This blog post was written by Jean-François. Thank you J.F. ! 🙂 [some comments by Ingo in brackets] Mark Knopfler has always been associated with fingerpicking. His totally unique right hand technique has become his landmark since the first Dire Straits album in 1978. However, Mark also sometimes plays with a guitar pick – not only but mostly during his solo career. Among his childhood guitar heroes, Chet […]
I often get emails from people who ask me for help with playing some particular Mark Knopfler stuff, for tutorial videos, or for personal video tutoring via e.g. Skype. In fact I have been thinking about this for some time but am not sure yet in which direction to go (DVDs, online tutoring,…), or how many fans are out there who might be interested in this. If you are interested […]
While Mark Knopfler is strongly associated with playing fingerstyle, we know he always used a pick occasionally as well. Before he started Dire Straits, he did a lot of fingerpicking- e.g. on his National resonator guitar – but also used a pick much more than he did later. With his band before Dire Straits – the Cafe Racers – he mainly played with a pick on his 1959 Gibson Les […]
I recently realized that I used to play the foghorn chord wrong (the very first notes in the intro of Down to the Waterline). I played those foghorn sound on only the two lowest strings – this way I explained it in a Youtube tutorial on Down to the Waterline. In fact it is played on three strings. Not a big deal, and I guess many of you were already […]
In these videos I am a/b comparing two different guitars side by side: Mark Knopfler’s famous sunburst Schecter Dream Machine Strat and my pink part-o-caster, built from a Japanese Squier body in metallic pink with a nice bird’s eye maple neck I bought on ebay some time ago (actually a noname product), equipped with the loaded Schecter-style pickguard with the F500T pickup replicas, and with a prototype of the coming […]
When I had the opportunity to play on Mark Knopfler’s sunburst Schecter Strat some weeks ago, I could also try out some other great guitars over there. Here is a video of a 1961 Fender Stratocaster in all original sonic blue that really impressed me. Some slab board Stratocasters from the very early sixties can have a rather dark or even muddy sound, that’s why some players prefer Strats after […]
In the following you will find a tab of a lick in the song Bluebird from Mark Knopfler’s last album Privateering. It is the lick the last solo starts with (2:40 – 2:43). I like this lick because I thought it sounds unusual and thus interesting when I first heard it. While I often immediately know on what scale or idea a MK lick is based when I hear it, […]
Here are some videos with the Mark Knopfler Schecter Dream Machine Strat SN 8001, the guitar I had the chance to play a few weeks ago (see A trip to Mark Knopfler’s sunburst Schecter Strat ). The amp was a Tone King, not the Imperial but a Metropolitan combo, no effects except reverb from the amp. The strings were 09-42. In the following three videos I played some distorted sounds and […]
I found this in the AMIT forum and thought it might be very useful info for us guitar players. The author – nickname foma – allowed copying it, so here it is, a list of all keys with the songs in that key. It even included the songs of Privateering, Mark’s coming album (to be released September 2012). Thank you, foma 🙂 Quote: >>>>>>>> It’s the statistics of almost all […]