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.

I was getting torn up fingers when I switched from 9s to 8s I guess the thinner strings just tended to cut in more at first but I think I've adapted to them now. I use Ernie ball though I might start mixing sets as I find I get a lot of fret Buzz on the larger gauge strings, I do like the feel and sound from the non wound strings though. 8s for the string bending, I just can't bend 9s over and over and keep tempo. I'm going to try 7s too soon, just to see what they are like. I've got the grooves in my calluses, I was finding they affected hammer ons on acoustics as the string was going into the grooves or dents. It's been a few weeks now though since I switched to the thinner strings and the dents or grooves seem to be getting shallower. Probably worth mentioning that when I was ripping up my fingers I hadn't been playing much since a break of couple of years so that may have been a factor too.

I've always found Clapton kind of dull all too studied and sanitised for my ears. Have to be honest that I initially posted the question because it was something I had seen said over and over. I think I understand better now what people meant by it, or at least the relevance of the 'sloppy' term to my own study of jimmy's playing.

I like the last one a lot, not for me to be the one to interpret meanings into it, but it suggests many things to me that fit the man and image.

With budget guitars, I would recommend Epiphone copies, my Epiphone Les Paul is at least as good if not better than my Gibson SG. The main difference is I could have bought 5 Epiphone guitars for the same price of the SG. The SG does do Kashmir and IMTOD very well though, but it needs some work to finish the fret ends really which for a not very cheap guitar sucks. No problems like that with the Epiphone. I still play a budget Jackson PS-2 from the '90s most days, cheap guitars are OK if one isn't scared to set them up and experiment with them. I put a genuine Floyd Rose tremolo on it instead of the poor quality copy it came with and it is adequate for most lead playing. Amp wise I use a Spider Jam - I get the tones I want out of one amp with built in effects. For reference it is not true either that all guitars sound the same through the Line 6 Spider amps, the tone is preserved despite many people claiming it is not. Had the delight of playing BD yesterday along with the cut-back version on the deluxe CD - frantic and physical were the words that came to mind about Jimmy's playing on the studio track, which neatly brings us back on topic.

I caught part of a radio interview on a documentary today where Jimmy stated he did not want to do 40 takes to make it perfect, it was all about capturing the moment. What he did want was the music to stand the test of time, I think he got his wish.

I heard he was known to use .008 but moved up a place with the high e replaced with a violin string I doubt though if that was a constant thing. I have been using .008 whilst working on the solos recently which helps. That's the physical side covered, but coming up with the phrasing in the first place is what makes his work unique. At first I was getting my fingers ripped to bits using thin strings but I just went back to putting in a couple of hours a day on acoustics to cure that.

How do people think he came up with the phrasing? I can hear plenty of the standard blues licks on the recordings, so that was listening to old recordings, but they are often strung together with some very individual runs and ideas. One suggestion I heard years back for coming up with lead breaks was to base it on speech patterns (I guess similar in concept to 'call and response'), interesting one to think about, though I could just accept it is because he's a genius on the guitar.

Heroin affects people differently though, some seem to thrive on it, for a while at least, for others it is a a pretty quick slippery slope into ill health. I think it depends a lot on the person and what goes with it, plenty of booze probably wasn't helping, I can't play hardly at all after just a few pints of bitter - though it has to be said I still like to try to.

I think one thing that must be brought to this debate is whether Jimmy Page wanted things rough around the edges. I heard in interviews he wanted to capture spontaneity, the emotion of the moment, rawness, brutality, human condition - are they all words that could be substituted for 'sloppy' I wonder? I'm another who has played guitar for more than 30 years, sometimes it is just better on the first run through, it's easy enough to practice a piece over and over until it is 'perfect' but in doing so it seems to lose emotion or turn into nothing more than exercise rather than a piece of music. I honestly feel when I listen to very technical guitarists that I'm listening to a string of exercises played one after the other rather than listening to music. The more I think about the discussions here the more I see the 'mistakes' as totally essential to his playing style and capturing of the moment in production. It's almost a statement of attitude in itself. I know he felt restricted as a session musician and was looking to escape the rigidity of perfection for raw emotion in a rock group, it all seems to fit together at some point.

That's such a moment in 'It might get loud', it's Jack White's expression that gets me, his face has that 'I've dreamed of this moment all my life' kind of look to it.