Effects, Mark Knopfler gear

Mark Knopfler’s Guitar Rack of the 2008 Tour

With this blog post I will try to compile some info on Mark Knopfler’s effect rack for his latest tours – based mainly on pictures of his 2008 tour. Probably the same rack was also used on his latest 2010 tour.

Here we have a picture of the full rack:

The Devices

Tuner – On top we have a chromatic tuner, as it seems a Korg DTR2000.

Power conditioner – The second device we can see is a Furman power conditioner (not sure about the exact model). A power conditioner stabilizes the AC power supply and removes voltage peaks that can be dangerous for the following devices.

Preamps – Below the tuner there seem to two units with various preamps by D.A.V electronics. These are used to raise the guitar signal to the correct level that is required to feed the various studio effect devices we can see a bit below.

Switching – The next unit seems to feature individual switches for the various effect feeds. The control on the left is a gain control, followed by various push buttons, each witch a green pilot light. I guess here Mark’s guitar technician Glenn Saggers mutes or activates the different aux effects.

Delay – Next comes a TC Electronis 2290 Dynamic Delay –  a state-of-the-art digital delay. Note that Mark has two of these, the other one being the last device (bottom).

Reverb – Next we see two Bricasti M7 reverb units. Bricasti is a relatively new company founded by some ex-Lexicon employees. One of these costs about 3.700 Euros ! Note that these were not used at all because it was prefered to put a reverb on the guitar sound on the mixing desk.

It will hardly be a surprise that the rack features only components of the highest available quality. While the previous racks built by Pete Cornish featured Cornish’s own signal preamps and buffers, now these are by D.A.V. (Dave Electronis) – a company that also supplied Knopfler’s  British Grove recording studios. Possibly the switching unit was also supplied by them (?). We can assume that the overall logic behind the rack – sending effect feeds in parallel just like studio mixing desks do – is still valid for this rack.

Misc

Brett Whiteley – Alchemy – The picture on the Alchemy cover

This blog post is not about guitar, not even about music, instead it is about a piece of art – Alchemy by Brett Whiteley, the painting that gave its name to Dire Straits’ first live album in 1984, and appeared on the cover.

Brett Whiteley (1939 – 1992) was an Australian artist who is represented in the collections of all the large Australian galleries.

Brett Whiteley - Photo by Jacqueline Mitelman

Paintings

For your pleasure, here is a collection of some of Whiteley’s paintings. Interestingly one of his most famous pictures – The Jacaranda Tree (1977) – which sold for almost $ 2 million, cannot be found in the whole web.

 

Brett Whiteley Screen as the bathroom window 1976 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The Olgas for Ernest Giles, 1985, sold for $ 3.48 million in 2007 - the highest price paid for an Australian artwork at auction
Balmoral

 

These pictures appear on the screen courtesy of the estate of Brett Whiteley. More info on http://www.brettwhiteley.org

 

Alchemy

The original Alchemy painting was done between 1972 and 1973. It was composed of many different elements on 18 wood panels.

 

Alchemy is the ancient progress to transform ordinary components into gold. Transformation –  “Alchemy is seen as an allegory of life’s journey, from birth to death, and the ultimate transmutation. It wanders from darkly sexual surrealist forms through beautiful Australian landscapes with native animals and birds, to the flashing sun against a golden sky.”

The parts on the Dire Straits Alchemy cover can be found on the right. The guitar and the lips and some other details of the cover are not original.

This is what the Wikipedia writes about it:

Part of his work Alchemy was featured on the cover of the Dire Straits live album Alchemy although it had the addition of a guitar with lips held by a hand. Alchemy is the ancient process of turning ordinary compounds into gold.The original painting, done between 1972 and 1973 was composed of many different elements and on 18 wood panels 203cm x 1615cm x 9cm. Reading from left to right it begins with an exploding sun from a portrait of Yukio Mishima that Whiteley had started but never completed. The famed author Mishima had committed seppuku in 1970 and the literary mythology that arose of his apparent final vision of enlightenment in the form of the exploding sun,as he pressed the knife into his body inspired and became the basis for this work. In terms of media it used everything from feathers and part of a birds nest to a glass eye, shell, plugs and brain in a work that becomes a transmutation of sexual organic landscapes and mindscapes. It has been regarded as a self-portrait, a giant outpouring of energy and ideas brought forth over a long period of time.According to art writer Bruce James the self conscious inclusion of the austere pronoun ‘IT’ that also makes up part of the work compacts life, passion, death and faith in a single empowering word and unites the notional wings of an altarpiece to nascent addiction. Alchemy

Effects, Mark Knopfler gear

Mark Knopfler’s effect rack of the Making Movies tour in 1980/81

One of the commentators to my previous blog post (on the Rock Pop TV gig Dire Straits did on December 20, 1980) asked for Mark’s effect rack. He triggered this blog post in which I would like to put together all information I have about it.

