NOTE: I had this post written about two days before Les Paul’s passing. Now it gets to see the light of day.
If you believe the marketing blather and the hero-worshiping masses of guitarists who pick gear with their eyes instead of their ears, a Gibson Les Paul plugged into a Marshall amp is the sound of rock.
How did it get this way? I can’t say I’m certain. But I’m pretty sure that a lot of kids saw Jimmy Page wailing away on his Les Paul through a wall of Marshall amps, and they thought Jimmy was the coolest person on the planet. They wanted to be like him, including some little kid who grew up to be Slash. There are currently plenty of kids who saw Slash, and the cycle began again.
All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again, as they say in Battlestar Galactica.
Let’s talk about Jimmy. He’s hardly my favorite player, but he was highly advanced when it came to equalization and multitrack recording. As for why he used a Les Paul/Marshall setup, I have a theory: He understood that, alone, a Les Paul is a thick slab of mahogany that has a very dark character, bordering on muddy. The Marshall amp was, and continues to be, bright and midrangey, sometimes bordering on shrill. Pair them together, and they’ll mitigate each other’s weaknesses. I’d bet this is the very root of his decision to use this gear – and he probably liked the playability of the Les Paul, and needed the right amp to bring out its tonal potential (I vehemently disagree on the Les Paul’s playability, but Jimmy existed before the days of Grover Jackson and his hordes of imitators).
Now I’m bringing this to you and me, the modern guitarists. We have so much more to choose from that Jimmy did. Gibson has pretty much quit making workaday musician’s gear and now worries more about collector value and appearance than quality and innovation. Their prices are exorbitant, their quality control unimpressive. Marshall is a hair overpriced, but still has some great industry standard stuff like the DSL 50 head, and excellent speaker cabinets. Quality control, however, is a bit spotty.
But if you’re willing to experiment and use your ears, you can find gear that will do what the Les Paul/Marshall combination will do – better, cheaper, more reliably. Just don’t put too much stock into what your heroes play, played or claim to play.
