This time I am checking two great guitars, a Suhr MK-1 and a Pensa MK-1. The Suhr is the one that you could already see in this video. Both belong to the same person, a collector from Germany. Some background on the first MK1 The Pensa-Suhr MK1 was built in 1988 by luthier John Suhr at Rudy Pensa’s guitar shop in Manhattan. Suhr worked there before he built amps with […]
For this week I had some nice borrowed guitars around which made me record a short youtube video comparing them with some of mine, all played over the same amp with the same setting – only the volume knob was adjusted for each. This was rather a spontaneous session recorded with the camcorder mic. I tried to play both some similar licks on different guitars and different licks that sound […]
This blog post is not about a Mark Knopfler amp but still has a clear connection to Dire Straits: the Peavey Deuce VT was the amp that David Knopfler played on stage with the band between 1978 and 1979, and thus contributed to the band’s unique sound. The Peavey Deuce VT was built from 1978 to the early eighties. Before, a similar model called Deuce (without the VT) was […]
Today I was jamming a bit on the acoustic guitar and still had the camcorder ready from the last video yesterday, so I simply let it run a bit and recorded this sponatneous version of Dire Straits’ “Where do you think you’re going”. If you wonder about the sound or even about the string bending on the acoustic – check out this old blog post about the string gauge on […]
Here is a youtube video that demonstrates some of the 36 possible pick-up combinations of our loaded Schecter-style pickguards. Each pick-up can be switched to the full or tapped coil which means a fat sound or a vintage-like sound. This way you will not only get new combinations that are not possible with the standard 5-way switch like bridge & neck or all three PUs, but you can also mix […]
This blog post is about the 50 seconds instrumental part that bridged the two songs Expresso Love and Down to the Waterline on the Making Movies tour (aka On Location tour) of Dire Straits in 1980/81. I always admired this part, especially how it transferred the energy of the ending of Expresso Love to the ‘foggy mood’ of the Down to the Waterline intro. For all who don’t know this […]
We already knew from Guy Fletcher’s forum that on stage the band plays some songs to a click track – a metronome only the musicians (or at least drummer Danny Cummings) could hear on their inear monitors – but we could only speculate which songs these were. A click track means a steady beat at a 100% constant tempo while without there are normally little tempo changes going along with […]
This post is about two of Mark Knopfler’s Fender vintage amps, the brown Fender Vibrolux – the Sultans of Swing amp that was covered in this blog article – and the similar-sized and similar-looking brown Fender Vibroverb. The Fender Vibrolux (model 6G11a) was one of Knopfler’s earliest guitar amps. Probably it belonged to Dire Straits’ bass player John Illsley and was used for the first demo recordings of Dire Straits, […]
With this blog post I will try to compile some info on Mark Knopfler’s effect rack for his latest tours – based mainly on pictures of his 2008 tour. Probably the same rack was also used on his latest 2010 tour. Here we have a picture of the full rack: The Devices Tuner – On top we have a chromatic tuner, as it seems a Korg DTR2000. Power conditioner – […]