Dire Straits/ Mark Knopfler live pictures and videos, Misc

Video snippet of Dire Straits – In the Gallery – Pinkpop Festival 1979

I was surprised to find this video today which starts with an excerpt of Dire Straits –  In the Gallery – live from the Pinkpop festival, Gelen/Holland, June 4, 1979. The whole gig was broadcasted on TV in 1979 but it seems those video tapes then disappeared – at least I don’t know of any rebroadcasts, and thus of no video clips anywhere, except some parts of Lady Writer in awful quality. This one is better quality (although only b/w), unfortunately only half a minute 🙁 Enjoy nevertheless 🙂

Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear, MK guitar style and licks

Suhr Custom MK-1 and Pensa Custom MK-1

This time I am checking two great guitars, a Suhr MK-1 and a Pensa MK-1. The Suhr is the one that you could already see in this video. Both belong to the same person, a collector from Germany.

Some background on the first MK1

The Pensa-Suhr MK1 was built in 1988 by luthier John Suhr  at Rudy Pensa’s guitar shop in Manhattan. Suhr worked there before he built amps with Bob Bradshaw and became master builder at Fender’s Custom Shop. Later he started his own company – Suhr guitars. For this reason the first guitars were called Pensa-Suhr, and  after John  left simply Pensa. John Suhr also builds guitars similar to the MK-1 (although for legal issues he has to change some details) – if you want a MK-1 you basically have to decide if you want it from the same place or from the same builder.

Pensa Custom MK-1

This guitar is from 1993 and differs in some details from the original MK-1. The body top is not maple but koa, while the body itself is still from mahogany. The shape of the upper body horn is different – the horn is thinner and longer. It has a SPC mid boost but it is not activated with a push-pull poti. Instead, a third poti gradually blends between the normal and the boosted sound. See the pictures for more details:

Two EMG SA and one EMG 85 pick-ups

 

Suhr Custom Carve Top (MK-1)

This wonderful guitar is from 2006. Note that apparently for legal reasons the official name of this guitar is not MK-1 – only Pensa are allowed to use this model name. It has a mahogany body with a 3/4″ quilted maple top, a maple neck with Indian rosewood fingerboard, Floyd Rose tremolo, abalone dots, EMG pick-ups etc. The top of the guitar is really astonishing – almost three dimensional. We found it sounds darker and warmer than the Pensa.

 

In this youtube video you can see me playing both of them – including riffs from Money for Nothing, Heavy Fuel, No can do, …. The guitar goes directly into the amp, the distortion is from the amp – a Music Man RP112 65. The SPC mid-boost is enabled on both guitars.

Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear, Vintage guitars

Comparing different guitars

For this week I had some nice borrowed guitars around which made me record a short youtube video comparing them with some of mine, all played over the same amp with the same setting – only the volume knob was adjusted for each. This was rather a spontaneous session recorded with the camcorder mic. I tried to play both some similar licks on different guitars and different licks that sound nice on the particular guitar.

The guitars were:

1 – Part-o-caster

This guitar is basically a copy of Mark’s Fender  which he used on that early Dire Straits stuff. It is not too accurate, wrong body wood, one-piece maple neck instead of laminated maple fingerboard etc. but it sounds nice in most situations. In the neck position it has a DiMarzio FS-1, in the middle position an old vintage Strat pick-up. One of the tone potis was replaced with a rotary switch that allows all kinds of pick-up combinations, even fat humbucker-like sounds.

2 – 1974 Gibson Les Paul Custom

70ies Gibson are surely not that much sough-after but this one is a nice guitar. It is tobacco sunburstwhich resembles a faded sunburst of those 50ies Paulas. Originally the plastic parts were black but they were replaced with white ones to look more like an ’58 Les Paul.

3 – 1983 Squier Stratocaster

These very first Squiers were really great, almost all of them sound cool. I put one of my loaded Schecter-style pickguards on it that allow a total of 27 sound combinations from the three tapped pick-ups.

4 – 2006 Suhr MK-1

This guitar looks and plays like a dream – and it sounds fantastic, too. The top is one of the fanciest I have ever seen, the wood looks almost three dimensional. Unfortunately it is here only for a couple of days, a guitar you can easily fall in love with.

