The goal of this ongoing project is to teach students about Les Paul’s life of innovation and musicianship through hands-on project-based learning activities in which students analyze, recreate, adapt, and, ultimately, use musical inventions originally created by Les Paul. In early 2020, the PI and music faculty affiliated with the Electric Guitar Innovation Lab (EGIL) at WPI began developing hands-on instructional activities centered around Les Paul's innovative spirit and implemented activities into several existing WPI music technology courses. Undergraduate students from various majors enrolled in these courses worked in small groups and self-selected one of Les Paul's innovations to study including the Rail, the Log, and the Les Paulverizer. This research is supported through a generous grant from the Les Paul Foundation .

The primary goal of the Rail project is for students to learn about the history and significant of Les Paul's "rail" experiment and the influence it had on later work by Les and others. Students worked with faculty to recreate and adapt this technology toward gaining an understanding of the roles of various materials in defining an instrument's timbre through experimention. The directive given to students in the first iteration of this project (2020) was as follows:

This team sought to recreate Les Paul's rail using materials comparable to what Les originally used as well as some alternate materials. The team fabricated rails of two different metals and used spectral analysis tests to compare the frequency content of each instrument.

Using the resources at hand

Of note: the COVID-19 pandemic occurred during academic year 2020 when we first began these projects. The ensuing self-quarantine forced all project work to be carried by students in their respective homes and without access to many campus resources, workshops, and tools. These constraints, however, forced the students to conduct these experiment with limited tools and resources in the same way that Les's original experiments like, for example, the rail experiments in which he used a 2-foot piece of discarded rail he found across the street from his home and the microphone from his mother’s telephone. Read more about the students' work in this report .

The primary goal of the Log project is for students to learn about the history and significant of "the Log" and learn about the ways Les Paul leveraged his findings from the Rail and other experiments into what became known as "the Log". Students explored a literal recreation of the Log with special attention drawn to the novelty of the faux "wing" sides and the perceptions and expectations of "conventional" guitarist at the time. Students leveraged their findings from the Rail experiments and integrated the best aspects of those findings into newly created instruments. Students worked with faculty to explore various aspects of using magnetic pickups, piezoelectric transducers, and microphones in instruments made from a variety of materials including wood, composite and 3D-printed materials, and sustainable and recycled materials. The directive given to students in the first iteration of this project (2020) was as follows:

This team sought to recreate the Log using comparable materials. The images and video below describe the processes completed by these students.

Les Paul regularly demonstrated a sense of fearlessness with regard to his innovative efforts; of similar mindset, the two students who asked to work on this project were not guitarists, and, yet, responding to the same type of inquisitive fearlessness that Les demonstrated, these students learned what they needed to, as they needed to through this hands-on project. Read more about the students' work in this report .

The primary goal of the Les Paulverizer project is for students to learn about the history and stage implementation of the "Les Paulverizer" . Students then worked to recreate and adapt this technology toward new music performance experiences. The anticipated result of this exploration was the adaptation of guitars and other musical instruments so that they would be capable of playing back pre-recorded audio files by using accessible controls affixed to or embedded within the instruments themselves. Students then compose and perform new pieces using this technology. The directive given to students in the first iteration of this project (2020) was as follows: