From now on you can buy the Hotcake overdrive pedal in our online shop. This is the overdrive pedal that Mark Knopfler used on his 2005 Shangri-La tour, and probably on other occasions as well. The Hotcake is built by Paul Crowther in New Zealand since 1976. It has a best reputation among players around the world – Stevie Ray Vaughn also played one. For us Mark Knopfler fans it […]
The first (today: nine) pages with Mark Knopfler guitars are online. I started with some Strats (mainly the most important ones) and also finished the ones about his 1958 and 1959 Les Pauls. I also included the option to upload your own pictures for each guitar at the bottom of the pages. If many will do, we might soon have a nice picture gallery for each guitar. After approval (to […]
While working on the new gear database – especially on the pages about the different MK Signature Strats – I felt it difficult to tell from a picture which of his different signature Strats it is (Mark used alone three of these on the 2008 tour, and generally seems to use even more here and there). So I had to dig a bit deeper into the numerous pictures and viceo […]
I finally decided to start a new database for all the Mark Knopfler gear that was used over the years. This will take surely several weeks (or even months), and finally will be a never-ending progress. The idea is to have one dedicated page for each guitar/amp/effect that holds all info we have on that guitar/amp/effect. As each page has the possibility to add reader comments (at the bottom of […]
Those beautiful 1958/59 Les Paul Standards are probably the holy grail not only for Mark Knopfler fans – Mark owns a 1958 and a 1959 and plays them on all his tours – but for all guitar players. Unfortunately the prices for these are in the region you’d normally pay for a house, so most of us will hardly ever get the chance to touch one of these. They came […]
What can be nicer than one of those wonderful old National resophonic guitars like the Style-0? The answer is, of course, two of these! My friend Thomas brought his 1932 Style-O along for a photo session. And what a wonderful guitar this is – shiny and sparkling like one of the new reissues but real vintage, almost 80 years old. The pictures from the photo session show the guitar from […]
In this blog post you will find another guitar tutorial video, this time not about a certain aspect of Mark Knopfler’s guitar playing but one that explains how to play a particular song again, similar to the ones I did about Down to the Waterline some time ago. As Down to the Waterline is the first song of Dire Straits’ first album, I thought why not go on with the […]
The recent Mark Knopfler & Bob Dylan tour ended with the show at the Hammersmith Apollo in London on November 21, 2011. The last encore played that day was a duet of both masters – the song ‘Forever Young’ (from Dylan’s 1974 album Planet Waves). A new guitar appeared on this song – a Mark Knopfler Signature Strat with lipstick pickups. The original lipstick pickup The lipstick pickup was the pickup […]
In the videos below we were comparing two Mark Knopfler Signature Strats to a 1964 Fender Stratocaster, also in red (fiesta). Talking about red, note that one of the signature Strats is in the ‘wrong’ colour the very first ones came with, while the other one is the normal hot rod red. It is always interesting to hear how different three Strats will sound, even Strats of exactly the same […]