Rock Out on the Google home page with the Logo Guitar

If you’re like me, you search Google directly from your browser’s address bar, and although it’s more efficient than visiting the home page -you can easily miss out on some of the grooviest Doodles.  In honor of what would have been famous guitarist Les Paul’s 96th birthday, Google created an HTML5-based web guitar that is shaped like like their official logo.  Usually a special logo only stays up for one day, and this one has been there since yesterday!  Google recently tweeted why it’s hanging around: “Due to popular demand, we’re leaving the Les Paul doodle up in the U.S. for an extra day. Thanks for jamming with us!”

Play the Google Logo Guitar yourself, even after today

You can try out the Google logo for yourself today on the official U.S. Google homepage.  But, if you’ve misesd, you still should be able to access the guitar indefinitely from here.

If you start pressing keys on your keyboard, the controls might not make sense at first.  It turns out that Google’s Doodle team just assigned rows of keys to control different strings.  Below is a keymap that should help you visualize it.

Listen to what other’s have played.

Want to hear some examples?  A few other creative souls have undoubtedly halted their productivity for the day to bring us some groovin’ Google logo tunes.

• Google’s demonstration
• The Beatles – Here comes the Sun (recorded by Chris Phillips)
• Rugrats opening Theme 

If you’ve made your own groovy creation you can save up to 30 seconds of it and share it with others using the record function.  All you have to do is give someone the generated URL and they can be playing your tune in no time.

Front page Doodle’s are a Google-only thing

Google has certainly put a lot of emphasis on their front page Doodles.  This one though, was by far the most addicting one yet.  If your productivity at work didn’t go down the toilet following when you found it, then you must possess some mighty willpower.  But, not to worry.  Other websites won’t be picking up Google’s fun and workflow killing habits anytime soon.  Google actually owns a patent for displaying themed webpage logos:

Systems and methods for enticing users to access a web site

Abstract

A system provides a periodically changing story line and/or a special event company logo to entice users to access a web page. For the story line, the system may receive objects that tell a story according to the story line and successively provide the objects on the web page for predetermined or random amounts of time. For the special event company logo, the system may modify a standard company logo for a special event to create a special event logo, associate one or more search terms with the special event logo, and upload the special event logo to the web page. The system may then receive a user selection of the special event logo and provide search results relating to the special event.