The Making Movies ( On Location) tour was the first tour on which Mark used a fully loaded 19″ effects rack. Some of the devices were probably  still  used on the Alchemy tour, and some of them even on the Brothers in Arms tour. Later Knopfler had a rack built by Pete Cornish.

The rack was on the right side of the stage, near Knopfler’s two Music Man HD 130 amps. It was visible from the audience but almost all pictures we have from the various gigs of the tour do not let you see anything more than some control lights and some knobs. The main source of information we have is the On Location tour book that does not only contain the closest picture of the rack but also a list of the built-in effects. Unfortunately the list is not too accurate and only mentions a handful of devices, but no concrete model numbers or such.

The list reads like this (see explanation below):

Customised rack comprising:

Deltalab Delay Unit
Flanger
Master R Reverb
Roland Equalizer
Mantec Switch Unit
Roland Choms Echo
Mantec Preamp Main Transformers
Morley Volume Pedal
Mantec Remote Switching Unit


With the help of the picture I managed to identify most of the devices. Here  is what I found out:

Deltalab Delay Unit: Deltalab DL-4 Time Line

The Deltalab is a very early digital delay – this was really high tech stuff in 1980!

 

Master R Reverb: MicMix Master Room Reverb XL-305

The Master Room Reverb was a stereo spring reverb, typically used in studios instead of in guitar racks. Both channels had different decay times to create a very special reverb. In fact MicMix modified the common Accutronis springs to get exactly the result they wanted.

Flanger: MicMix Dynaflanger

MicMix was a US company that was mostly known for studio reverbs and this special flanger device. The Dynaflanger was also used by Frank Zappa who created some astonishing sound effects with the help of two of these flangers. A unique feature was that the delay time could be controlled by the envelope of the incoming signal – in other words a loud note lead to a different flanger setting than a soft tone, the effect reacted musically to what you were playing.

 

Roland Equalizer

I could not determine the exact model number of this graphical equalizer. It seems to be a mono device with  31 bands with a height of two rack units – like the common EQ-131 but this one was only one unit. It was possibly used for the National resonator guitar.

Roland Choms Echo: Roland SRE 555 Space Echo

This one is another representative of Roland’s Space Echo series, basically an RE-501 as 19″ rack version. Like all the other space echos, it makes use of a tape loop to record and playback signals, something that modern devices do digitally. A tape loop was the only way to create long delay times since analog delays became duller with rising delay time, and digital devices costs a fortune and mostly did not have enough memory for long delays.

The SRE 555 also features a chorus effect which sounded great in combination with the delay.

 

The Morley volume pedal is the same model he used before, we don’t know at which point it was inserted into the system.

 

The rack itself was said to be from “Mantec”. Unfortunately I did not find anything about such a company. Nevertheless, it seems to be evident that the first stage of the rack was a pre amp that boosted the signal to line level which was required to drive the following studio effect devices. Probably the effects were not in a direct one-after-the-other chain but were used inparallel – just like you do with studio effects connected to a mixing desk.

Knopfler controlled everything with a foot controller that featured big coloured foot switches so that everything was easy to operate – especially on a dark stage.

It seems the rack had 8 effect ways – at least there are 8 control lights. Interestingly these can easily be seen from the audience, even on the dark stage.  Checking videos from this era, it might be possible to tell which effects were switched on or off on different songs, compare the two yellow lights on the pictures below. If  someone finds the time to do so, you can use the comment form for this blog post to let us know.

 

Dire Straits/ Mark Knopfler live pictures and videos, Misc

The Dire Straits Rock Pop in Concert TV show in Dortmund 1980

The Dire Straits concert from the German Rock Pop in Concert TV show in December 1980 was indeed a very special concert for me. The reason is simple: it was the first concert of my life. I was 15 then and had been a Dire Straits fan for one and a half year. Dire Straits were still a new band at this time, but were already big. Their first two albums had both been mega-sellers here in Germany, and they had just released their third album Making Movies.

Dortmund – a city at the eastern edge of the Ruhrgebiet,  one of Europe’s biggest urban areas – was my hometown, so it was no question for me to see this concert as soon as I heard of it. The ticket was 20.00 DM (German Marks, about 10.00 Euros now !!!), really not much for something that was not only a concert of one of the hottest bands but in fact a complete festival evening with four bands. These were – in the order of their appearance:

Talking Heads

Roxy Music

Dire Straits

Mike Oldfield.


