Ted McCarty told me, "We didn't like the idea in a way, because it didn't take a great deal of skill to build a plank guitar...We made solid maple bodies but they were too heavy and sustained too long - couldn't keep 'em quiet. So the original had a mahogany back with a carved maple top laminated to it. That gave us the balance. The reason we carved the top was that Fender didn't have any carving equipment, so I decided, let's do something different. So we built this guitar, but then we didn't know what to do with it".
Ted was of course familiar with Les Paul...met Les's financial adviser, Phil Braunstein, and they journeyed to Les' mountaintop recording studio at Delaware Water Gap, Pensylvania, carrying the new solidbody, a sunburst with a regular
Gibson trapeze tailpiece. "I showed the guitar to Les", McCarty recalled. "Les played it, and his eyes litp up. We worked all night long on a royalty contract, and when we were finished, it was only a page-and-a-half long. After that we submitted things to Les for his advice".
Ted McCarty explained in the summer of 1993, "No one person designed the Les Paul. I was involved in the shape and the crowneed top, and our engineers worked on the pickups. Then we'd get together and discuss sketches. We mainly wanted it to embody the things that
Gibson stood for. We didn't believe in a screwed-in neck, for example. Sp the design just sort of grew. We worked on it for a year or so."
Les Paul told me, "I had two models in mind right from the beginning. I picked the gold color because no one else had one, and because it's always associated with quality, and black because it's classy, like a tuxedo." Ted McCarty added "We didn't want Leo [Fender] and the rest of them to discover our combination of maple and mahogany, so we figured the solid colors would make it difficult to see the separate pieces".