Les Paul

📍320 N Boscobel Street, Waukesha, Wisconsin, United States

“I grew up in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in a house that became my first laboratory. From the time I was a boy I was pulling apart radios and telephones, trying to understand how sound moved through wire, how electricity could be made to carry music. My mother encouraged all of it — she bought me a harmonica, then a banjo, then a guitar, and when I started modifying the instruments she did not tell me to stop. I would lie in bed at night imagining how a guitar might work if the body did not need to vibrate at all — if the sound came purely from the string and the pickup. The solid-body electric guitar I eventually built grew directly from those childhood thoughts in this house. I also taught myself to record here, layering sounds on top of each other in ways nobody had worked out yet. Everything I later became — the musician, the inventor, the man who changed what recorded music could sound like — started in this small house in Waukesha.”

Sources: Les Paul's Waukesha childhood is documented in Mary Alice Shaughnessy's biography Les Paul: An American Original (1993) and in the documentary Les Paul: Chasing Sound (2007).