Just a quick note: I added a version of my Wild West End video from last week without backing tracks, just vocals and lead guitar as I played it live over the backing track. The mix including all effects and EQ is the same as in the full video with exception that I increased the level for the lead guitar for about 3 dB.
The song You can’t beat the House of Mark Knopfler’s latest album Get Lucky is a traditional sounding blues song, reminding of some Chicago blues. However, something in its chord scheme sounds somewhat surprising and fresh, so I had a closer look at the chords and the structure of the song.
You can’t beat the house is based on a standard 12-bars blues scheme. Of course there is not only one blues scheme, but many common variations. If you try to break it down to the very basics, the following 12-bar scheme seems to be the purest blues scheme (here in the key of C major):
Compared with this, the first verse of You can’t beat the house runs over the following scheme:
Everything is quite normal up to bar 5, where an additional 2/4 bar (red) is inserted before the change to the subdominant (IV) chord, the F7. This chord goes together with the line of the lyrics which says “you can’t beat the house”. It is totally unexpected and thus has a surprising effect. Generally, inserting 2/4 bars into a 4/4 song is one of THE typical elements of Mark Knopfler’s songwriting, a topic to be covered with a future blog article.
The second change to the original scheme affects the 9th bar of the original scheme: the first G7 (change to the dominant chord) is substituted with a C7 (blue colour) here.
The second verse and the last verses are almost identical to the first with one exception, the 9th bar is left out:
As you see, we don’t have a 12-bar scheme anymore but a 12.5-bar scheme in the first and an 11.5-bar scheme.
The solos are over the standard blues scheme as in the first figure. Just to make it complete, the bridge (from 2:00 to 2:18) is just over a C chord.
A few days ago I jammed a bit with a friend of mine – Thomas Schwarze – in our little home studio. Thomas is a great guitar player and also plays fingerstyle, using a technique similar to the MK style. Our first idea was to play “something” and upload it to youtube. We tried out a few tunes and then attempted to play a rather complex tune – a song I wrote some time ago and recently started to arrange for a proper recording. Unfortunately it did not really happen with this song this day – too many parts and details to get it done properly in a little jam – so we decided to drop the idea of the youtube upload, and just jammed over some of the chord progressions of this song. For some reason we simply let the camera run, and also the audio recording software.
When we were watching the result we thought it was not that bad, so we finally uploaded it last week. Most comments on youtube so far were favourable, some people seemed to enjoy the relaxed mood of the tune. For this reason I thought some of you also might want to watch it, so here it is.
The red Strat I am playing is a “Parts-o-caster”, it is something like a clone of Mark Knopfler’s red maple-neck Strat of early Dire Straits days, consisting of an old Fender neck with a (non-original) laminated maple board, a Japanese vintage body, and a vintage Squier pickguard loaded with the US vintage replica pick-ups of those first Squiers.
The amp was a Music Man 212 HD 130, mic’ed with a Shure SM 57. Effects are a Morley volume pedal and the green MXR analog delay.
Thomas is playing a Fender Telecaster from the early 70ies, a beautiful guitar that always sounds great, also played through a Music Man amp (a 65-112), mic’ed with an Audio Technica AT 4050.
By the way, the chord progression is
E D A E (repeat)
C#m, B, A, G#m, F#m, E, A, E
Hope you will enjoy 🙂
Wild West End from Dire Straits’ first album has always been one of my all-time favourite songs, so it is no wonder that it is one of the songs I recently started to practice a bit. Of course you will never come to a point where you think that you really can play it (at least not the way you feel it should be played like), but a few days ago I nevertheless recorded and filmed me playing this song, to capture its current state so to say (see video below).
I played the lead guitar together with the vocals live in one take, over a self-produced backing track (available here).
Here is a “little secret” about the way I filmed the video (before some Sherlock Holmes might notice it anyway): As I have only one camcorder, I cannot film different views simultaneously. For this reason I mimic’ed the lead guitar in a second take for the close-up scenes (I thought some of you might like to see some details what the fingers are doing). Same for the rhythm guitar which I did not film when recording it for the backing track (it was in fact the same guitar shown here, a beautiful blonde Fender Telecaster).
