Before there was distortion, overdubbing, multi-track recording, or the solid-body electric guitar, there was Les Paul. The innovations he developed in his New Jersey garage in the 1940s and 50s are the foundational technology of virtually all modern music. A Tribute to Les Paul brought Slash, Joe Perry, Buddy Guy, Joe Satriani, Alison Krauss, Neal Schon, Steve Lukather, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Robben Ford, Hubert Sumlin, and Switchfoot to Universal Studios Hollywood to celebrate the man himself, performing live with Paul watching from the wings. A rare convergence of the giants of the guitar tradition, united by a shared debt to the inventor who made all of it possible.

Why This Films Matters: Les Paul's story is a story about invention, about what happens when a restless, obsessive tinkerer refuses to accept the technical limitations of his era and builds the tools he needs from scratch. In a music industry dominated by technology that most artists don't understand and don't own, Paul's DIY approach to music-making and invention is a radical counter-model. His multi-track experiments in his garage were, in spirit, the ancestor of every bedroom producer who records an album on a laptop. For young audiences who take the technologies of modern music entirely for granted, this documentary makes visible the human ingenuity that built them.