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Amps, Mark Knopfler gear

Jim Kelley amps – the FACS model used on the Brothers in Arms tour

Jim Kelley  was a small manufacturer of boutique amps who started his business in the late 70ies. He started with only one amp model, a single channel amp with 6 tubes and just 3 knobs. The  later dual channel was still based on this model.

Compared to other boutique amp that were favourits at that time – namely Mesa Boogie or Dumble – the Kelley amps followed a different approach. While the Mesa Boogies had lots of controls and options (various push/pull knobs, EQs, different gain stages etc.), the Kelley had just 3 knobs and followed the idea of having a simple signal path without any redundant components to obtain a pure and natural sound.

The original single channel combo amp

While the Mesa Boogie made use of two different pre-amp sections that were chained in serial so that the first can overdrive the second to get high-gain distortion even at low volume, the Kelley favoured the more natural sounding distortion from the power amp. As this automatically results in high volume, the amps were often paired with a power attenuator ( a device between amp and speakers that turns a part of  the output power into heat to reduce volume).

The Kelley amps soon get very popular among session players on the US West Coast, they became the “house amplifiers” of the Shangri La studios (the place where Mark Knopfler recorded his Shangri La album decades later), and were soon exported to Japan and Gemany (by the way, the German distributor was the music shop in my hometown where I played a Kelley amp for the first time in the early 80ies). On the US East Coast they were sold at Rudy’s Music Stop in New York, where John Suhr and Jack Sonni worked at that time, who introduced this amp to Mark Knopfler. According to Jack Sonni, Mark played his Kelley amp and his foam green Schecter Strat for the recording of One World (from the Brothers in Arms album) and loved the sound so much that he used the Kelley amp on the Brothers in Arms tour (1985/86).

The two channel FACS head - note the power attenuator on top of the amp

The model Jack Sonni and Mark Knopfler used was the dual channel amp, the FACS (for foot activated channel switching). These amps were available as combo or head (Knopfler and Sonni used the heads) and had two identical pre amps so that each can be adjusted for a different sound, with a reverb control for each channel. As the idea of the Kelley’s distortion sound was to overdrive the output stage, different gain settings would automatically lead to different volume. Here the attenuator comes in, which was activated when switching to the overdriven channel so that you can match the volume to your needs.

 Technical stuff

Each channel has a gain, treble, bass, and reverb control (from left to right). The treble control can be pulled to act as a bright switch, while pulling the bass control adds a mid boost. Pulling the gain control on channel one – which was intended as a the overdrive channel and is paired with tghe power attenuator – allows you to switch the channels without the foot switch, pulling out the gain control of the second channel enables a presence boost.

The output stage uses four 6V6 tubes and can be switched to 30 or 60 watts, while 12AX7 tubes were used in the pre , as phase inverter, and to drive the reverb. The Brothers in Arms tour was one of the longest tours a major rock band ever did, and thus surely meant a particular stress for the gear. This lead to some tube failures so that Jack Sonni finally changed to a Seymour Duncan convertable amp towards the end of the tour which seems more reliable.

The FACS - from a Guitar Player feature

Unfortunately there aren’t any pictures that show Mark’s amps as these were placed behind the stage where they could be operated by a technician. You can see one of these – probably Jack Sonni’s – on the video of the Live Aid concert in July 1985. The pictures do not show Knopfler’s amp but similar ones.

Amps, Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear

Guitar and amp used for the solos on One World

I recently got a reliebable information about the guitar and the amp that Mark used for the solos in the song One World of Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms album (studio version, 1985).

I put up a quiz with five possible question for you to find out the answer, hoping this way you have some fun and can check if your ears and general knowledge are good enough to let you guess the correct answer.

I don’t know which comments will be made and if the solution will be discussed there, so better do not look at these before doing the quiz.

Question:

What was the guitar and the amp on "One world" (solos, studio version) ?

Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear

A trip to Mark Knopfler’s sunburst Schecter Strat

The good thing about running a website about Mark Knopfler and his guitar sound and style is that you get in touch with so many other people who share your interest. I guess everyone who is really interested in this topic sooner or later finds his way to this site. So it happened that one day a customer who bought two of my iSounds in my online shop told me that he owns quite a lot of guitars, one of them being the Schecter S8001 – that sunburst Dream Machine Strat that probably everyone of us knows from his teens on, the guitar used in e.g. the Alchemy video on songs  like Tunnel of Love or Telegraph Road. The guitar was auctioned at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads charity for more than 50,000 USD in 2004  (Note: The owner now – let’s call him O. for owner –  is not the person who won the charity but got the guitar later from him).

