Google’s “doodle” in honor of Les Paul attracts armchair musicians worldwide

People around the world have only a short while left to admire — and play with — possibly the coolest Google "doodle" ever.

On Thursday, Google paid tribute to the U.S. guitarist and inventor Les Paul with its doodle, logo designs that spell out the company's name on its web site and often replace the actual logo, according to AFP. In honor of Paul's birthday, the doodle is an interactive, playable, and in some countries recordable, guitar. Paul, who died in 2009, would have been 96 years old.

The wannabe-musician user simply mouses over the strings of the stylized guitar, or uses keystrokes, to make music, and, in the United States, even record a song. Recordings can be up to 30 seconds long and the site gives a URL for the recording so users can show off to their friends, Fox News reported.

As the Guardian explained:

Hardly anything remains of the Google logo itself, abstracted into several guitar strings, bridges, a pickup and a recording button – but brush your cursor over the strings and they strum. Use the keyboard, and you can play chords. Click record – and infuriatingly, this feature doesn't seem to work outside the US – and record a few seconds of whatever you can create and share the URL of that recording. Send that URL to someone else and they can join in on a duet.

Paul is best-known for his work developing the electric guitar, which made new styles of music possible, according to the Telegraph. Having built one of the world's first solid-body electric guitars in 1940, Paul's design was put into production by manufacturer Gibson in 1946. But he was immortalized in 1961 when Gibson changed the design to create a lighter and sleeker instrument that the fabled company named the Gibson Les Paul.