Google Guitar Doodle Song Gallery

itwbennett writes "Now in its second day of productivity destruction, Google's Guitar Doodle is still making music, beautiful music. Here's a roundup of some of YouTube's best, from beginner favorite Seven Nation Army to an ambitious version of Paint it Black, and, yes, Stairway to Heaven."

No mention of Les Paul?

[jd2112]

The Google Doodle was in honor of Les Paul, who would have been 96 yesterday. For the handfull of slashdotters who don't know Les Paul was one of the inventors of the solid body electric guitar, multitrack recording, and many other inventions still used in the recording industry. And if that weren't enough he was an excellent musician as well.

Re:No mention of Les Paul?

[gnapster]

Here is a comic strip [questionablecontent.net] commemorating his passing (nearly two years ago).

Re:No mention of Les Paul?

[gknoy]

For those seeing the [questionablecontent.net] annotation and wondering if the strip is worksafe, it is. That particular one is. (I'm pretty sure most of the ones in the archive would be also, but you might be careful all the same. This one's safe, though.)

If you'd rather not read the comic, one could always read Les Paul's wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Paul [wikipedia.org] ), but QC mentions some of his really notable accomplishments. A brief (and likely too-shallow) overview would be to say that he was a pioneer of the solid body guitar (the Gibson Les Paul closely followed the Fender Telecaster), and that he invented multitrack recording (along with also pioneering several other techniques). He laid the technological basis for nearly all of our recent music.

Even though I'm not a music nerd, I think the guy was pretty amazing.

Re:No mention of Les Paul?

[Naurgrim]

And if that weren't enough he was an excellent musician as well.

I consider myself fortunate to have seen him play live, must have been about 1986. He was one of the finest guitarists ever, IMHO.

Before seeing him live, I had heard many of his recordings. Knowing that he like to use tape effects, etc. I thought that some of his fast riffs were done with double speed tape, as they sounded super-humanly fast. I was amazed to find that he actually could play that fast, live, without error.

The only other guitarist I have seen play live at that level is Robert Fripp, but that's a story for another day - King Crimson, Discipline tour, 1982.