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 […]
Last weekend we had guests and one of them had this new photo camera – a Panasonic Lumix FX 37 which costs less than 200,- €. Besides taking great photos you can also record videos in HD quality (1280 x 720 pixels). As I was curious what these look like with my stuff I played Sultans for them and we filmed it. The result is really amazing – much better […]
Romeo and Juliet is a song I have been playing on my National for many years, but I never tried to play the wonderful ending of recent live versions where the piano leads through a rather unusual chord sequence. Yesterday I played around with the piano a bit and had a look at this. After the last verse Romeo and Juliet features a two-chord sequence over which Knopfler plays solo: […]
During the last weeks I played around a bit with the backing tracks from the Jam with Dire Straits book by Total Accuracy. Some of these are great and sound very good. Unfortunately, the one for Sultans of Swing seems almost unusuable to me because of the harsh rhythm guitar sound. Since I still had a Cubase file with the MIDI drum part of Sultans – something I did with […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]