The lead guitar is a US Fender Vintage Stratocaster ’62 which lost its finish some years ago – played into a Music Man 212 HD 130, mic’ed with a Shure SM 57. Effects are a Morley volume pedal and the green MXR analog delay. I added some EQ’ing, a limiter (!) and some reverb in the mix (the reverb of the Music Man was also on). That long stereo echo at the end of the intro was also from the desk (the “desk” and the effects are all software in my case).
The rhythm guitar was tuned to Open A and capo’ed at the 5th fret (thus open D). I played it directly into the desk and added a bit of EQ and reverb. As said, it is a wonderful Telecaster, played with both pick-ups on, all controls up.
But now, here is the video, I hope you will enjoy it.
The radio concert of Dire Straits live at the Schouwburg in Rotterdam, October 19, 1978 was one of the earliest Dire Straits live bootlegs, and for this reason has been known for long among fans. However, I have never seen pictures of this concert (at least none with realizing that they were from this gig). Yesterday when browsing Dire Straits pictures at Getty Images I found some which were specified to be from just this famous gig.
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For copyright reasons I do not dare to show them here in full size, but you can click on them to open enlarged in a new tab at Getty Images (where you can also buy them in high resolution if you want).
While watching the pictures, you might like to listen to a sample from this concert:
Dire Straits, Once Upon a Time in the West, Rotterdam, Netherlands, October 19, 1978
The three picture show mark playing the #68354 rosewood Stratocaster, which he played on the complete late 1978 tour it seems (for more info see this blog article) over the HD 130 212 Music man amp. David plays the Peavey Deuce amp, I am not sure, but there might be a third amp right of the Peavey (third picture), no idea what this can be, on other late 1978 pictures or videos (e.g. Paris October 14, 1978, Chorus TV) there seem to be just the two amps.
The following two pictures are said to be from the same location, something I personally doubt:
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I guess these are from early 1979 (probably in Germany), I think so because of a different red Strat (with the Music Man guitar strap), different sweat bands, Mark is wearing a neck lace etc. See the article on Angel of Mercy for more information on the guitar played in the left picture.
Mark Knopfler never played that much bottle-neck guitar on his albums or concerts, nevertheless he occasionally did: except Water of Love from the first Dire Straits album of course, songs like The Man’s too strong (from Brothers in Arms), Do America (from Sailing to Philadelphia), Money for Nothing intro (live version 2001 tour), or Right now (All the roadrunning) come to mind. (I guess there are more, but before thinking about these for too long I will leave it to you to add these with the comment function below this article).
One song that was normally never played with a slide guitar is Angel of Mercy from Dire Straits’ Communiqué album (1979). However, the live version we have on some bootleg recordings from Germany, February 1979 features a slide lead guitar. On this tour Angel of Mercy was played as an encore, see more on this in this forum thread.
Before many will ask where they can hear this recording, I thought to write this article to include an audio clip. Enjoy:
Dire Straits, Angel of Mercy, Mannheim, Germany, February 14, 1979
Edit March 27: original text:
By the way, I have no idea which guitar he is playing here. Normally they had a black Fender Telecaster Thinline (from around 1969) tuned to open A on which Mark played Water of Love. So it would make sense that it is also the black Tele, as the Strats were setup for normal playing with an action probably not suited for bottle-neck. On the other hand, Angel of Mercy does not call for an open tuning. I am afraid we will probably never know for sure 🙁
Update March 27:
If you read the comments to this article, you have probably seen the following picturs (thanks to Brunno):
The description at Getty Images says that it was taken in Rotterdam, October 19, 1978 (like four other pictures , see also this article), but I think this picture one (and one other) are in fact from early 1979 (similar but not identical clothes, different guitar, Mark is wearing a neck lace, etc.). If so, this picture is the proof for a 12-string (a Burns Baldwin Double Six by the way) played with bottle-neck, and the song can be no other than Angel of Mercy.
