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By Colby Cosh, National Post

Two men, Les Paul and Bob Moog, stand above all others as creators of the musical environment in which our brains are all now marinated. Moog, who died in 2005, stepped into the nascent field of digital music and devised an interface that took pure sound synthesis across the bridge from engineers to practicing musicians. Paul, who died of pneumonia yesterday at the age of 94, is less recognized as a digital innovator. But maybe he should be. Underlying many of his incredible inventions was an abstract notion that demanded, almost as an afterthought, radical changes to the hardware of music creation: the idea of sound as pure information.

The man born as Lester Polfuss is remembered, above all else, for creating the solid-body electric guitar. (Like most well-known inventors, he was more of a Columbus; his ideas had already been tried by more obscure figures, but he was -- arguably, and there definitely is an argument -- the one who permanently opened the floodgates to followers and imitators.) And why did he do it? Because he wanted a better, simpler, more direct, more efficient way of transferring the sounds inside his head to the amplifier.

The hollow-body electric guitars then existing were a kludge -- basically, wired-up acoustic instruments whose lingering resonant qualities interfered, at concert volumes, with the purity of the signal. Paul saw astonishingly far beyond this state of affairs. He understood that the guitar, in its crude acoustic form, could be dispensed with altogether. He created the first influential solid-body by attaching strings and a pickup to a solid length of pine; he is said to have performed with this straight rectangular "log" for test audiences, only re-adding cosmetic side pieces when it became clear that listeners had a weird need for the sight of the familiar guitar shape. He was, after all, a working showman as well as an electrical genius. And if he had not relented, we would not have the Gibson Les Paul guitar, perhaps the most beautiful and inspiring of all species of musical instrument.

Paul's status as the great early proponent of multi-track recording, an invention that goes beyond the guitar to the very heart of music-as-commodity, is less debateable. It is incredible, but true, that he was experimenting with multi-tracking even before magnetic audiotape was widely available, making recursive use of acetate disks to play along with himself. After World War II, when the Ampex company began to commercialize methods of magnetic recording pioneered by the defeated Germans, Paul bought one of its very first machines and came up with the idea of installing a "playback" audio head just ahead of the "record" head. He would eventually commission Ampex to build the first eight-track recording machine in 1954. How far ahead of his time was he? Think of the Beatles recording Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in early 1967; they were easily the world's wealthiest musicians, with unlimited access to the premier studio technology in the UK, but at that late date they could still do no better than four tracks at a time.

Paul's fundamental additions to the musician's toolbox, along with other gadgets he pioneered or even just envisioned, seem in retrospect to have been implying the future existence of the digital computer, almost crying out for its creation. Paul really imagined music as manipulable bits long before he or anyone else could have put the matter in information-theoretic terms. It was kind of providence to have allowed him to live to see the computer age, and even to participate in it as a performer; he was, after all, making records and playing for audiences right up until the end. Almost every guitarist, from the amateur to the virtuouso, well understands the personal debt he owes to Les Paul. It is the rest of us, those for whom music is primarily something to be consumed, who should pause to recognize him as a designer, a philosopher, a true genius.

A special multimedia web presentation on the history of Aretha Franklin's "Respect" just won a national EMMY. I was fortunate enough to be involved as a designer on the project, creating the overall look. This is the first year the Emmys have awarded this category, so it's equally cool to be the first. If you love music and the history behind it, then this presentation of videos, interviews, articles and pics will enthrall and entertain. Dig it.

Find "40 Years of Respect" here