Google's Les Paul doodle rocks the Web
Tribute to the musician and electric-guitar innovator proves popular with Web guitarists, yielding nearly 4,000 YouTube videos of their musical efforts.
With apologies to Jon Bon Jovi, Google's latest doodle has seen a billion faces and rocked them all.
With the launch yesterday of its doodle honoring musician and electric-guitar innovator Les Paul, Google created the world's largest jam session by giving everyone on the Web a playable and recordable guitar. And by the looks of things, everyone was getting their Jimmy Page on.
As of this writing, Web guitarists have posted nearly 4,000 recordings of their musical efforts to YouTube. That apparently struck a chord with Google, which announced this evening that due to popular demand, it is leaving the doodle up on its main page through Friday as an encore.
Google's video-sharing site was strumming with videos produced by music lovers who probably know more about defragging a hard drive than tuning an ax. (However, for those who actually know more about notes than notebooks, The Washington Post has composed this handy guide to how the chords line up with the doodle's strings and your keyboard.)
As if defying the guitar shop's rules in "Wayne's World," apparently one of the more popular songs for users to try to cover was Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." More than a dozen were brave enough to give it a go and upload their performances to YouTube.
One standout showed his work verse by verse while using his keyboard instead of his mouse to crank out his version of the rock anthem:
Another favorite was the chorus to The Beatles' Obladi, Oblada:
And if you don't feel you are quite ready for your solo, take heart: the Les Paul doodle will be archived with the rest of Google's notable doodles, which includes the previous killer of corporate productivity: Pacman.