Les Paul, who helped revolutionize popular music with his innovations on the guitar and in the recording studio, died yesterday of complications from pneumonia. He was 94.

As the recording executive Ahmet Ertegun said in 1988 upon Mr. Pauls induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Les Paul is an inspiration to a world of guitarists for his playing, for the instrument he created and his multiple-track recording innovations. Without him, its hard to imagine how rock and roll would be played today.

Mr. Paul enjoyed enormous success in a performing career that lasted more than 80 years, selling more than 10 million records and earning 34 gold records. During the early 50s, he and his second wife, the singer Mary Ford, were among the most popular acts in show business.

What he was doing on those hits couldnt have failed to influence any guitarist, Led Zeppelins Jimmy Page, a vastly different player, once said of Mr. Paul.

Yet it was as an inspired musical tinkerer that Mr. Paul had his greatest impact. He essentially invented the technique of multi-track recording, and it was at his behest that Ampex built the first eight-track recorder. Mr. Pauls overdubbing of his guitar playing and Fords singing was so unprecedented that Capitol Records billed it as The New Sound.

While Mr. Paul did not invent the solid-body electric guitar, he is widely credited with having done so. Certainly, he did more to popularize it than any other player, and he was the first guitarist to exploit such possibilities offered by electrification as feedback and note bending.

Mr. Paul never played anything that sounded in the least bit like rock. His style was a highly distinctive combination of swing, country, and pop. Yet its hard to imagine the electric guitar becoming the king of rock without Mr. Paul having played kingmaker.

The success of Mr. Pauls recordings gave the electric guitar a newfound prominence. As the jazz critic George Simon noted with startling prescience in 1953, What Benny Goodman did for the clarinet ... Les Paul has done for the guitar. He has brought it into such prominence that it has become an almost newly discovered instrument for many people, as well as one with which musicians can make more sound, and more money than ever before.

A year earlier, Gibson had brought out its first Les Paul model guitar. It has remained on the market ever since, along with subsequent model lines. Mr. Paul actually contributed only a few details to the design, but he received a royalty on every one sold. More important, the name Les Paul became inextricably linked with the electric guitar in the public imagination.