5 – Fender Stratocaster

What to say about this one? The neck pick-up is not original (a FS-1), bare wood finish, needs to be refinished but it looks cool as it is, too.

6 – 68 Fender Telecaster

The late 60ies Telecasters are really cool, so is this one. The combination of the ash body with the maple cap neck  sounds really bright, but alwasy war at the same time. The neck pick-up is a Japanese copy, the owner still has the original pick-up that needs to be rewound.

7 – 77 Greco Super Sounds

Greco guitars are better known under tha Ibanez label. I think the domestic guitars were called Greco, the export guitars Ibanez. It sounds amazing – especially for its price! The gold anodized metal pickguard is not original.

Here you can vote for which one sounds best to you. You will see the results so far after voting.

Which of the 7 guitars sounds best to you?

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Mark Knopfler gear

The Peavey Deuce VT – David Knopfler’s amp with Dire Straits

This blog post is not about a Mark Knopfler amp but still has a clear connection to Dire Straits: the Peavey Deuce VT was the amp that David Knopfler played on stage with the band between 1978 and 1979, and thus contributed to the band’s unique sound.

Note the red light which shows that the effects channel is activated

 

The Peavey Deuce VT was built from 1978 to the early eighties. Before, a similar model called Deuce (without the VT) was available that had – besides various other technical differences – a tremolo effect instead of the phaser.  As a combo with two 12″ speakers, it has similar dimensions as the Fender Twin Reverb or the Music Man HD 130 212 that Mark played at the same time. In fact David started to play the Peavey at the same time as the Music Man appeared for the first time, in late 1978. Before (mid 1978) both Mark and David were seen with Fender Twin Reverbs on stage. I assume both were bought together when they felt they needed to upgrade their equipment for the following tours.

The Peavey Deuce is – just like the Music Man – a hybrid amp which means the pre-amp stage is solid state, while the power amp has four 6L6 tubes. Today solid-state is considered to be inferior because of the harsher distortion compared to a tube, but back then it was almost high-tech, considered to be more reliable than an all tube design – no crackling noises, no whistling pre-amp tubes, less danger for a failing tube in the middle of a performance. The amp is bulit like a tank, solid and heavy, suited for professional usage on big stages.

While Mark’s Music Man is basically an upgraded Fender Twin Reverb, with the same controls, the Peavey Deuce VT has its own layout: two channels (Effects and Normal) , built in reverb (works on both channels) and the phaser effect (effects channel only). On the left we find four input  jacks, two for the effects channel, one for the normal channel, and one to use both channels (together or switchable with a foot switch).

The Normal channel has a control for pre gain (gain before the EQ section), bass, treble,  and post gain (after the EQ section), the Effects channel has controls for pre gain,bass, middle, treble, post gain, and color and rate for the phaser. The phaser of the Deuce VT is said to be really good sounding. The phaser we hear live on the songs Down to the Waterline or Once Upon a Time in the West might be from the Deuce, but some sources also claim that a MXR stomp box was used for this matter. However, many pictures from this time seem to prove that David’s guitar cable went directly into the Peavey,  so live it should come from the Deuce.

Finally we have  a Master section on the amp that has only one control for the reverb which affected both channels.

The four 6L6 tubes creates an output power of 120 watts. Most amplifiers in the pre-amp section are ICs (TL 072 or 478).

The amp was optionally available with heavy-duty speakers called Black Widow. These are much heavier, more solid and can handle more power  than the stock speakers. I know from David himself that his amp had  these.

MK guitar style and licks

Dire Straits – Where do you think you’re going – spontaneous cover on acoustic guitar

Today I was jamming a bit on the acoustic guitar and still had the camcorder ready from the last video yesterday, so I simply let it run a bit and recorded this sponatneous version of Dire Straits’ “Where do you think you’re going”. If you wonder about the sound or even about the string bending on the acoustic – check out this old blog post about the string gauge on this guitar.

I always find that playing at low volume leaves you more room to get louder when necessary and causes a much nicer guitar sound. Unfortunately you get some noise when recording with the built-in camcorder microphone as it turns up the record level automatically and catches more noise from the cheap mic pre-amp in the camcorder. The camcorder compresses the dynamics, and youtube compresses again I think, so you will lose much of the dynamics anyway but still it makes a big difference I think.

Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear

Demoing pickup combinations of the Schecter style pickguards

Here is a youtube video that demonstrates some of the 36 possible pick-up combinations of our loaded Schecter-style pickguards. Each pick-up can be switched to the full or tapped coil which means a fat sound or a vintage-like sound. This way you will not only get new combinations that are not possible with the standard 5-way switch like bridge & neck or all three PUs, but you can also mix full and half pick-ups in any combination.

The guitar is my old Japanese JV Squier, over a brown Fender Vibrolux amp, no effects except some reverb.

 

MK guitar style and licks, Understanding music

The bridge section between Expresso Love and Down to the Waterline on the Making Movies tour

This blog post is about the 50 seconds instrumental part that bridged the two songs Expresso Love and Down to the Waterline on the Making Movies tour (aka On Location tour) of Dire Straits in 1980/81. I always admired this part, especially how it transferred the energy of the ending of Expresso Love to the ‘foggy mood’ of the Down to the Waterline intro.

For all who don’t know this part – it is only available on several unreleased bootleg recordings -, here is a sound clip (I am sorry for the bad sound quality). To recapture the mood of this section, you should play it *loud*!
(Note that you can click  on the blue position bar of the player to jump to any part of the clip)

 

Analysis

On the Making Movies album, Expresso Love ends on a 4 bar pattern which is repeated until the song is faded out. This pattern goes like this:

 

 

 

On stage they added  eight bars over a C major chord after this pattern (0:12) . Note that the pattern above already ended on the C chord at the beginning of the last bar, so adding 8 more bars of C should have resulted in 9 bars. Instead, the last bar of the pattern was omitted so that the new part (8 bars of C) started directly after the Bb chord. Doing so the beginning of the new part was highlighted.

Next (0:24) after these 8 bars of C, the chord progression jumps to E major for the next 8 bars. This is totally out of the harmonical context of Expresso Love (which is in the key of D minor), neither does it fit to the previous C chord (If you want to learn more about which chords have a close relationship and which not, refer to this blog post about the circle of fifths). Again, such a sudden transition to an unexpected chord created a moment of surprise. Knopfler – who played the complete song with  a plectrum by the way – added various chord licks over these E chord bars.  The feel and the sound of this part strongly remind me of Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street band of this time – in fact Knopfler was obviously heavily inspired by them around this era (note that Springsteen’s keyboard player Roy Bittan played all keyboards on the Making Movies album).

Next (0:36), they played four bars over the B minor chord (Bm) – which is already the key of Down to the Waterline. Now we understand the role of the previous E major chords as it is the subdominant chord of Bm and thus naturally  resolves to Bm.

At this time it becomes necessary to reduce the high tempo of Expresso Love for a smmoth transition to the Down to the Waterline intro. For this reason, the tempo gradually decreases for the next 8 bars which run over the following chord pattern (0:42).

 

 

 

The last bar features a keyboard bass line of the notes  b – f# –  c# – a which resolves (1:01) to the Bm chord of the Down to the Waterline intro.

Here is the complete chord scheme again:

Misc

Click track on the 2010 Mark Knopfler tour

We already knew from Guy Fletcher’s forum that on stage the band plays  some songs to a click track – a metronome only the musicians (or at least drummer Danny Cummings) could hear on their inear monitors – but we could only speculate which  songs these were. A click track means a steady beat at a 100% constant tempo while without there are normally little tempo changes going along with the different parts of a song, often very subtle but still a possibly different feel.