Rock Pop in Concert vs. Rockpalast Night

In fact there were even two shows, the first on Friday, December 19, 1980, the second on the next day, Saturday 20. My ticket was for Saturday.

These shows were the first Rock Pop in Concert festival. At that time Germany’s TV channel ARD broadcasted the legendardy Rockpalast Night twice a year, a six-hour rock show that was broadcasted via Eurovision to most parts of Europe. Germany’s second big TV channel then, the ZDF, started Rock Pop in Concert to establish something similar to compete with the Rockpalast Night. Unlike the Rockpalast Night, Rock Pop in Concert was not broadcasted live, but about two weeks later.

Before the show – Meeting Mark Knopfler

The concert officially began at 7 p.m. It was about midday that day when I got a phone call from a girl who was a class mate of mine, saying something like “I am here at the Westfalenhalle [the venue], Dire Straits are sitting in the hotel lounge next to it. They are really nice and I already got  lots of autographs. You better hurry …”.

I was there about one hour later (no car, I had to take the bus – remember I was a kid), together with a friend of mine who was also a mad Dire Straits fan. In fact some band members were still sitting in the cafe next to the arena. I cannot really recall who it was – mind that Allan Clark and Hal Lindes were new in the band, and I did not even know about them them at that time, neither did I know their manager Ed Bicknell. All I remember is that Dire Straits’ bass player John Illsley was there, but neither Mark nor drummer Pick Withers. I still have those John Illsley autographs in the Dire Straits book I had with me for that purpose (see pictures). I of course asked where Mark was, and someone gave me the advice to wait for him near the hotel elevators in the hotel because he was in his hotel room but probably came down soon. This was what we did.

 

Autographs John Illsley

I don’t remember how long we were waiting there, or how many times the elevator doors opened to let out some ‘ordinary’ people, but then they opened again and Dire Straits drummer Pick Withers stepped out. We spoke to him, saying something like “You are Pick Withers, aren’t you? Can we have an autograph?”, but for some reason he replied – in English of course – that he was not the person in question. If we wanted autographs, he advised us to try in the near hotel cafe were “the others of the band are” (!!?) …

It was only a few minutes later when the elevator doors opened again, and I still clearly remember that there was only one single guy in it: Mark Knopfler. It then turned out that we were not the only ones waiting because a few guys near us immediatley were off their seats pushing towards MK, and asked him for autographs.  We also got an autograph each, but there was no time for a chat about whatever. At least  I got the chance for a picture with MK.

Note: I would like to add the picture of MK and me plus the autograph here, but I cannot find them right now. I think I remember putting them into one of my Dire Straits books or vinyl records not too long ago, but I don’t find them 🙁

The girl who had phoned me that day got even more luck: she managed to get into the arena (I remember she regularly did so to collect autographs from all bands she liked), and she watched Dire Straits during the sound check. She even took some pictures,which you can see below. I also remember she told me later that she was just watching them from in front of the stage, when Mark came over to the stage front to give her an autograph (she did not even had to ask for it).

Dire Straits at soudcheck, Dortmund, December 20, 1980
Mark Knopfler at the soundcheck
Rhythm guitarist Hal Lindes

The show

The Westfalenhalle in Dortmund was one of Europe’s biggest venues at that time. There were two stages, one at each end of the oval shaped arena. This way it was possible to change the stage line for the next band while some other band was playing on the other stage. Talkin Heads and Roxy Music were alright, but for us they were not more than some kind of support act.

The Dire Straits show was spectacular  and left a deep impression on me, a 15-years old watching his first concert. I guess many of you know the concert from videos of the TV broadcast. While the sound on TV was terrible, I did not feel so during the concert. I later read an interview with Pick Withers where he also stated that they had the worst sound of all four bands on TV, but the best during the concert. The setlist was – as far as I remember it – probably something like:

Once Upon a Time in the West
Expresso Love*
Down to the Waterline
Lions
Skateaway* (? not absolutely sure anymore)
News
Sultans of Swing
Tunnel of Love
Where do you think you’re going*
Solid Rock

The songs marked with * were not included on the TV show. I am rather sure that they did not play Romeo & Juliet, which became a hit shortly afterwards.

Mark played all songs on his new red Schecter “Dream Machine” Strat, except the last three. Tunnel of Love and Where do you think you’re going were the sunburst Schecter Strat, and Solid Rock was his new black Schecter Telecaster (which was also used for Telegraph Road a few weeks later on that same tour). The amps were two Music Man 212 HD 130 into Marshall cabs, and he had a rack full with effects.

