There are facts and there are fictions. Do you know the difference?

1. Fender made the first solid bodied electric guitar.

2. Les Paul was famous for developing multitrack tape recording.

3. The closer a record needle gets to the centre of an LP, the slower it's travelling.

4. Strats were designed to give three normal pickup positions and two out of phase options.

5. Leo Fender recorded guitar albums under several pseudonyms.

6. The first digital keyboard technology was actually developed in the mid '60s.

7. Django Reinhardt the amazing jazz guitarist only had three fingers because he lost one in an accident.

8. Jimi Hendrix played a perfectly normal right handed Strat turned upside down, so all his chords and lines were inverted.

9. Brian Rankin was the original guitarist in the Shadows and played all Hank Marvin's stuff.

10. If you're interested in percussion you have to decide from the outset whether to be a drummer or a conga player. Conga players build up such hard skin on their hands that after several years it's not possible for them to grip drum sticks properly.

11. Blues harmonica players will deliberately choose a harp in the wrong key to improve their scales.

12. Record companies make the most money out of album sales because they take the biggest share of the profits.

13. The first country to compile a list of best selling records in the form of a 'chart' was America.

14. Valves have to get hot, otherwise they won't work.

15. John Cage once wrote and played a track which comprised nearly five minutes of total silence.

16. Compact Discs were first announced in 1978 and were developed not by the Japanese, but by a European company.

17. Bass players in search of tougher fingers can harden the skin by dipping them in vinegar before playing.

18. Making Music Associate Editor Tony Bacon used to play in a band with a member of Culture Club.

1 False. The first solid was the Rickenbacker "Frying Pan", a seven string, Hawaiian guitar cast from a single piece of aluminium. Adolph Rickenbacker developed the A-22 in 1931, after being asked to make metal parts for other guitars. Fender didn't work on solids with normal fretting until the mid 1940s.

2 True. Yes, we know all about the guitar, but Lester William Polfuss was the first recording artist to base his music on bouncing from one tape to another in order to overdub and layer his own playing. (He also did a lot of early fiddling with half and double speed recording.) And when he wasn't directing Gibson, he was designing an eight track recorder for Ampeg.

3 True, ha ha. That got you. If you think about a normal, 12in vinyl record, the first groove on the outside is about 900mm in circumference and the one closest to the papery label in the middle is around 450mm. However, the entire record and turntable is travelling at 33 revolutions per minute (for argument's sake, it's about one revolution every two seconds). If the needle has just dropped on to the start of the record, that means it's travelling across the surface at 900mm per two seconds. Just before it lifts off the run out groove, it's shifting at only 450mm per two seconds. Interestingly enough Compact Discs run on something called Constant Linear Speed. The disc spins more slowly as the laser reader approaches the outside edge so it is always passing over the surface at the same rate. Not even that's original. Some wax disc systems tried it earlier in the century.

4 False. The original Strats had only three way pickups selectors. It was guitarists who discovered you could jam the switch in mid-way positions and, because of the wiring, produce these weird, honky tones. Only later did Fender wake up to the fact, and introduce five-way selectors to arrive at these out of phase options more easily.

5 False, he can't play. Yes, I know he designed the Strat, but the man can't actually play the guitar.

6 True. It's almost as old as commercial analogue synthesis. Dr John Chowning defined the basics for musical FM in 1967 when boring old voltage controlled synths were in their merest infancy. (Bob Moog announced his first VC prototype in '64.)

7 False. Contrary to popular belief, Reinhardt had his full complement of four fingers. However, following a fire in his caravan in 1928, he suffered severe burns on his hands and body. Even after hospital treatment, Reinhardt was left with two fingers (the third and fourth) on his left hand that had been withered by the heat. They could be used for forming chords on the top two strings, but had no strength for runs. Those remarkably smooth and speedy lines were played almost entirely with Reinhardt's first and second fingers only.

8 False. Yes he did play right hand guitars back to front, but they were all strung normally for a left handed strummer. Anyone who tells you that the secret of Hendrix's unusual style was that the strings were on upside down can be clipped firmly round the old boko.

9 True. Not surprising since Brian Rankin is Hank Marvin's real name. Ha ha, aren't trick questions fun?

10 False. The sort of thing you hear in the playground, (usually from disaffected conga-ists). There's nothing in conga playing that's going to permanently cripple you... they just want you to believe it so you won't show them up.

11 True. The familiar blues wail is only possible if certain notes in the scale are generated by breathing in rather than blowing out. If you're playing in A and choose an A harp then the arrangement of notes will fall so that some of those important blue ones will be blowers not suckers. You have to "Cross Harp" — pick one in the wrong key — so the scale is shifted to give you sucky notes in the right places. For A you'd want a D harp... E for B, A for E, etc. (Happy coincidence, Hohner have just produced a free, plastic, credit-card-sized chart explaining the system. Send a stamped, self-addressed envelope marked "Key Card" to M Hohner Ltd, (Contact Details), mentioning where you read about it.)

12 False. The largest single slice of the purchase price goes to the shop itself. The record company is quite a way down the chain. From every LP, the store gets £1.25, the distribution company takes 80p and next comes the Government with its grasping 78p for VAT. The mere musician ties with the dubiously titled 'overheads' at 68p a piece. The record company is sixth — 31p.

13 True. It was published in Billboard on 20th July 1940 and the top song was "I'll Never Smile Again" by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra (who he?). NME published the first British singles chart on 14 November 1952, and Melody Maker the first album chart on 8 November 1958 (and where has it got them?)

14 True. Their power to amplify is based on the fact that a heating element inside the glass warms up the cathode allowing electrons to flow from it, to the anode. No heat, no flow. It's not just an undesired side effect. For those technically inclined, your input signal is fed to a grid between the anode and cathode which acts like a gate, allowing the electrons through or shutting them out. As the tiny input signals fluctuate in level, so does the power running from Anode to Cathode, closely mimicking the signal but at much higher (amplified) levels.

15 True. It was called "4 Minutes 33 Seconds" — in which any number of musicians with any type of instruments remain perfectly silent for that length of time". It has been performed (and the punk version is 2 minutes 57 seconds). But it doesn't beat the longest recorded silence which goes to American Jerry Cammarate — 52 minutes, 10 seconds released in 1974 under the title "Auditory Memory".

16 True. Philips announced the laser based invention on 17 May, utilising PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) with a 14 bit digital code and a signal to noise ratio of 84dB. The first hardware was launched in Japan in. October '82, and doomy experts consider that 1978 may well be immortalised as the last time the Occidentals ever beat the Orientals in hi-tech hardware.

17 False. Total rubbish. People will merely ask what that funny aftershave is. Sadly, the only way to harden the skin is to continually subject it to pressure, friction and punishment. No, we meant bass playing. However it is true that double bass players who've been at it for some years develop 'spatula' fingers. Where the tips have been subjected to so much pressure, they spread out to become wider and flatter than the rest of the finger.

18 True. It was Jon Moss (drummer). "We used to play hour-long versions of "Headhunters' by Herbie Hancock," confessed Bacon in an unguarded moment, "... it was great." Yes, quite.