For those who missed it – Les Paul Google Doodle Lets You Strum Guitar, Record, Playback

June 12th, 2011 | by Esquire Travel Group

click image for instrument

Google introduced arguably its greatest doodle ever this morning, an interactive electric guitar to honor the 96th birthday of legendary musician and guitar innovator Les Paul.

The doodle is definitely a whole lot of fun, but can also be incredibly addicting. For anyone who hasn’t spent the better part of their working day trying to figure out how to play Mary Had A Little Lamb on Google’s incredibly awesome doodle, here’s a crash course to help you rock out on your desktop.

Lesson 1: Notes
The Google guitar can play 10 notes, starting with a low G and climbing up to a high B. To play, either strum over the doodle with your mouse or use the keyboard icon to play using, you guessed it, the keyboard.

Here’s a look at each note and its corresponding numerical key, starting at the low G string:

• 1 = G
• 2 = A
• 3 = B
• 4 = C
• 5 = D
• 6 = E
• 7 = F#
• 8 = G
• 9 = A
• 0 = B

And here is how those notes correspond to the doodle itself.

Remember, the Google guitar includes one F#, so you can play a G major scale.

Note: Google guitar’s keyboard function also works using corresponding letter keys down the rows of the keyboard, meaning that low G can be played using the 1, Q, A and Z keys, the low A can be played using the 2, W, S and X keys, and so on.

Lesson 2: Chords
Now that you know your way around the notes, it’s time to mix things up with a few chords.

G Major = 1, 3, 5
C Major = 4, 6, 8
D7 Major = 4, 5, 7, 9 (inverted for Google guitar)

With these chords, you can go ahead and practice your 12-bar blues in G:
G G G G
C C G G
D7 D7 G G

Tags: google, google doodle, Les Paul

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 12th, 2011 at 2:55 pm and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.