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 […]
For some weeks I have been playing around with a Boss RC-50 loop station. The RC-50 allows you to record your own playing and play it as a loop. This way you can create multiple sound layers, and then jam to it. A really nice tool that makes a lot of fun. Here I am live recording a rhythm guitar and a bass over a drum rhythm from the RC-50, […]
When I started playing the guitar in 1979, spiral guitar cables were common. Many players favoured these spiral – or coil(ed) – cables because it is very handy not to have meters of cables lying on the floor between your feet and your effects. The spiral cable shortens automatically to a few feet, while it allows distances up to several meters when stretched out, and they don’t wrap themselves after […]
This week-end I found time again to record another cover version – Brothers in Arms. After Six Blade Knife and Wild West End, this is the third video I put some additional effort into, which means I did not record the audio with the microphone of the camcorder but with the gear in our homerecording studio. Nevertheless it should be considered rather as “live video” and not as studio recording […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In the blog post about the Sultans of Swing lead guitar track that was made available through the Guitar Hero 5 game we had some interesting discussions about some technical aspects of the guitar sound. One was whether the effects we hear (compression, chorus, reverb) were added later in the mix or were recorded right with the instrument track. Unfortunately there is no direct information available so we will probably […]
Here is a small video clip in which I play the Southbound Again riff, this time the studio version (I put another video online with the completely different live version a few weeks ago). I played it in standard tuning. A few years ago I read an interview where Mark said that it was open G tuning (which somewhat surprised me here). Anyway, it works fine in standard tuning I […]