Modern technology has made it incredibly easy to emulate the sound of a rock band. Plug the right guitar into the right amplifier and you're already on your way to sounding like Kurt Cobain. In fact, you don't even need the amplifier. Just plug the guitar into a computer and choose the "Kurt Cobain" setting on your favourite music software. Almost every sound in rock and pop history that's caused your ears to prick up, or your eyebrows to raise, has been sampled or digitally reconstructed for our music-making convenience. But these sounds all started somewhere; a musician or a producer made a noise - often by mistake - and someone in the studio piped up and said, "Hey! Actually, that sounds quite good!" And so the palette of rock and pop music was formed - a series of happy accidents, developed, refined and combined, mixed down and presented to us. Here are some of the most distinctive and, in no particular order, the records that best showcase them.

1) Piano Glissando
Jerry Lee Lewis: Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On (1957)
Modern European composers such as Ravel occasionally used the piano glissando (essentially, dragging a finger up or down the white notes of the keyboard) as a delicate piece of ornamentation. Nothing delicate about Jerry Lee Lewis, though - his battering of the keys transformed the glissando into an exhilarating build to a musical climax, and it subsequently found its way into the armoury of any pianist working up to a big chorus. Perhaps the most famous lurk at the start of Abba's Dancing Queen and I Want You Back by The Jackson 5; feel free to emulate them next time you see a piano. It requires virtually no skill - although it starts to hurt after three or four attempts.

2) Power Chord
The Kinks: You Really Got Me (1964)
It's the essential building block of rock; the root and the fifth of the chord played at substantial volume on guitar and distorted to taste. It's also the musical equivalent of the poker face; with just the two notes, it's neither a sunny-sounding major chord nor a gloomy minor. Link Wray's Rumble contained an early example, and it picked up steam in the '60s and '70s: strident, effective - and, as demonstrated by thousands of amateur guitarists hacking out the opening bars of Deep Purple's Smoke On The Water, easy to play. Without the power chord entire genres of metal simply wouldn't exist.

3) Hammond Organ & Leslie Speaker
Booker T & the MGs: Hip Hug-Her (1967)
The Hammond was designed for churches that couldn't afford a pipe organ, but in the 1960s it found its way from gospel into jazz and rock music, via musicians such as The Animals' Alan Price, Booker T Jones, Billy Preston and Procul Harum's Gary Brooker. The Leslie speaker cabinet was the essential Hammond accessory; its unique design - featuring a rotating speaker horn - created a unique "Doppler" effect that could be set to move quickly (tremolo, as per the Booker T track) or slowly (chorale). You may well be sick of hearing A Whiter Shade Of Pale but its Hammond/Leslie combo inspired a generation of organists.

4) Fretless Bass
Japan: Talking Drum (1981)
On a bass guitar, the frets tell you where the notes are. The fretless bass, by contrast, gives players room to indulge themselves with additional vibrato, harmonics and sweeping up or down the fretboard in search of the note. The instrument has had a bad rap, synonymous with overindulgence; it's certainly difficult to listen to early Paul Young singles without wishing that bassist Pino Palladino would tone it down a bit. But it can be tastefully deployed - as per XTC's English Settlement album - and the sound of a virtuoso player really going for it can be exhilarating, as per Percy Jones's vigorous duelling with Phil Collins on albums by Brand X.

5) Theremin
The Beach Boys: Good Vibrations (1966)
This most famous example of theremin use isn't strictly a theremin at all, but an electro-theremin. While the theremin is probably the only musical instrument you play without physical contact (your hands' distance from its metal antennae controls the pitch and volume), the electro-theremin employed by Brian Wilson was manipulated using a piece of string. But that eerie, high-pitched sine-wave tone made famous by Good Vibrations continued to crop up in rock music: from the authentic (Jimmy Page would use a theremin during live performances of Whole Lotta Love; Pere Ubu continue to use one on stage) to digital recreations of the same sound (Mysterons from the first Portishead album, Dummy).

6) Guitar Feedback
Gang Of Four: Anthrax (1981)
A classic case of rock music taking an undesirable noise and moulding it to suit its own purposes. The reason for feedback is simple: the guitar pickup "hears" itself being blasted out of a speaker cabinet, processes the sound and passes it to the speaker: noise piled upon noise. As rock music became less polite, more liberties were taken with feedback; while there's an unintentional burst at the front end of I Feel Fine by The Beatles, the outro to The Who's My Generation uses the sound more creatively. Eventually, the act of emulating Townshend or Hendrix by standing too close to the amplifier to create freeform squealing became almost cliched.

7) Mellotron Flute
The Beatles: Strawberry Fields Forever (1967)
The eerie chords stabbed out by Paul McCartney at the beginning of Strawberry Fields come from the mellotron, an instrument that could be termed the first sampler; small loops of tape containing recordings of instruments at various pitches were triggered by a piano-style keyboard. The fragile nature of the tape medium made for
an erratic, unpredictable instrument, but that was part of its charm. The Beatles weren't the pioneers (check out the sublime Baby Can It Be True by The Graham Bond Organisation) - but Strawberry Fields piqued the interest of bands with pockets deep enough to buy a mellotron, including Lynyrd Skynyrd, Rush, King Crimson, Yes and Genesis.

8) Palm Mute Guitar
Billy Bragg: A New England (1983)
The technique of dampening strings to create a muted sound is second nature for most guitarists; it's one of the easiest ways to create contrasts in volume. Anyone who ever listened to John Peel's radio show will have heard the sound during the opening theme, Grinderswitch's Pickin' The Blues, and for some guitarists, such as Billy Bragg and Stuart Moxham from Young Marble Giants, it almost became their default sound. Whack some distortion across rapidly played palm-muted guitar and you've got thrash metal in a nutshell; spend an hour listening to Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer and you'll become intimately acquainted with it.

9) Reverse Tape
Yes: Roundabout (1971)
Reversing audio by playing tapes backwards was one of the few bits of audio trickery available to psychedelic musicians of the late 1960s. Musique concrète composers had been at it for years, but it was The Beatles who brought the effect to a wider audience; the aforementioned Strawberry Fields, Tomorrow Never Knows and Rain include reversed percussion, guitar or vocals. Reversing guitar or piano chords gives that now-familiar long fade in and abrupt cut-off, while the benign act of reversing vocals became infamous in the 1980s when Judas Priest stood accused of inserting reversed satanic messages into their songs. They hadn't. And even if they had, they wouldn't have had much effect. They were playing backwards, after all.

10) Slap Bass
Stanley Clarke: Lopsy Lu (1974)
No one could deny a bass player the right to hit strings with their fingers instead of plucking, but the resultant noise can lead to irritation among otherwise mild-mannered music fans. The theme to Seinfeld - a synthesized version of slap - is many people's idea of the technique's worst excesses, and some players, including Level 42's Mark King and Primus's Les Claypool, have pushed slap to that kind of extreme. But you'll hear slap hiccuping away throughout rock and pop, subtly enhancing the rhythm track. Bassist Chuck Rainey knew that slap bass wasn't particularly welcome when he played on Steely Dan's Peg, but he did it anyway, erecting screens so Becker and Fagen couldn't see what he was doing. "They never knew it went down," he said proudly.

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