As O. lives only a couple of hours by car from my place, the idea to visit him came up automatically.

So it happened that I went on a short trip to his place a few weeks ago. O. is a huge MK fan and a guitar collector. I can tell you his collection is beyond being amazing :), including lots of vintage Fenders, Gibsons, and Schecters, also many amps, and much more.

Mark Knopfler’s sunburst Schecter Strat (2012, click to enlarge). With courtesy of guitarmotel.net

 

 

Playing the Alchemy Schecter

I guess you can easily imagine that the moment when O. opened the guitar case was very special for me. The guitar still looks as it did when we saw it the last time, on the pictures for the Crossroads auction in 2004, and thus pretty much as it looked in 1986 when we saw it on stage the last time. The condition is great, not much worn after being played on so many Dire Straits concerts, with exception of the gold plating on the pickguard. This is a problem of all the golden vintage Schecter pickguards. Applying a gold plating to something as big as a pickguard is extremely expensive, with the gold price itself being the relevant cost factor. Gold plating is the more durable the thicker the coat is, which means a 5 micrometers coat is 10 times more durable than one of 0.5 micrometer, but unfortunately also 10 times as expensive – and we areeasily  talking about hundreds of dollars (!!) just for the gold here. This is the reason why already on Alchemy – two years after Mark got  the guitar – the pickguard was worn at the places where Mark used to  rest his right hand.

I was allowed to play the guitar. I played some expensive vintage guitars in my life, so touching a 50,000 dollars guitar was not such a problem (of course you must not think about  what would happen if you accidentally drop the guitar …). It had been in the case for some time so it was totally out of tune. After tuning it we plugged it into a Tone King Imperial. It is a really great sounding guitar, with a very warm and full sound. The question which probably comes up automatically is, do you sound like Mark on Tunnel of Love or Telegraph Road just because of the guitar? Well, the answer – you can probably guess – is ‘no, not really’ – it is all in the fingers and the rest of the signal chain. If you have a blindfold on your eyes and someone plays the guitar, you will not say ‘That’s the one from Tunnel of Love‘. But – the other way around – after playing the guitar I can often hear the same tonal characteristics on the old recordings with this guitar, e.g.  a particular warmth or a typical sustain.

(click to enlarge), with courtesy of guitarmotel.net

The guitar is not a lightweight – it is from a time when heavy wood and brass parts were considered as superior – and in fact these ingredients cause a special sound.

I took many photos of the guitar. Unfortunately I cannot publish these, especially detail photos. The reason is that O. is afraid of giving food to people who fake vintage guitars – here he is not thinking of people ‘like us’ who might make a luthier build a clone of Mark’s Schecter to play with a tribute band but of those who sell fakes as real stuff on ebay. I could convince myself that this is in fact a serious matter when he showed me one of ‘my pickguards‘ that was sold to someone as a real vintage Schecter  pickguard (and my pickguards are really not intended to fool someone, e.g. the pickups all have the manufacturer’s label on the bottom plate but these were simply sanded off !).

Still I can show you two new pictures of the guitar in this blog post –  please don’t ask for more.

When I was fifteen and saw this guitar for the first time during my first Dire Straits concert, I would not have believed that one day I will play on it myself.

Check out this blog post that features some videos in which you can watch me playing the guitar.

Dire Straits/ Mark Knopfler live pictures and videos, Misc, MK guitar style and licks

Albert Lee – a recent live version of Setting me up

I think I wrote a blog post about Albert Lee’s cover of Setting me up from the first Dire Straits album before (see here). Today I surfed into this video clip on youtube which I really like a lot. It is a bit on the slow side, much slower than e.g. Albert’s live version that was featured on Eric Clapton’s Just one Night live album. It seems the older you get the slower you play but with more emphasis on the groove and on details. Reminds me on Mark’s recent versions of  Telegraph Road which is also much slower these days but so rich of new details and has such a nice flowing feel.

