Did you know that the top session players on the West Coast earn the preposterous figure of $300,000 a year! Joe Sample does, and is not impressed. "I don't think some of those fellas should be paid so much. I think sometimes they should be paying me to give them music lessons." (P16).

"Enter a gentleman by the name of Roberto Brandoni. About a year ago while holidaying in Italy, Mr Brandoni perchanced to visit the Eko guitar factory. He was duly shown around the premises and their stocks were displayed to him as a potential buyer. However, his eyes lit upon a peculiarly shaped, yet strangely familiar object lurking in a dusty corner. Was that not a Vox Phantom XII? Was it for sale? Did they have any others?" They did. For the full story of Mr B and the rediscovered Vox legend, let Jon Lewin twang your 12 strings. (P77).

You are in the doctor's surgery suffering from Jazz. He pulls his Stethoscope out of the ice bucket where it is kept for his favourite patients, and asks: 'Where is the pain.' - "In rock guitar playing your 'brain' is on the fretboard and in the pickups. With jazz, it's played in the mind." John Etheridge delivers a diagnosis. (P80).

Admittedly, we do get a lot of demo tapes in that must have been recorded on 4-track cassette players, but we had no idea how popular these delightful gadgets were until attending a Harman press conference. So far they claim to have sold £3 million pounds worth of TASCAM 244s — in the UK. Tha's a lorra spooling.

See-through bodies; dense, perspex construction; six interchangeable pickups; stacked single coil pickups; 24 frets on the neck... and all this in 1969. Paul Day warms to the transparently magnificent genius of Dan Armstrong. (P20).

A very large gorilla rushes into the studio and eats the engineer just as you are about to do the lead vocal for the last track on your new record. Do you: (a) ask the gorilla for a bit more 10k in the cans (b) leave the faders down until the gorilla burps or (c) ring the gorilla-gram company and congratulate them on cutting down on your production costs? (P8).