Many Mark Knopfler fans like Eric Clapton and are familiar with his work. Especially his live album Just one Night from 1979 was a milestone in his career. It features a live version of Setting my up – a Mark Knopfler song from Dire Straits’ first CD. However, many do not realize that this cover version has not much to do with Eric Clapton. Instead this song was meant to […]
In this article I will cover a little chord progression that Mark Knopfler apparently discovered some day and – as he sees himself mainly as a songwriter – directly translated into a song. He often learned such little patterns and licks by accident – finding something when playing for hours – or learned them from one of his mates, people like the great Chet Atkins, pedal-steel player Paul Franklin, or […]
Summer is here and with it my summer holidays, so the ideal opportunity for some more song tutorials here in my Mark Knopfler guitar blog. This time I will explain the song Down to the Waterline – the first song on the first Dire Straits CD (1978). Down to the waterline is surely another highlight of early Dire Straits. It is one of the oldest Mark Knopfler songs, one of […]
The song In the Gallery of Dire Straits’ first album seems to be in a strange key. The official songbooks transcribe it in the key of Bbm. On all live versions Dire Straits played it in Am. So, why is this? If you listen carefully to the CD version and and try to play along with your guitar, you will notice that Bbm seems to work better than Am, but […]
Mark Knopfler owns two beautiful vintage Gibson acoustic guitars which he seems to play a lot on his studio albums these days. One is a 1953 Gibson Southerner Jumbo, the other a 1938 Gibson Advanced Jumbo which I would like to feature in this article. Both have a sunburst finish and thus look a bit similar at first glance. Besides the different body shape, the different fingerboard inlays tell you […]
I recently saw this extremely rare amp offered on ebay – a 1974 Musitek combo amp that looks very similar to the “Dire Straits” amp – the Music Man 130 HD 212. In fact Musitek was one of the names under which the very first amps were produced before the company was renamed to Music Man (see this article for more info on Music Man amps). As this was the […]
I recently put one of these waterslide Fender decals on one of my guitars, which is basically an easy job that does not take very long. However, I remembered that I heard of even a luthier who got big problems with it. The mistake he made was that he left the decal too long in the water. If the decal loosens from the paper and swims around in the water, […]
Mark Knopfler started to play Music Man amps around September 1978. These amps were used for all live gigs from then on until the end of the Making Movies On Location tour in 1981. The Music Man amp was used on some studio recordings from this era, probably also on Making Movies, but it was most likely not used on the first album, and neither on Communiqué (here amps borrowed […]
Today I want to feature a little software that was available as a free dowwnload on the official Mark Knopfler site some years ago. It is a flash mixer with individual tracks of the song Sailing to Philadelphia, in other words, a software mixer that does not only allow to listen to the individual instruments but also to adjust the volume of these. For this reason it was described as […]
The history of the Music Man company began about 1971 when Tom Walker, Forrest White and Leo Fender started a company called Tri-Sonic. Walker and White had worked for Fender before. Leo Fender himself had to sign a 10 years non-compete contract when he sold his company Fender Musical Instruments to the CBS Corporation in 1965, so he remained in the background until 1975. In 1974 the company name was […]