Albert Lee, originally one of THE Telecaster heroes, switched to a Music Man signature model a long time ago. Speaking of Music Man, just like Mark Albert played Music Man amps – often a 4×10 combo – in the late 70ies and early 80ies. On this clip we hear him over a Fender amp, seems to be a  Tone Master.

While Mark used to  play Setting me up in an open A tuning (some years later he changed to standard tuning) , Albert always played it in standard tuning and in the key of D (the Dire Straits version is A).

Enjoy 🙂

Dire Straits/ Mark Knopfler live pictures and videos, Misc

Dire Straits book by Michael Oldfield – the French Edition

Some days ago I got the French version of the Dire Straits book by Michael Oldfield. Unlike the English version – which price meanwhile skyrocketed on the used-book market as it seems – I got this one for a couple of Euros on ebay. Nevertheless, I guess it is a clear indicator that you are a crazy MK fan if you buy a book in French and your French is as bad as mine (or better non-existing) 😉

Of course we still can watch all the pictures, and in fact the French version is a bit different than the English one in this respect. With this blog post I will tell you about some striking differences.

French edition (left) - English edition (right)

First of all I was surprised when the postman  handed me the envelope that presumably contained the book: it was so small. The book – at least the edition I have – is just about 13.5 cm x 16 cm (5.3″ x 6.3″). I think there must be different version – I remember I saw a full-sized version in a French book shop years ago (which I then did not buy as  I had the English version).I don’t know which size is more common for the French edition, maybe our French friends can give us more insight here (Jean-Francois, are you listening…?)

The book  is very handy for this reason but still big enough for comfortable reading.

Next, the layout ( number and position of the pictures in the different chapters) is completely different. The English version has much more pictures, I did not count them all but I feel it has something like 50-100% more pictures. The French version however is from 1985 (the English one from 1984) and includes a few pictures from the Brothers in Arms period. In fact the last chapter is about how Dire Straits’ career continued after 1983, such a chapter is not included in the original English version. The French version has five pictures of a gig in Paris in 1979 which are not included in the English version.

Both have differently cropped pictures

The French version has some pictures from Paris, 1979, that are not in the English version...

Many pictures have apparently being cropped, both in the French and the English version, which means that you see a bigger part of some pictures in the English version, while other pictures were cropped less in the French version. We already came across this when Jean-Francois told us in a comment that in his French edition you could see a Strat in its guitar stand at the edge of an early Dire Straits picture (one from the Clapham Common gig in 1977) which you can’t see in the English book. Unfortunately none of the pictures revealed any new hints to any gear like guitar floor effects  you have never seen on any picture before.

... and a few pictures and some info from 1985

So all in all, if you are another mad DS/MK fan, with these differences it should be easy to convince your wife that you really need to spend a bit of money for a book in alanguage you don’t understand, on the other hand, if you have the English version – which I recommend as a really great book – you are not missing too much.

Amps, Dire Straits/ Mark Knopfler live pictures and videos, Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear

Dire Straits at the Hope & Anchor pub 1977 – new picture

I recently got an old Dutch magazine called JOEPIE from February 1979 with a two-page story about Dire Straits. It features two pictures that show the band on stage at the Hope & Anchor pub. Dire Straits played there several times in late 1977: on September 10 (in the evening after  they played the Clapham Common gig in the afternoon of that same day), on November 4, 11, and 18, and on December 9 (when Eastbound Train was recorded, released as a b-side of the Sultans of Swing single).

It is not possible to tell from which of these gigs the pictures are but I am almost sure that it is not from the one in September (David’s hair is shorter than on the pictures we have from the Clapham Common gig earlier on the same day).

The first picture can also be found in the Dire Straits book by Michael Oldfield (which also features some more pictures of the same gig). It shows Mark with his 1961 Stratocaster, before the guitar was refinished to red. The guitar had a natural wood finish (possibly sealed with clear laquer). By the way, I know that this is the 1961 Strat because of a typical mark in the pickguard at the upper end of the middle pickup. The body does not have a strong attractive grain, like ash bodies normally have. It looks very much like alder which was the standard body wood at that time. Note that David’s guitar also had a natural finish, I strongly assume that both Strats were  refinished one year later, about summer 1978, Mark’s to red, David’s to black.

