I recently made a backing track and started to rehearse Southbound Again (live version, not an easy one I think) from Dire Straits’ first album. In fact the live version they played from 1977 to 1979 (often as an encore) is a totally different song than the studio version. Unfortunately not one single video exists of it so noone has ever seen how/what/where Knopfler played exactly there. The only complete […]
I just got this picture via email (thank you Wolfgang of the Dire Strats tribute band) which shows the settings on the Fender Hot Rod Deluxe amp that Mark Knopfler used for a promo gig in Germany, 2004. He played live the song Boom like that on a German TV show. Volume 5 ; Drive 2.5 ; Treble 9, Bass 4 ; Middle 7.5 ; Master 4 ; Reverb 0 […]
Normally I use my Music Man 212 HD 130 amp for clean guitar sounds, but the other day I was tinkering around with the Les Paul jamming to Brothers in Arms. The Music Man has a solid state pre-amp section which is not ideal for distorted sounds. Yet, I was surprised to get some really nice, fat and warm sounds out of this combination. Knopfler uses Marshall cabinets which allow […]
Quarter note triplets are notes of a certain duration, or in other words they produce a certain rhythimcal effect. Such a note is shorter than a quarter note but longer than an eighth note. They do not “fit” into the normal grid of half, quarter, eighth or sixteenth notes; they break out of the normal rhythm scheme, thus highlighting a melody or a phrase. However, they have nothing to do […]
Dire Straits’ first hit was Sultans of Swing, recorded in Basing Street studios, February 1978. But did you know that there was a different studio recording before (demo version, Pathway Studios, July 1977), and also a later recording (Pathway Studios, April 1978) that was recorded to be released as a single in some countries? The demo version This version was recorded on July 2, 1977, together with four other song […]
*Note: As there was an issue with this guitar – the neck warp was too big to play properly with 08 strings – the guitar was returned. For this reason, I removed all names – of the builder and the client. XY* – a reader of this blog and singer / guitar player in the band XY*- recently sent me an email about his latest guitar: a clone of the […]
On October 26 Geocities finally closed. Geocities was one of the first hosts for free websites. They were taken over a few years later by Yahoo who now finally decided to drop Geocities forever. When I built my very first website in 1996, it was Geocities who hosted my original “Dire Straits Guitar Page” at http://www.geocities.com/Nashville/3399/. Although hardly updated within the next years, it was nevertheless one of the first […]
Recently my son started to practice Tai Chi – an internal Chinese martial art that is often practiced for health reasons. Tai Chi is originally a sophisticated martial art in which you learn to control and relax your mind and your body and to win over the hard with softness this way. It is not really about fighting these days but rather about practicing ultimate principles that enable you to […]
I recently recorded an acoustic guitar for a cover version of Brothers in Arms. I used two different microphones – a large diaphragm condensor Audio Technica AT 4050 near the bridge and a small diaphragm condenser Schoeps CM 64 over the neck. I had seen pictures showing Mark using a similar approach from a radio promo recording he did a few years back. I recorded both mics to separate channels […]
I recently saw a few threads in numerous forums about the guitar sound of So far away on Dire Straits’ fifth album, Brothers in Arms. People speculated that there was a flanger, a delay, a chorus, or other effects involved to create the rather unusual sound of the lead guitar. And unusual it is in fact. This is because it is not really a guitar what you hear – instead […]