The two competing designs would also strongly reflect the musical tastes of their builders. Leo Fender was a country music fan who built instruments for the burgeoning West Coast country scene; his goal was to provide to guitarists some of the same trebly tones as pedal steel players. But Ted McCarty was in love with warm chordal jazz guitarists, and wanted a much mellower-toned instrument, but with longer sustain. It was he who suggested mahogany for the body for its warmth and only a thin maple cap to add some treble and high-end. (In the 1950s, the "Black Beauty" Les Paul Custom's body was all mahogany.)

The result was an instant classic; all it took was Les Paul and Mary Ford to play the instruments each week on their television series, for sales to take off. It was Les who suggested his namesake instrument's first color schemes — gold for what would eventually be dubbed the "Standard" Les Paul model, and tuxedo or piano-style black for the afore-mentioned Custom.

Eventually, another innovation was added to the guitar, the humbucking pickup, designed by Seth Lover, one of over 1000 employees McCarty would have on Gibson's payroll at the height of his period with the company. (Seth Lover's test bed Les Paul with his first humbuckers graces the cover of Gibson Guitars.)

Today, original "Patent Applied For" pickups, as Lover's invention would become universally known fetch well over a thousand dollars each. Lover and McCarty had no way of knowing it, but they had created what a decade or so later, would become the sound of hard rock. In the mid-1960s, Eric Clapton mated a PAF-equipped Les Paul with an early Marshall amplifier, and rock and roll would never be the same.

In the 1950s though, amplifier distortion was largely still a bug, not a feature. And Lover's PAF-pickup, played cleanly, provided the warm mellow tones that McCarty favored, but its dual-coil design cancelled virtually all of the hum an electric guitar's single-coil pickups could generate, particularly around fluorescent lights. Perhaps in an effort to both showcase this innovation, and keep pace with Fender's landmark Stratocaster design, beginning in 1957, the Les Paul Custom had three humbucking pickups, encased in gleaming gold-plated steel covers.

A year later, the "Standard" Les Paul (now also PAF-equipped) saw its gold body color retired and replaced with Gibson's traditional sunburst finish, and underneath, (usually) carefully bookmatched maple tops, often with dramatic "tiger-striped" grain patterns.