I heard it had to be Jimmy Page as he was the only one in London with a fuzz box at the time and wasn't about to lend it to Keith Richards. Perhaps not true, but I found it a funny anecdote.

You shouldn't be looking!

I took my sg to my tech the other week. I so wanted 8s on it because I'm getting on with them so well on my ps-2. He strongly recommended 9s though, he was quite sure it simply won't work out with 8s on the sg. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

It is interesting, I think the Anderson's always touched on a lot of these issues and were very open minded. Dark leading characters like Captain Scarlet, interracial relationships were featured in Thunderbirds, they would explore many things. It was only when it was transferred to live actors it ruffled a few feathers. Watch out for the episode where Ed Straker clearly wipes away a white powder from his desk at Shado HQ for example! There is a ton of hidden and not so hidden stuff to be found. I can't think of another TV show in the UK at the time where the main character was not really all that easy to like (though I personally loved Ed Bishop and the way he played the Ed Straker character), he was purposely awkward and at odds with himself. The episode 'A Question of Priorities' where Straker's son dies stayed with me for a lifetime. It might seem tame now, but it was a very hard hitting show for early 1970's kids TV.

Glad you know the series, I don't find many people who remember it other than Gerry Anderson fans. Controversial because of the 'adult content' you can look up the history of how it became a scheduling hot potato. The TV stations thought it would be like another Gerry Anderson puppet series and therefore scheduled it as a kids show. However it touched on many adult issues of the day, mixed raced relationships, etc and ended up shifted to a late night weekday slot. I've taken the time to find a typical write up - I actually clearly remember it disappearing from the kids slot and wondering what the hell had happened with my favourite TV show! Scheduling UFO The show dealt –admittedly often quite clumsily- with racial and gender issues, as well as drug abuse and the emotional effects of death and loss. This made scheduling it a nightmare for the networks, since in many ways it retained a lot of appeal for the same children who had enjoyed Thunderbirds and other Anderson puppet series: superb special effects and model-work from British effects maestro Derek Meddings; very cool alien and future-tech hardware; fights in space, on earth and in the earth’s atmosphere; and tense and well-written dramatic situations. In the mid-1970s in the UK, UFO was shown at 11.00pm weeknights; in the nineties, Bravo showed it at 6pm, as did the BBC (who had leased the show from Carlton) a few years later, though the Beeb also showed it on Saturday mornings! The episode The Long Sleep - which dealt with a hippie girl who cannot tell if the alien abduction of her boyfriend was real or an LSD hallucination - has always been excluded from pre-watershed showings, whereas other episodes have either been edited for violence or scheduled diversely for their own problematic content. http://www.denofgeek.com/tv/19363/underappreciated-tv-ufo

I binge watch every episode of Gerry Anderson's UFO every year. Brilliant and controversial series from my childhood. I spent years wanting to watch it again, now I have the DVD box sets.

Could be plenty from the provided list, but right now for me it is the end of Hots on for Nowhere. It's like 'get some of this riff, rude eh?", Now get some more of it, finished. It's just a brilliant way to end a song.

Sitting here listening to Tangerine on a loop, the key and use of acoustic guitar are resemblances I'm picking up. You start off with the strummed A minor - G - D chords in Tangerine, the same chords all feature in the intro and later strummed parts of Stairway. I don't think in terms of what is played there is much similarity. Stairway has minor and major sevenths etc and starts off with a finger picked arpeggio with the well known chromatic descending bassline, I don't hear anything like that in Tangerine. Mood wise I can see the resemblance, songs in the same key are often like that, there are only so many chords that work together in a given key and some orders of those chords (progressions) sound better than others, so the variations available are not huge really.

Whatever the outcome l'll remember this article for spelling out the facts.

It's zep again, IpMan suggested some solos to learn, now this is going through my head constantly, I love it!

That's great advice about the picking on finer strings - small is big - I got use to it by using a really thin floppy pick at first. Funny old things guitars, small is big when picking light strings, slow is fast when learning songs and we all learn it is what we don't play that is the most important bit.

I use to think I gave the LPs and vinyl singles I bought more of a chance. You know you would go to the effort of going out and buying it, taking it home, carefully taking it out of the sleeve, putting it on the turntable, if it didn't immediately grab me, with all that effort I put into it I would listen over and over anyway. A lot of stuff grew on me and 'stuck' that way. Now it's just all too easy to move on after the first 30 seconds and go listen to something else.

Good and bad I guess. I'm old enough to remember taking a vinyl LP home in a bag and feeling I really 'had' something special. Just the experience of browsing the record store was an event. Now though I just order a CD on Amazon and have it available on my phone immediately and the CD arrives in the post a couple of days later. I don't even have to take it out of the wrapper as the music is already available to me.

The thinner strings are usually plain wire, run you thumb nail down your strings, if you get a 'scratchy' sound they are wound, if not they are plain. (you also get 'flat wound' which are wound but the winding sits flush and they won't sound so scratchy). You'll find with most sets the 3 thinnest (finer gauge) strings are plain the thicker (heavier gauge) strings are wound. 8s means the finest (high E) string is .008 of an inch. The rest of the 'set' you buy is balanced to this getting progressively heavier gauge up to your low E which is the 'fattest'. So with a set of 8s generally all the strings are going to be finer gauge than a set of 9s. Though you can get custom sets where they are out of balance so you get the thinnest strings for bending but the 'bass' strings are fatter for better tone and less fret rattle. Best advice really is just try out different sizes and makes and see what works for you. I lowered the action on my acoustic recently and put on a set of 9s - transformation from extremely difficult for me to play, to not even having to think about it.

Good advice above, I've found doing a lot of Led Zep at the moment that the 8s transformed the learning process for me. I would try for hours with 9s and not get the sounds I was hearing, just flat bend after flat bend. If someone can bend 9s or 10s and make the right pitch over and over they have a better sound quality, but it just doesn't happen for me. It takes too much physical effort to make the bend then I loose the timing. Overall it is a case of don't be afraid to experiment. I did have to adjust the action on my guitars when I switched to 8s but it is just a case of fiddling with the adjustments until it 'feels' right or taking it to someone to get it set-up properly. But if that saves hours of frustration with not being able to do something and thus slowing progression, it is a small price to pay.