A red Stratocaster has always been one of THE rock’n’roll logos – something that started with Hank Marvin, guitarist of the Shadows, who had the first red Strat in England. He started a desire for exactly this guitar among thousand of English kids in the early 60ies, one of these was a kid named Mark Knopfler. In fact it was rather coincidence that Hank Marvin got a red Strat: he […]
Over the last days I was working on a Strat project. I had some parts from a 70ies Japanese Strat copy, which together with an American Fender neck and a loaded pickguard should make a nice part-o-caster. In the seventies many guitars were finished with polyester. This finish is like a coat of hard plastic (actually it is rather a resin). It is easy to apply because you can sand […]
Most people who like Mark Knopfler might know Chris Rea, who has been popular especially here in Europe since the 80ies. Due to health problems, he ended his active career some yeasr ago. I first heard of him in 1983 when a friend of mine who was also into Dire Straits at that time told me about a concert he was at with the then super-group SAGA. It seemed he […]
I recently surfed into a nice site called JamCenter.com where you find a “jam machine” – an online loop player that plays backing tracks to jam with. Simply choose a key in the left sidebar, scroll down (the loop player appears at the very bottom of the page), select one of the styles (rock, cool, metal,…), and the player will play a loop of a certain length. The chords are […]
One of the last articles was about how to record a clean guitar, and the POD and the Tubeman have already been mentioned there. This time it is about what these two devices were mainly built for: a distorted guitar sound. You will hear the same track first recorded with the POD (lead and rhythm guitars), then with the Tubeman, both devices were connected directly to the mixing desk. Here […]
In this article you will find a sound clip to hear the sound of a guitar amp … (a) mic’ed close to the speaker (Shure SM 57) (b) mic’ed at a distance of about 2 m (6 ft.) (Audio Technica AT 4050) (c) with both microphones [of (a) and (b)] blended together. The close mic’ing results in a dry and precise sound with hardly room. When you move back the […]
There are countless ways to record an electric guitar. While some of these do not really work for distorted guitars, you have even more choices when you want to record a clean guitar: you can plug it directly into the mixing desk, or use a DI-box before. Then there are special recording solutions like digital or analog pre-amps that also emulate the influence of the guitar speaker or even the […]
According to an interview with Guitar Player magazin from 1979, Mark Knopfler played a DiMarzio pick-up in one of his two red Fender Stratocasters that he played around the time of Dire Straits’ first two albums: On one there’s a DiMarzio pickup for the bass, and I like it because it just seems to give a fatter, louder sound, with more clout than the standard pickup Fender uses. DiMarzio has […]
A few people asked for the gear I used on the last set of youtube videos that I put online last week, namely on the video clips of the following articles: The one-man band – Playing both rhythm and lead guitar together Dire Straits Eastbound Train – Rhythm riff, licks and solo explained Mark Knopfler licks using the b5 note Knopfler goes Jazz – Video with licks from Comfort and […]