This is the second time I want to feature Chris Rea here (first time: click here). The reason was that today I surfed into a video on youtube from a concert I watched about 25 years ago on television: Chris Rea on a festival from the Loreley – that famous rock on the river Rhine- that was live broadcasted by Germany’s WDR Rockpalast. By the way, Dire Straits also played there a festival gig some years before (summer 1979). It is a beatiful place and those summer evening concerts were always a highlight.
The song is called Bombollini, a song from his 1984 album Wired to the Moon. I never liked this album that much because it sounds somewhat like a cheap and quick production to me although some of the songs were real gems. This song was the openener of the concert, and it always reminded me of the way Dire Straits used to open their concert at that time with Ride across the River: similar pace, similar groove, similar instrumentation to some extend -the flute, the bass marimba sound – … who knows, Chris Rea is known to be a huge Mark Knopfler fan.
The song builds up more and more, ending with a guitar solo on Chris’ ’63 fiesta red Strat nick-named Pinky, played through a silver-face Fender Twin for the clean sounds and an old blonde Fender Bandmaster amp.
But now enjoy:
Today I was on the Fender website and accidentally found a nice little tool there: the online guitar tuner.
When you click on one of the six tuners of the peghead, the software will play a sample of the corresponding note, played with a clean Fender sound.
There are some very useful options: loop on or off (the note will be played again and again in loop mode), and you can select the tuning – standard or all different kinds of open or special tunings. You can even create your own tuning.
The only thing that is missing is the option to fine tune to another root pitch than 440Hz – but to be honest, not something many of us really need.
I like the idea to tune the guitar using your ears instead of a tuner device – helps to keep your ears fit 🙂
I often read threads in forums about how to check if a certain part on a Fender vintage guitar is original or not. Of course there are countless books and websites which show many details that help to do so. However, there is one particular detail which is only rarely mentioned: the ‘dowel holes‘ on those old Fender bodies (I am not talking about ‘nail holes’ here!)
If I understand it right, Fender used some clamps to hold the wood plank when sawing out the body. These clamps left two holes in the body which were filled with wooden dowels. These dowel holes are at exactly the same location on all old Stratocaster bodies – in fact all other models seem to have them as well, however, at completely different places than the Strat.
So if you happen to see an old stripped Fender body, you can easily spot these. New Fender and all the reissue bodies don’t have them. Thus this seems to be a reliable detail to tell an old body from a fake.
Unfortunately, you normally can’t see them on a painted body, at least not easily. However, if you know exactly where they are and observe carefully the way the body reflects light at these places, you might see them through the finish. This is because old nitro finish is often really thin and the dowel holes leave a tiny inaccuracy in the body surface. And of course there are all those Stevie Ray Vaughn or Rory Gallagher-like looking battered Strats which are partly bare of any finish and allow to see those dowel holes directly.
I am not sure in which year these disappappeared, I guess somewhere in the 70ies, when Fender switched to a different method of cutting out the bodies.
Theoretically it is possible to fake these holes, too, but I think this is rarely done – yet …
As many of you might already have noticed, I recently added a forum to this site.
We have the comment function below each blog post which has been used to discuss everything that is related to the post subject, but many times completely new threads emerged within the comments which became easily off-topic in a way. For this reason – and to make it possible for readers to start a new thread any time – I added a proper forum. The forum plug-in I found for this purpose is really great and offers a lot of cool functions. Almost every feature you know of other forums is here, too (like directly embedding youtube videos or pictures, PM’ing other members, and so on.
You can get to the forum via the link under ‘Pages’ at the top of the left sidebar. And there is a list of the latest forum posts a bit below in the sidebar, you can also get to the forum by clicking on one of the list entries.
You need to register to post but don’t be afraid, you will not be pestered with many newsletters or such. This is mainly to avoid spammers.
So after the last few days of testing I officially announce the new forum with this post. I hope there will be many interesting discussions, looking forward to it 🙂