I recently made a backing track and started to rehearse Southbound Again (live version, not an easy one I think) from Dire Straits’ first album. In fact the live version they played from 1977 to 1979 (often as an encore) is a totally different song than the studio version. Unfortunately not one single video exists of it so noone has ever seen how/what/where Knopfler played exactly there. The only complete […]
Following on from Ingo’s excellent article on the stolen sunburst schecter used on Tunnel Of Love. I (Dermot O’Reilly also known as strat61 on some forums) have been invited to write a piece on my Schecter come fender strat inspired by that guitar. Inspiration Although I followed Dire Straits from 1978 with Sultans it was only Christmas 1980 when I started to play the guitar myself that I really locked […]
*Note: As there was an issue with this guitar – the neck warp was too big to play properly with 08 strings – the guitar was returned. For this reason, I removed all names – of the builder and the client. XY* – a reader of this blog and singer / guitar player in the band XY*- recently sent me an email about his latest guitar: a clone of the […]
On October 26 Geocities finally closed. Geocities was one of the first hosts for free websites. They were taken over a few years later by Yahoo who now finally decided to drop Geocities forever. When I built my very first website in 1996, it was Geocities who hosted my original “Dire Straits Guitar Page” at http://www.geocities.com/Nashville/3399/. Although hardly updated within the next years, it was nevertheless one of the first […]
I recently saw a few threads in numerous forums about the guitar sound of So far away on Dire Straits’ fifth album, Brothers in Arms. People speculated that there was a flanger, a delay, a chorus, or other effects involved to create the rather unusual sound of the lead guitar. And unusual it is in fact. This is because it is not really a guitar what you hear – instead […]
Those early years of Dire Straits are still a very special period for me. 1979 was the time when I first heard the band and became a fan of Knopfler’s guitar style and sound. For this reason I still have a deep interest in any live pictures from this time but more and more I got the impression that I meanwhile have seen most existing pictures from those early years. […]
Last weekend we had guests and one of them had this new photo camera – a Panasonic Lumix FX 37 which costs less than 200,- €. Besides taking great photos you can also record videos in HD quality (1280 x 720 pixels). As I was curious what these look like with my stuff I played Sultans for them and we filmed it. The result is really amazing – much better […]
During the last weeks I played around a bit with the backing tracks from the Jam with Dire Straits book by Total Accuracy. Some of these are great and sound very good. Unfortunately, the one for Sultans of Swing seems almost unusuable to me because of the harsh rhythm guitar sound. Since I still had a Cubase file with the MIDI drum part of Sultans – something I did with […]
Summer is here and with it my summer holidays, so the ideal opportunity for some more song tutorials here in my Mark Knopfler guitar blog. This time I will explain the song Down to the Waterline – the first song on the first Dire Straits CD (1978). Down to the waterline is surely another highlight of early Dire Straits. It is one of the oldest Mark Knopfler songs, one of […]
The song In the Gallery of Dire Straits’ first album seems to be in a strange key. The official songbooks transcribe it in the key of Bbm. On all live versions Dire Straits played it in Am. So, why is this? If you listen carefully to the CD version and and try to play along with your guitar, you will notice that Bbm seems to work better than Am, but […]