"When I took it out of the box I thought, 'This guitar is knackered'. I mean, the thing was scratched and covered with mud." That's how Mick Slaven of Bourgie Bourgie met his Guild Starfire. But how did it sound? "I couldn't believe it. It was pure Eddie Cochran, I played it for hours, I just couldn't put this one down." (P16)

The total cost for making Led Zeppelin 1 was £1782, including cover artwork. By 1975 it had grossed £3½ million. Bacon turns the Page. (P68)

"You buy a standard kit and it's 13, 14, 16, or something, and the factory will always put together the ones that look right – the same lightness of wood, or whatever. Whereas you hit the drums and no matter how you tune them, they don't match – it's the wood that makes the note." Budgie berates the batter builders. (P48)

"An algorithm is a gathering of sine wave oscillators (operators). There are carriers (a man singing) and modulators (another man shaking him by the throat so his voice changes)." How many more times can Colbert explain FM synthesis before he goes mental? (P10)

Honeybone supplies the Barry Norman guide to sound sampling. "A movie camera does the same thing, sampling one frame at a time, if the rate of sampling is too slow, then the original cannot be reconstructed from the information available, and the result is the musical equivalent of a jerky Charlie Chaplin film." (P52)

"Another handicap or perhaps a blessing in disguise was his damaged and deaf right ear. Without it, Brian could not, cannot, hear stereo. But some claim that this actually gave Brian a more concentrated type of hearing, enabling him to hear the important notes and chords without the confusion that the directional elements of sound can cause." So Brian Wilson only received half of those Good Vibrations. Morrish finds a Beach Boy Hero. (P25)

"I used to believe the world was divided into two sorts of people – those who liked guitars and those who didn't. The former category, I now realise, is of course sub-divided into those who like Dobros and those who don't." Adrian Legg learns a bitter truth. (P62)

Are scientists carrying out genetic experiments on rock 'n' roll? "The SynthAxe is not a guitar, nor a guitar synthesiser – it is a new type of musical instrument which gives a guitar player the means to plug into and play a variety of synthesisers. So began the closely typed, 17 page press release and so ended six months of bizarre rumours." (P78)