso explained. “The connection they make is that this is where it started, this is the first of all of it.”
The idea for the studio began in 2022 amid Rosenthal’s quest to source, organize, curate and restore Paul’s vast catalog of music from the Library of Congress archives. “It became clear to me that the best solution would be to mix the music on Les’ original gear,” he said. He brought in Camuso, a longtime associate who’d worked at the Magic Shop, and the pair endeavored to repair the eight-track recording console nicknamed “The Monster” that Paul built with engineer Rein Narma, which featured leading-edge in-line equalization and vibrato effects.
They also retrieved Paul’s Ampex 5258 Sel-Sync multitrack tape machine, familiarly known as the Octopus, which sits alongside the console, and was the first-ever eight-track. The studio also has a three-track machine that was in Paul’s home in Mahwah, N.J., which he used to play tapes recorded at other studios. At the time, Paul was the only person with eight-track capabilities. “That was his way of communicating with the outside world, so to speak,” Camuso said.
The first-ever multitrack tape machine, called “The Octopus,” resides at the Les Paul Recording Studio in Hollywood.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
The equipment was in varying stages of disrepair, and there was no documentation accompanying it. Many of the recording console’s wires had been cut, and some of its modules were missing. Camuso and a group from Thump Recording Studios in Brooklyn spent 10 months replacing and repairing pieces that were missing or had failed, without changing anything about the way the machine was originally made. “We had to source old stock parts from the ’50s,” Camuso said, “and there were little plastic pieces that had disintegrated. The team would drum scan those and then 3D print them in their original form.” An Ampex expert from Canada broke down the tape machines and then rebuilt them from the ground up, exactly as they were when Paul used them.
Before he used the multitrack tape machine and recording console, Paul’s early experiments with overdubbing, or what he called “sound on sound,” involved two recording-cutting lathes, a record player, a mixer and hundreds of blank wax discs, all of which he used to layer tracks manually. In 1948, Bing Crosby gave Paul his first mono Ampex recorder, to which Paul added a second playback head, which enabled him to record multiple tracks on the same reel of tape. He and his second wife, Mary Ford, took this machine on the road, recording their songs in hotel rooms and in apartments.
Ford was a skilled singer with perfect pitch who could execute lead vocals and harmonize with herself in very few takes using Paul’s early version of multitracking, which was revolutionary but primitive and didn’t allow for mistakes. Given the analog nature of Paul’s setup, she had to sing everything live and unmanipulated. The pair recorded a string of 28 hit singles between 1950 to 1957, beginning with a cover of the jazz standard “How High the Moon.” They were so popular that Listerine sponsored a widely syndicated television show, “Les Paul & Mary Ford at Home,” during which they performed their intricate songs live.
A photograph of Les Paul inside his recording studio in New Jersey is displayed at the Les Paul Recording Studio in Hollywood.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“Their discs sell like dimes going for a nickel,” Florabel Muir reported in the Los Angeles Mirror in January 1952. The pair’s “Vaya Con Dios” spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Best Sellers in Stores chart (which was discontinued in favor of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1958). Paul and Ford’s sultry version of “Smoke Rings,” released in 1952, features in Todd Haynes’ 2015 film “Carol.”
“The only singer I’ve encountered in my life who can compare to Mary is Aretha Franklin,” said Gene Paul, Les’ son from his first marriage, who became a recording engineer for Atlantic Records. “Neither one of them ever hit a bad note. You couldn’t pay them to.” The younger Paul learned about recording in his father’s home studio in Mahwah and played drums in his touring band from 1959 to 1969. “It took me years after my dad died to realize he was a genius,” he added. “Yes, he had a studio in his house, and built his own guitar and his own eight-track, but I thought every dad did this.”
Rosenthal and Camuso are in the process of restoring Paul’s original recordings, including his hits with Ford. The pair is using demixing and speed correction software to create new stereo mixes of the songs, which don’t have any of the crunchiness or distortion that were a byproduct of Paul’s original experiments in multitracking. It’ll be the first time any of Paul’s music has been released in stereo. The project has created a library of multitrack stems, which is another singular feature of the new studio. “Lana Del Rey could come in and sing with Mary Ford, or she could sing ‘A Fool to Care’ with the original Les Paul guitar parts,” Rosenthal said.
Guitars on display inside the Les Paul Recording Studio in Hollywood.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Camuso says a number of famous musicians have already expressed interest in using the new studio. “There’s lots of people who would be in your record collection for sure,” he said. Its historical significance and superior sound quality is a major draw, but the Les Paul Recording Studio also provides a chance for musicians to work more intentionally. Though its equipment was once cutting-edge, by today’s digital standards — in which there are unlimited tracks and effects and every mistake is erasable — Paul’s console and tape machines are limited. To work with them, musicians must think about what they want to record ahead of time. “The average person may not know what they’re hearing, but they will feel it because the performances will be better,” Zappa pointed out.
He views the new studio as a welcome counterpart to the too-perfect sonic monotony that can occur from every commercial recording artist using the same software. “There’s just so much music that’s disposable today,” Zappa added. “We’ve never had as many amazing tools to make stuff, and then have it be used in the lamest way possible.”