Here is the second picture that shows almost the whole guitar at higher resolution:

(click on the picture to enlarge)

 

Of the few pictures that show the guitar in the original condition  this is possibly the best we have. Unfortunately the quality is rather poor so we cannot see too many details of the guitar.In the lower right corner of the picture we probably see a part of an amp. I assume that this is David’s amp, the knobs look like Fender or Music Man. With the help of some imagination 😉 we might see a part of Mark’s Vibrolux amp between Mark and David, there might be the plug of the guitar cable and a few knobs (the Vibrolux has dark brown knobs without a silver center plate), but this might be illusion as well (any other amp than the Vibrolux would be real surprise at this period).

Dire Straits/ Mark Knopfler live pictures and videos

Mark Knopfler – Portobelle Belle – the only existing live video (Belfast 1996)

Although Portobelle Belle from Dire Straits’ second album Communiqué was played on so many tours,  it seemed that there are no live videos of this song at all. It was played e.g. on each gig of the Love over Gold tour in 1982/3 which ended in the Alchemy live video concert but just this song was not included on the Alchemy video, neither on the original vinyl album or CD, nor on the VHS tape or on the recently reissued DVD/blueray version (an incomplete audio version was included on the greatest hits compilation CD Money for Nothing).

It was just a few weeks ago that I found the following video on youtube which in fact seems to be the only video of this song. It is from the Golden Heart tour, Mark’s first tour as a solo artist after the Dire Straits era. The song “about a long gone Irish girl” was played mainly on the Irish gigs of this tour and Mark was joined by some Irish folk musicians on stage.

From a guitar player’s point of view it is interesting to watch this video because I was never sure whether Mark played the song with his right hand in a fixed position (playing with thumb and two fingers and the right hand resting on the other two fingers) or with his hand swinging freely like he normally does when playing rhythm. Unfortunately the quality of the video is not too good but as it looks Mark used a mish-mash approach of the two styles, playing mainly with thumb and two fingers but moving the whole hand at least on the upbeat strokes.

It is also intersting that this song was played in different keys over the years. Originally in C major it was shifted to D on the On Location tour in 1980/1 (played on different guitars like on a Rickenbacker, see this blog post),  then down to Bb on the Lover over Gold tour, and back to C on the On Every Street tour in 1991/2 (compare this video) or here in 1996.

Guitar in general, Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear, Misc

Loaded pickguards now available in black

The loaded Strat pickguards in the vintage Schecter style have been available in brass and white aluminium for a while now, but from now on they are also available in black aluminium. You can chose between two versions: with the VFS-1 or the F500T-style pickups. As both are tapped pickups (two different sounds for each pickup), you will get 26 different pickup combinations and thus 26 different sounds.

The black ones are otherwise identical to the white version and have the same burnt-in enamel coating , the same high-quality toggle switches, the same extended-life quality potis, and of course the same sound. You can choose between three different metal knobs: chrome, gold, or black. The price is the same as for the white ones.

More info and more pictures in the mk-guitar.com online shop:
with Schecter-style pickups
with VFS-1 pickups

With the F500T-style pickups and chrome knobs
With the VFS-1 pickups and gold knobs
Amps, Mark Knopfler gear

Tone King Imperial: Played on which songs?

According to Guy Fletcher, the songs on which Mark plays the Tone King Imperial are:

True love will never fade
Shangri la
Prairie wedding
Dark is the night/Donegan’s Gone
Postcards from Paraguay
Let It All Go

I guess this is meant to be true rather for the latest tours than for the studio albums (click here to find out what gear was used on them), and it matches what I described in this blog post:
Which songs of the Get Lucky tour are played with the Tone King Imperial? And what was the amp setting?

However, we can add the songs Prairie Wedding and Let it all go (which was only rarely played live, I think only on some of the small promo tours) to our previous list.

The Tone King Imperial on the 2010 tour
Misc

mk-guitar.com on Facebook

This site is on Facebook now: check it out here. From now on you can follow interesting news there as well, or simply  let the world  know that you like this site 🙂

I admit I am still rather new in the world of Facebook, and probably do not fully understand all possibilities and options of Facebook yet, but I am sure that good ideas will come after a start has been made (your input is – as always – appreciated!)