August was the month that guitar designer, music tech pioneer, jazz player and all-round legend Les Paul passed away, at the age of 94. We were at the Gibson HQ the day he died - you can read our account of the day here and our tribute here.

The month saw Noel Gallagher finally quit Oasis, after months of not-so-veiled hints that him and Liam weren’t getting on. Actually, make that years of not-so-veiled hints. Still, it was big news nonetheless - here’s looking forward to a Noel Gallagher solo album, and here’s looking back at 15 years of Oasis: in pictures and videos.

OS X Snow Leopard arrived in August - key features of Apple’s new operating system such as improved mutli-thread processor support and disk space savings pleased music makers, although legacy users were inevitably peeved at Apple finally dropping support of PowerPC machines.

August also hosted a major new music festival. It might have been Sonisphere’s first year but that didn’t stop the event taking place across multiple countries and bagging some serious big name headliners - including Metallica, Linkin Park and Avenged Sevenfold.