I meanwhile know from a reliable source on which songs a click track was used. These were:

Border Reiver:  precount to get into the right tempo after the intro of the song (side stick sound in quarter notes plus hihat sound in eighth notes)

What it is: side stick sound in quarter notes throughout the whole song, including the lower parts before the final solo

Sailing to Philadelphia: side stick sound in quarter notes throughout the whole song

Coyote: side stick sound in quarter notes plus “cricket sound” percussion throughout the whole song

Prairie Wedding: no click track

Hillfarmer Blues: side stick sound in quarter notes plus maracas (shaker) sound in eighth notes , switched off at final solo

Romeo & Juliet: no click track

Sultans of Swing: side stick sound in quarter notes plus hihat sound in eighth notes until first solo

Done with Bonaparte: no click track

Marbletown: side stick sound in quarter notes plus hihat sound in eigth notes in the intro (ends when Mark’s guitar starts)

Get Lucky: no click track

Speedway at Nazareth: side stick sound in quarter notes plus hihat sound in eighth notes throughout whole song

Telegraph Road: no click track

Brothers in Arms: no click track

So far away: no click track

Piper to the End: no click track

Amps

Mark Knopfler’s brown Fender Vibrolux vs Fender Vibroverb

This post is about two of Mark Knopfler’s Fender vintage amps, the brown Fender Vibrolux – the  Sultans of Swing amp that was covered in this blog article – and the similar-sized and similar-looking brown Fender Vibroverb.

The Fender Vibrolux (model 6G11a) was one of Knopfler’s earliest guitar amps. Probably it belonged to Dire Straits’ bass player John Illsley and was used for the first demo recordings of Dire Straits, and also for the first record and for their live gigs of this time (late 1977 – early 1978). He still owns this amp and used it regularly on the last albums.

The brown Vibroverb (model 6G16) was a much later addition to Knopfler’s amp arsenal. From what I heard he got it probably in the late 1990ies with some help of John Suhr, and used it e.g. on some Notting Hillbillies gigs of that time.

Both amps were only produced for a very short time: the brown Vibrolux from 1961 – 62, and the brown Vibroverb in 1963  only. Consequently, both are ultra rare. The Vibroverb was reissued in the early 1990ies (1990 – 95).

Both amps have a lot in common: two channels with a  similar pre-amp layout (same tone controls, same pre-amp circuit), about 30 watts from two 6L6 tubes,  tremolo, and of course the same design like as all amps from the brown tolex era (wheat cover grill, brown barrel knobs, brown tolex etc.). Note that both – like all brown face amps – don’t feature bright switches. Nevertheless, the little capacitor to boost treble that is normally added with the bright switch is still present on the right channel of both amps, so imagine these amps as bright switch off for the left channel and bright switch on for the right channel.

Differences

The major differences are the speaker configuration – one 12″ Oxford speaker in the Vibrolux but two 10″ Oxford speakers in the Vibroverb – and the reverb which was only  featured in the Vibroverb. In fact, the Vibroverb was the first Fender amp with reverb, and the only one of the brown tolex era. The Fender spring reverb was available with the brown tolex reverb unit and was later – to be concrete with the introduction of the black face design – added to most of the Fender guitar amplifiers. This combination of features – two 10″ speakers with reverb and tremolo in a middle -sized tube amp – turned the Vibroverb to one of the all-time favourites for many players.

Normally it is easy to distinguish both amps on pictures because only the Vibroverb had the grill-mounted Fender logo, while the Vibrolux and other small Fender amps had no grill logo. However, Knopfler’s Vibrolux has a non-original Fender logo that was apparently added later (the logo itself looks like the ones from the black or silver face era).  Normally there is a special piece of wood for the logo screws, but not so on the Vibrolux. For this reason, the logo on Knopfler’s amp had to be moved extremely into the upper left corner of the grill so that the  logo screws hit the wooden frame of the grill front. Other optical differences: only the Vibroverb has those tilt legs on the sides, and the Vibroverb has one additional control – the reverb control on the second channel – so that is has a total of 9 controls (vol, treble, bass / vol, treble, bass, reverb / speed, intensity). This and the two 10″ speakers are the reasonwhy the Vibroverb is a bit wider than the Vibrolux.

The Fender Vibrolux in the studio in the mid 90ies. This picture shows why the (non-original) Fender logo has to be located in the extreme upper left corner of the front grill which makes it easy to identify this amp even on low quality pictures.

 

Both Mark Knopfler and Steve Phillips play a brown Vibroverb on stage on this charity gig in 2002.
A brown 1961 Fender Vibrolux
A brown Fender Vibroverb. This amp was produced in 1963 only.


The amp in the background on this video clip from is the brown Vibrolux, as the position of the logo tells.