Here is a video clip from the show. By the way, both me and my friend bought a Dire Straits poster at one of those merchandisising stands in one of the breaks between two shows, shortly before the Dire Straits appearance, and neither of us thought too much about what to do with a rolled poster during the concert…  Funnily you can see where we were standing in the audience waving those posters, e.g. at 0:38 🙂

Dire Straits/ Mark Knopfler live pictures and videos, Mark Knopfler gear, Misc

Early Dire Straits picture

I recently found this picture showing Dire Straits on one of their probably earliest gigs – I guess 1977 or early 1978 at the latest. Not the earliest picture, but I think a nice one which I at least  haven’t seen before.

It is only b/w, but  Mark’s ’61  Stratocaster should still have the bare-wood finish it had when he got it. I am almost sure that it got the later red paint at the same time when his brother David’s Strat got its black finish – here also with a wood finish (right).

Dire Straits before the famous red Strat became red

Unfortunately we cannot see which amp Mark is playing – the Fender amp on the right seems to belong to David (although he theoretically can also play some other amp outside the visible range).  I wish the picture would show just a bit more of the floor so that we could have seen any effects he had at that time (did he already play the Morley and the MXR then?), but we can’t 🙁

John Illsley (left) already had his Precision bass here (at some earlier pictures from September 1977 he played some weird bass), also Pick did not have the black Eddie Ryan drum kit here yet.

If some day time-travel hyperlinks on pictures will be invented (click on it and be in that room), this is a picture I would click on 🙂

Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear

Limited Alchemy Edition of the white Schecter pickguard

The family of the loaded Schecter-style pickguard – currently available in white aluminium and brass with tapped F500T-style pick-ups – got a new member: A pickguard with a pick-up configuration just like in Mark Knopfler’s red Schecter Strat in the early 80ies – thus the name Alchemy Edition. For now it is a really limited edition of just a few – so if  this is what you always wanted better don’t wait too long ( I try but at the moment I cannot promise if I can make these availabe in the future again).

The pick-ups are three Seymour Duncan SSL1 with white caps just like on Knopfler’s red Dream Machine (that’s the name for those Schecter Strats), everything else is as in the normal version. Note that these are non-tapped pick-ups which means those mini switches are on in the down position and off in the up and middle position (just like in Knopfler’s guitar).

 

Update: The Alchemy Edition was a limited edition  and is not available anymore. It was replaced by the loaded pickguard with the VFS-1 pickups. You can get the same sounds but in contrast to the Alchemy board – which only allowed 7 sounds – you do not lose the 26 different sound combinations  from the three mini switches. In the full coil position of the mini switch you will get a sound like the DiMarzio FS-1 that Mark had in his red Fender at the time of early Dire Straits so you will have the best of different worlds. Check out this blog post and the video there which compares the tapped coil sound of the VFS-1 ( stands for Vintage +  Fat Strat) to an original 1955 vintage Strat pickup.

Easy stuff for beginners, MK guitar style and licks

Chord changes in News on live version of the Making Movies tour

Have you ever noticed that some chords of  News were changed in the live version that Dire Straits used to play on the On Location tour (Making Moviers tour) in 1980/81?

The original chord sequence of News – as recorded on the Communiqué album – was:

Em –  Bm –  C –  Bm –  Am – Am –  C –  C

Live it was changed to:

Em – Bm – C – G/B – Am – Am  G/B – C – C  D

In words: The second Bm was changed to a G (while the bass still plays the B). This also lead to some changes of the melody over this chord. The G before the last C chord (also with a B in the bass) was just a transition chord (played for the last two beats of that bar), the same is true for the last D which was the transition to the Em of the next verse.

Here is a video which shows them playing this version:

 

MK guitar style and licks

Interesting lick in Telegraph Road from a 1992 live version

In today’s blog post I want to feature a lick again, one I think that stroke me because of the interesting and logical idea behind it. This idea is: what will it sound like if you steadily repeat the same five sixteenth notes?

In detail:  On a recording of Telegraph Road from Nimes, France, September 29,  1992 (this is NOT the gig in Nimes that was filmed for the On Every Night video earlier that year but the one that was shown on TV in many European countries), Mark played a lick that consists of the following five repeated notes:

If each of these notes is played as a sixteenth note, always each fourth of them will fall on the beat. As there are five different notes over a rhythm of four sixteenth notes, the first note of a sixteenth group will always be different, see the following tab.

After 20 notes, which is on the 2nd beat in the 2nd bar, the notes will repeat, after 80 notes which is after 5 bars, the first c note will be on the “one” again.

