We all know & love Lester William Polfus for the great singlecut guitar he manifested from his tinkerings back at the Epiphone workshop. Who the heck would that be, you ask? Well, he's Les Paul to the rest of us...I did recall reading an article stating Les Paul's dislike for his guitar because he insisted in being his way, not how the production model turned out to be:
"I designed everything in there except the arched top. That was contributed by Maurice Berlin... I've still got my first two Les Pauls & they're the two best guitars I've got. They were made the way I thought they should be made- with a flat top".
Maurice Berlin was the founder of Chicago Musical Instrument company which acquired Gibson in 1944. Naturally, being the boss of the business, the design dictation was inevitable. Berlin was an avid violin lover & took Les Paul to see his vault of violin collection & suggested to him the incorporation of the arched top in the Les Paul guitar design.
The other Les Paul quirk was his favour of low impedence pickups as equipped in the Les Paul Personal depicted above. The advantage of this pickup type was its more dynamic tonal range but the inherent output is not strong enough to drive an amp. There has to be a boost in power before the signals reach the amp, the reason the above guitar featuring a pair of stacked, low impedence humbuckers, are equipped with special cables (equipped with an internal transformer) to ensure heightened output. These pickups would only be very advantageous for players who plug straight into the recording console, which Les Paul very often did.The LP Personal was indeed a personal guitar made for the man with the preferred flat top & low impedence pickups on board. The model proved to be unpopular & saw a 3-year production run until its removal from the catalogs in 1972.
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