Let’s feature another artist today: besides Mark Knopfler, I admire the work of Richard Thompson. Richard played with England’s folk-rock band Faiport Convention in the late 60ies, and started a solo career afterwards. His first records were with his then-wife Linda Thompson who is a great singer. Thompson has a lot of similiarities with Mark Knopfler: he is a great song writer, he is British, he has strong roots in […]
Today I surfed into the Strat-Talk.com forum where I found a photo album with 12 famous dream guitars. Among these were some Strats and Teles of David Gilmour, George Harrison, Jimi Hendrix, and three guitars of Mark Knopfler (the red Schecter Strat and Tele, and the red Fender), all in the same high resolution. The question: Are these real or are they fakes? You can use the comment function to […]
In the first article on this subject I explained what RSI is and where it results from. This second article should focus on what you can do to overcome it in case you already have problems. Since I am not a medical doctor and do neither work in this field, I might not be competent to write about such a complex thing. For this reason everything I recommend must be […]
For your enjoyment, here are a few rare pictures of Dire Straits. They are from a concert in the Zirkus Krone building, Munchen, Germany, on May 29, 1979. After February 1979, they returned to Germany in May, still on the Communiqué tour. The gear used on this part of the tour has changed slightly against February: Mark still played the #80470 maple-neck Strat (see also this article on his two […]
In May 1979 Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits drummer Pick Withers were invited to play on Bob Dylan’s new album, Slow Train Coming. This was not the first session Mark Knopfler was asked to play on (he already played on the Steely Dan song Time out of Mind and with Mavis Staple before), but it was the first session for a complete album. The idea came from Barry Becket and […]
Have you ever tried to transcribe a solo from a recording and you wished you could hear that guitar better in the mix than you actually did? Or did you ask yourself if there is chorus or not, or any other effects? Instead, the vocals, the bass, the drums, everything is louder than what you are trying to listen to, and for this reason you have no chance to hear […]
Here comes an article not really related to guitar but possibly interesting for everyone who likes to listen to music. The term “loudness war” is something you might have come across when talking or reading about modern music productions. There is even a Wikipedia article on this matter. I will explain in short what exactly is meant with it, and I will give some listening samples from Knopfler / Dire […]
I set up a poll about your wishes for future articles, it can be found under pages (so that it will be up for some time) or directly here (up to 4 possible answers). If you have further suggestions, please use the comment function on that page (click here) instead of the one under this article. Thanks.
RSI – the nightmare of musicians, even a Mark Knopfler got RSI problems on a tour a few years ago. RSI is a relatively new expression for a relatively new kind of health problem. RSI stands for ‘repetetive strain injury’, which means “any of a loose group of conditions resulting from overuse of a tool, such as a computer keyboard or musical instrument or other activity that requires repeated movements. […]