Google Guitar

Six strings and no sheet music

The instrument is a clay model with the strings pressed into a pale violet body. Drag your cursor down the neck and it strums. Land on one string and it plucks a single note. Move left to right and the pitch climbs because the horizontal position is doing the job of a fret, so the far right side of the board is roughly an octave up from the open string.

There is no wrong note here, which is the honest appeal of google guitar. Nobody is grading you. You mash the keyboard row, something halfway musical falls out, and ten minutes disappear.

The recording button is where it gets fun

Hit record, play whatever you like, hit it again and play it back. The timing is preserved down to the millisecond, so a sloppy run comes back exactly as sloppy as you played it. Layering a second pass on top of the playback is the trick most people find by accident, and it is the closest this thing gets to a real loop pedal.

The random riff button exists for the moments when your hands have no ideas. It runs a fixed eight note pattern across four strings, which is enough to hear how the low E sits against the B string.

Keyboard mapping

QWERTYUI covers the lower run, ASDFGHJK sits higher up the neck. Holding a key does nothing, each press is one pluck, same as a real string. Volume slider is on the right if you are somewhere you should not be making noise.

Why this one gets remembered

It first showed up as a birthday doodle for Les Paul and stayed live long enough that people recorded full songs on it. Search interest for google guitar easter egg still spikes every June for that reason. Spelling has never been a barrier either, misfires like googleguitar and google gitar all land in the same place.

If you want something else that responds to input rather than just playing an animation at you, google zipper reacts to a drag and google fan reacts to speed changes. For pure spectacle, google matrix is the one to open on a second monitor. The rest are catalogued under google easter eggs.

If you hear nothing

Browsers block audio until you interact with the page, so the very first click may be silent while the sound engine wakes up. Click a string once more and it will be there. Phone users, check the silent switch, it mutes web audio on iOS.