Simple but clever, isn’t it? Often the simple ideas are the best anyway. However, if you try to play the lick, you will find that it is everything but easy to play. Since always the first note of a group of four sixteenth notes is stressed, you have to stress a different note all the time (always the one on your foottap of course). Sometimes you even have to stress the pulled-off note. It is hard not to lose the musical context, in other words not to lose where you are in the chord scheme (which is basically Dm, Dm7, G , D by the way).

Here is the video that shows what I am talking about. Unfortunately specifying a starting point seems not to work any longer in embedded youtube videos, so you manually need to go to where the lick is, which is ca. between 6:52 and 6:57. I will also try to record a tutorial video on this lick as soon as I will find some time. Happy practicing!

Guitar in general, Vintage guitars

Why do certain pickups like Stratocaster pick-ups from the 50ies or the Schecter F500T die so often?

A guitar pickup does not contain any moving parts, and for this reason it is generally free of mechanical wear and might work for many decades (maybe even for centuries?). Nevertheless, certain pickup models seem to be prone to die earlier than others. One example are Fender pickups from the 50ies or early 60ies. For this reason you will often see vintage Stratocasters with rewound pickups. The same is true for the Schecter F500T – a tapped pickup which consists of two individual coils.

It is mostly corrosion of the magnets that kills the pickup

The reason is simple. A pickup consists of some magnets and a coil – in case of a standard Fender-type singlecoil pickup we have individual magnetic pole pieces for each string, but some pickups also have non-magnetic metal pieces (or screws) that are connected to one bar magnet that often sits below the bobbin. The coil consist of hair-thin wire that is wound around the magnets. The wire is an extremely thin copper wire that is insulated with some film (e.g. laquer, formvar or enamel). For this reason – the wire itself is insulated – it is not necessary to insulate the magnets from the wire.

Now the problem: the magnets are made of metal – normally alnico which is an alloy of ALuminium, NIckle, and Cobalt – , and metal can corrode when exposed to humidity or other environmental factors like sweat, beer, or whatever. It is this corrosion of the magnets in the interior of the pick-up that can destroy the wire of the coil.
There are two different things that can happen: (a) the wire breaks and the pick-up will not produce any output at all anymore, or (b) only the insulation is destroyed and the coil is shortened. The pick-up will still produce some output but not as much as it normally does. It depends on the number of turns that are shortened how much output the pick-up will produce – any value from 0 – 100% is possible.

Those old Stratocaster pickups often look like this

Fender reacted to the problem which killed so many pickups from the 50ies and applied a thin coat of laquer on the pole pieces before winding the coil. Alternatively some manufacturers  put some tape around the pole pieces.

Measurung the resistance of the pickup

The exact diagnosis of a defective pickup is simple. All you need is to measure the resistance of the coil with a multi meter (or to be concrete an ohm meter). Make sure that the pick-up is NOT switched on at the 5-way (or whatever) pick-up switch, but switched OFF. Then measure between the two poles where the cables are soldered to the pick-up. If you don’t want to open the guitar, you can also turn up the volume and tone controls, switch on the pick-up and measure at the output jack (plug in a guitar cable and measure between the two poles of the other plug). However, this measurment is not as exact as the other method since the potis will be in parallel to the pickup and reduce the resistance you will measure)

Measuring the resistance of a pickup

If the wire is broken, the multimeter will read an extremely high value (indefinite), if it is shortened it will read lower than the normal resistance of the pick-up (which is about 6 kohms in case of a vintage-style Stratocaster pick-up)

If the pickup is defective, there is nothing you can do to repair it except exchange it or let it be rewound by a specialist. If the correct type of wire is used, there should be no audible sound difference after the job.

If you are looking for a replacement for the Schecter F500T pickup, you should check out our tapped pick-ups by the German pick-up specialist Harry Haeussel. Click on the image below for more info.

Guitar in general, Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear

White Aluminium Schecter-style pickguards now available

After the brass pickguards, the white ones are also available now. Just like on Mark Knopfler’s red Schecter Strat, they are made of white enamel aluminium, they feature three mini toggle switches, one volume poti and one tone poti with chrome or gold knobs (e.g. Mark Knopfler’s blue Schecter – played on stage by Hal Lindes – had gold knobs).

Just two potis are great: you can finally rest your right hand closer to the bridge to get that funky, crisp attack like Knopfler.

Probably there will be other pick-up choices (e.g. Seymour Duncans) available soon. Note however that with standard (= non-tapped)  pick-ups you won’t get those 27 sound combinations.

Here are some first pictures.

Check it out in the shop.