top of page
Epiphone_Les_Paul_Special_II_(Vintage_Sunburst)_-_pickups.jpg

Humanities Practicum

Developing Technology for Music - Les Paul 'Lover' Pedal

As part of a team of students I helped to design a customized electric guitar pedal that could be used in live performance to re-create audio effects first created by musician Les Paul for his song Lover.
These effects were created using the ~gen library of the visual music programming software Max, developed by Cycling '74. The project was completed under the guidance of Professor V.J. Manzo at WPI as a part of the Electric Guitar Innovation Lab program run through the school. Using a virtual amplifier test rig designed for the EGIL by Professor Manzo, we designed the code for our pedal in Max before exporting it to C code which we uploaded to an embedded circuit inside a custom built pedal housing.

Les Paul "Lover" Pedal Student Final Presentation || Electric Guitar Innovation Lab (EGIL) (2021)
06:05
the RATLab

Les Paul "Lover" Pedal Student Final Presentation || Electric Guitar Innovation Lab (EGIL) (2021)

View full details at: http://electricguitarinnovationlab.org/lespaul Using our Guitar Digital FX Testing Rig, asked students to explore Les Paul’s arrangement of Rogers and Hart's "Lover”, which prominently features some of Paul's innovative production techniques including multitrack overdubbing and manipulation of playback rate to achieve otherworldly timbres from his electric guitar. Using the FX Testing Rig, we asked a team of students to implement the effects of “Lover” into a single guitar effect pedal with the primary feature of the pedal being real-time pitch-shifting in order to achieve the famous “double-speed” sound Les achieved in his studio recording.
bottom of page