UG Articles Archive

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Google says Happy Birthday to Les Paul with a cool homepage guitar!

Happy birthday to the founder of the electric guitar, Les Paul.  Though the world lost Les in 2009, his legacy will live on for as long as the electric guitar is played, which I'm hoping is at least until the year 2112. (With advances in modern medicine and science I plan to live to at least 125 years old so I can witness a year that the world will surely spend celebrating Rush's classic album 2112.)    

It's gonna happen.
Today, Google is marking Les' birthday with a fun little e-guitar on the homepage. Go there and check it out!  I had a bit of fun with the 10 notes available before I discovered that if you press the Keyboard button, you can use letter keys to strike the strings instead of dragging your mouse over them.  This allows the use of chords, which can be used to play songs!  I found online that a guy figured out a way to play the 12-bar Blues on the thing, which I tried, and it sounds about right.  Here's how:

You press ADGK at the same time to make a C chord.
FHK plays an F chord, and GJL plays a G chord.

The pattern you play with these chords goes:
CCCC
FFCC
GGCC 
Use one bar per individual chord, so that's 4 beats per letter in my diagram.  You can play even quarter notes, you can "swing" it and play eighth notes paired with dotted eighths, whatever you want.  Just play that pattern and it'll sound like the blues!

I'm curious to hear what songs people come up with throughout the day.  You can record yourself playing with the Record button and Google will generate a link to what you just played after a certain time limit expires.  I've already seen an off-key version of Hey Jude's intro section floating around, which was ok, but I expect we'll see some cool stuff played on this before the day is done.  Happy Birthday, Les!

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Mastodon's Brent Hinds Appears in Local Restaurant Commercial

Just wrote an article on this for Ultimate-Guitar, but Mastodon's lead guitarist Brent Hinds can be seen starring in a commercial for a local Atlanta bar/restaurant called Elmyr.  If you haven't seen it yet, here ya go:


For possibly the first person since Mike Tyson to star in a commercial, I think Hinds does a great job!  The commercial is a hilarious parody of common pharmaceutical ads, and the acting is actually pretty good!  The doctor is played by Hinds' friend and West End Motel band-mate Tom Cheshire. 

That's about it for now.  I should let all of you know that I was recently hired as Ultimate-Guitar.com's official online publicist for the site's line of mobile products, including apps for iPhone, Android, iPad, and Windows 7 Phones.  Should be keeping me pretty busy, but I will continue to update the blog as often as possible.

Have a great Wednesday, all.