I recently got a reliebable information about the guitar and the amp that Mark used for the solos in the song One World of Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms album (studio version, 1985). I put up a quiz with five possible question for you to find out the answer, hoping this way you have some fun and can check if your ears and general knowledge are good enough to let […]
The good thing about running a website about Mark Knopfler and his guitar sound and style is that you get in touch with so many other people who share your interest. I guess everyone who is really interested in this topic sooner or later finds his way to this site. So it happened that one day a customer who bought two of my iSounds in my online shop told me […]
I think I wrote a blog post about Albert Lee’s cover of Setting me up from the first Dire Straits album before (see here). Today I surfed into this video clip on youtube which I really like a lot. It is a bit on the slow side, much slower than e.g. Albert’s live version that was featured on Eric Clapton’s Just one Night live album. It seems the older you […]
Some days ago I got the French version of the Dire Straits book by Michael Oldfield. Unlike the English version – which price meanwhile skyrocketed on the used-book market as it seems – I got this one for a couple of Euros on ebay. Nevertheless, I guess it is a clear indicator that you are a crazy MK fan if you buy a book in French and your French is […]
I recently got an old Dutch magazine called JOEPIE from February 1979 with a two-page story about Dire Straits. It features two pictures that show the band on stage at the Hope & Anchor pub. Dire Straits played there several times in late 1977: on September 10 (in the evening after they played the Clapham Common gig in the afternoon of that same day), on November 4, 11, and 18, […]
Although Portobelle Belle from Dire Straits’ second album Communiqué was played on so many tours, it seemed that there are no live videos of this song at all. It was played e.g. on each gig of the Love over Gold tour in 1982/3 which ended in the Alchemy live video concert but just this song was not included on the Alchemy video, neither on the original vinyl album or CD, […]
The loaded Strat pickguards in the vintage Schecter style have been available in brass and white aluminium for a while now, but from now on they are also available in black aluminium. You can chose between two versions: with the VFS-1 or the F500T-style pickups. As both are tapped pickups (two different sounds for each pickup), you will get 26 different pickup combinations and thus 26 different sounds. The black […]
According to Guy Fletcher, the songs on which Mark plays the Tone King Imperial are: True love will never fade Shangri la Prairie wedding Dark is the night/Donegan’s Gone Postcards from Paraguay Let It All Go I guess this is meant to be true rather for the latest tours than for the studio albums (click here to find out what gear was used on them), and it matches what I […]
This site is on Facebook now: check it out here. From now on you can follow interesting news there as well, or simply let the world know that you like this site 🙂 I admit I am still rather new in the world of Facebook, and probably do not fully understand all possibilities and options of Facebook yet, but I am sure that good ideas will come after a start […]
This week I visited the Frankfurt Music Fair, the world’s leading trade fair for the world of music. On one floor it featured a special vintage guitar exhibition where you could see lots of wonderful guitars, even most valuable guitars like Fenders and Gibsons from the fifties. I took many pictures of all kind of guitars, but with this blog post I would like to feature those which are similar […]