It's difficult to put in perspective how Gary Moore changed things with Still Got The Blues. Those albums were huge. For me, as an eleven-year-old guitarist who had already been playing for a few years, Still Got The Blues changed my world. I could relate to the album cover - a young lad sitting on his bed playing guitar while a poster of Jimi Hendrix looked down with what I saw as equal amounts of interest, pride and encouragement.

In 2013’s social media world of texting, Tweeting, Facebook-liking and general online sharing, marketing guitars is now a rich process. Back in the day, guitarists were not so well served. If you wanted to see a new guitar model, you’d have to go to your local music store. And, if you bought a guitar magazine – as we’re sure, most guitarists still like to do – you’d see a print ad. But even after that, you’d go to your music store. So, what about those classic print ads?

Rock and roll was born in part out of teen rebellion, it’s true, but even rock’s most avid practitioners have occasionally penned odes to their moms. Sometimes the sentiment expressed is, ahem, complicated (see the Rolling Stones entry below), but generally speaking the message delivered is one of unadulterated affection.

As Gibson releases the Joe Walsh 1960 Les Paul, sit back and enjoy the wit and wisdom of Joseph Fidler Walsh...

Led Zeppelin released Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II, Led Zeppelin III and the fourth which didn’t even have their band name on it (it’s widely known as Led Zeppelin IV, of course).

I'll never forget it — an image of Frank Zappa, Gibson SG in hand, shirt off, long hair and commanding moustache, pictured in black and white in the pages of one of my guitar instructional books when I was ten years old. Who was this guy? He looked so… purposeful.

Reverb was one of the first effects guitarists used, and there's an established reverb vocabulary, a set of rules by which we expect to use it and to hear it. Reverb is something that usually trails our playing, adding a sense of dimension and depth. It also serves to place our music at a specific point in time, with reverb tails hanging in the air to remind us of notes that we've played but which are no longer being sounded. Would Van Halen's self-titled album have sounded so significant and powerful if we didn't have that breathy guitar reverb in the right channel, reinforcing the notes Eddie had just played? Well, probably, but it's still a pretty cool sound.

Conventional wisdom dictates that hollow body guitars aren’t the best instruments for rocking out. Their tones are more associated with jazz, country and blues — although post-Delta blues is more the province of solid body and semi-hollow body six-strings, the latter ala B.B. King’s Lucille and the ES-335s and their kin used by Freddie King and others.

There’s no denying that from the ‘80s onwards, the guitar instrumental has ventured into hitherto unexplored territories, with virtuosos such as Joe Satriani, Yngwie Malmsteen and others setting new standards for the concept. For the purposes of the list below, however, virtuosity is less a consideration than pioneering impact. Feel free to chime in with great instrumentals we missed — especially those with longstanding impact — in the comments section.

Making an album – even a classic album – sometimes can be an exercise in overcoming adversity. Still, the monumental troubles that Paul McCartney and Wings had to surmount to record Band on the Run, easily McCartney’s best post-Beatles album, easily could have served as fodder for an epic Hollywood film.