4K Google Guitar Tunes Posted to YouTube

Popular, playable tribute to Les Paul will remain available

(NEWSER) - The Google Doodle guitar tribute to Les Paul has proven so popular that Google is keeping it available permanently, reports Mashable . The playable gizmo now has its own standalone site here where fans can pluck away. Thousands of songs already have shown up on YouTube, including Stairway to Heaven . PC Magazine rounds up some favorites here . More»

Keyboard can help create actual songs

(NEWSER) - Google has outdone itself with one of its coolest (if least readable) logo "doodles" ever: A logo celebrating Les Paul's 96th birthday that actually plays music. Just hover your mouse over a string to pluck it. Under the logo is a red button that can record your creation. Hitting it will also enable keyboard controls; each key corresponds to a note, and hitting multiple will allow you to play chords. More»

Public split on whether sound is avant garde or out of tune

(NEWSER) - Rock music has gone to the birds at a London art gallery—literally. An installation by French artist Celeste Boursier-Mougenot pairs 40 zebra finches with Les Paul electric guitar resting places and cymbal feeders, and invites visitors to hear the result. “What you hear could be an experimental rock band, or a band warming up,” the exhibit’s curator tells the BBC . More»

(NEWSER) - Les Paul's death today at age 94 has the accolades pouring in:

• Lou Carlozo, True/Slant: "The solid-body Les Paul guitar that Lester developed with Gibson in the early 1950s is rock and roll. Like the Fender Stratocaster, its shape is so synonymous with the genre that any musician can recognize it by its single-cutaway silhouette alone."
• John Cook, Gawker: Without Paul's multitrack recording, "there would have been no White Album, no Radiohead, no nothing." Cook also is in awe of how Paul retaught himself to play in his 80s, when he couldn't bend his arthritic fingers.

Inventor, guitarist 'changed the course of 20th-century popular music'

(NEWSER) - Musical innovator and guitar legend Les Paul died today in White Plains, NY. He was 94. A “virtuoso guitarist” himself, in the early 1940s Paul pioneered the “log” guitar, “probably the first solid-body electric guitar," writes Jon Pareles of the New York Times. His popular Gibson Les Paul guitar and his recording inventions helped him “change the course of 20th-century popular music.” More»