1976 Gibson Les Paul Recording | CME Vintage Demos

Transcription Summary:

This Video discusses the Gibson Les Paul Recording guitar, focusing particularly on its unique pickups and features. The main distinction of this guitar lies in its low impedance pickups, which differ from traditional high impedance guitars pickups. Low impedance is also characteristic of high-quality recording microphones, aligning the guitar's signal with recording devices. This design, conceptualized by Les Paul, aimed for a clean recording sound by directly matching the guitar's impedance with the recording device, bypassing the need for an amplifier and microphone setup. The guitar also features a high/low output switch, allowing it to function with a standard amplifier or a low impedance input preamp like a mic preamp or console. Other notable features include the "decade" switch, which affects tone in low impedance mode and is related to electronic audio measurements, and the "phase" sound, described as a unique tonal quality. The transcript highlights that the Les Paul Recording was favored by Les Paul himself, noting specific variations and colors of the model, and touches on design preferences related to fret placement.

Full Transcription:
"So hi folks, so we've got the Les Paul Recording here. There's a lot going on here that I don't really know much about, but you do. I know a little bit, yeah. So I can certainly try to help decipher some of this stuff out. Okay, where's the best place to start? The reason why this has so many of these things anyway is because the thing that makes it really special is the pickups, so let's start there if that's okay with you. Think of it this way: pickups are normally high impedance; these are low impedance. So the main thing you should know is that these are different from traditional pickups, but we should understand a little bit more than that. A microphone, for the most part—most microphones, most high-quality recording microphones—are low impedance, right? So that means that these pickups and higher-end recording microphones are both in the same impedance range, whereas normal pickups—like, you know, a normal pickup, a humbucker on a normal Les Paul that isn't a Recording—is a high impedance pickup. Now, a guitar amplifier, the input on that, is a high impedance input, so it's made to work well with a high impedance pickup. Low impedance pickups, on the other hand, just like microphones, should go into a low impedance input preamp, like a mic preamp or a console, and that's definitely what, when Les Paul—the man, the legend, the inventor, the icon—dreamed up with this thing, it was definitely because he was—I mean, he was, like I said, he was an inventor, he was a tinkerer, he was an electronics, you know, wizard, and he wanted the cleanest possible sound when recording, and it's no coincidence this is called the Les Paul Recording, right? So he wanted to make a guitar that was super clean. So he was like, 'Well, why not just match the impedance from the guitar already with the recording device that I'm going to be plugging this thing into, instead of plugging into an amp and putting a microphone in front of that amp and recording that? Why not just go straight from here into the recorder?'" 

"Fortunately, this guitar has a switch on here, this high/low output switch. So these pickups, actually inside here, is a little transformer, and with this switch, it takes different taps of that transformer, and through the output jack over here, you can actually have it in high impedance or low impedance. So if you want to plug into a normal amplifier, which has a high impedance input, you just switch it to high impedance and then it's a normal guitar at that point. The obvious thing for me when I was doing this demo on it—you know what I want to say is, the decade decade, yeah, yeah, decade. No, I mean, I still don't know what it does. The decade knob, which is actually a switch, by the way, when you turn this thing it has different positions. It's not like a—yeah, it's like, yeah, the decade switch on these guitars is very confusing because when you're plugged into a normal amp in the high impedance output mode, it does nothing. You can't hear it. Yeah, you've probably spent some time. I spent quite a lot of time, yeah. You can't really tell what's going on. But when you're in low impedance mode and you plug it straight into a console, straight into a mic pre, what it is, is a very subtle—it's tonal, a tone, yeah, and it works in conjunction, I think, with the tone. But the reason why it's called 'decade,' it's not because if you're playing disco you have to set it to the '70s or, you know, I pretended I was doing that kind of thing, yeah. And that's fine. You can pretend whatever you want; it's a free country. But it's called 'decade' because it's really nerdy, but it's a measurement in the world of electronics audio. I think it's, if you were to plot like the decrease in frequency cuts or something like that, it's measured in decades. It's kind of like centimeters or kilometers or whatever. A decade is, yeah, it's a measurement in the world of electronics as it pertains to this, right? Okay, my probably my favorite part of the chart is the 'face,' which just has an incredible sound. For anyone who doesn't really know what it sounds like, if I do this, it kind of sounds like that. That's probably the best way to describe it. It's a great way of describing it, yeah. I didn't—I got it from someone else. Oh, really? I don't know who; otherwise I'd give him credit. I was gonna explain what it is, but what's the point? That's all you need to know, yeah. Cool, see you later."

"Oh, this is what Les Paul loved. This is what he played. This is it. This is 100% like, if you could represent Les Paul in one guitar, this is kind of it, yeah, yeah. In fact, if you see pictures of him playing, this is kind of what he had. He had one that had a device right here that was a sound-on-sound device, and he could record and loop with this little on-board thing really early on, too. I mean, he was quite a challenge ahead of his time, yeah, for sure. Yeah, these are usually walnut or natural wood color, the grand majority of them, and occasionally we get a white one in. It's pretty rare that we get a white one in, so this is very cool. And sometimes you see black ones, which are like super rare. This tuxedo version though, is really beautiful, especially yellowed out like this. I think it's, I don't know, it just looks kind of timeless, yeah, and it's a historically important instrument because of him. Yeah, he wasn't a fan of the 1579, didn't like the 22nd fret, not did he? No, all you need—I mean, who's gonna play the 27th fret on the low E? Only on the high E, well, yeah, no. Yeah, that's all you need. That's music, yeah, exactly, there we go. Anyone spending time up here on the low strings should be doing something else, for sure. There we go, no offense to you weirdos out there."