Today’s Google Doodle celebrates Les Paul’s 96th birthday. Les Paul is a well-known guitar maker and musician. His solid-body electric guitar was the foundation for rock and roll.
Google’s Doodle today is strummable. By putting your cursor over a string, a tone will play. Comments on the Hacker News story have also mapped the keyboard to the strings, which might help you play better.
do re mi fa so la ti do re mi
q w e r t y u i o p
a s d f g h j k l ;
z x c v b n m , . /
You can also hit the record button down at the bottom, play your tune, and then stop the recording. You’ll receive a shrunk URL to your recording. You can then share the link, like http://goo.gl/doodle/vEkU or the Imperial March http://goo.gl/doodle/D6ce, with others to hear your song. The ability to record and play songs back seems to be limited to the US. You can also find a good collection of other recorded songs in the Hacker News comments.
As a result of the Google Doodle, ‘guitar tuner‘ and ‘guitar chords‘ are in the top 10 Google Trends today.
From the announcement on the Google Blog:
For the next 24 hours on the Google homepage, you’ll find an interactive, playable logo inspired by the guitar developed by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee that made the sound of rock and roll possible.
As well as his guitar work, Les Paul experimented in his garage with innovative recording techniques like multitracking and tape delay. In keeping with this spirit of tinkering, those of you in the U.S. can click the black “compose” button to record your own 30-second track. Just strum the strings or trigger notes with the letters or numbers on your keyboards. Clicking the button again will display a link to share the songs you’ve made. (For example, here’s a little tune I put together.)
If you’re curious, the doodle was made with a combination of JavaScript, HTML5 Canvas (used in modern browsers to draw the guitar strings), CSS, Flash (for sound) and tools like the Google Font API, goo.gl and App Engine.