After the other article about Knopfler’s Ernie Ball volume pedal, this time I want to feature the volume pedal he played before, which means during the Dire Straits days until the end of the Making Movies tour in 1981. The pedal I am talking about is the silver Morley Volume Pedal.

Morley made a whole range of effect foot pedals, including a very popular wha-wha or even models with built-in flanger or delay. All of these could be used as simple volume pedal as well. Knopfler’s model, simply called “VOL”, was just the ordinary volume pedal.

The unique thing about those Morleys was that they did not use a poti  but a photo resistor instead. The advantage: potis tend to make noise after some years of usage, the photo resistor will not, no matter how much you use or even misuse it (dusty or smoky stages, humidity etc.)

What sounds rather complicated was in reality an extremely simple circuit: a small bulb  – the one behind the red jewel light that is also used as power indicator – shines on a photo resistor (LCR) which lets the guitar signal pass as long as it receives light. When you roll back the pedal, a piece of black cloth is pushed between the bulb and the photo resistor which reduces the volume of the guitar accordingly. That’s all! Well, the simple ideas are often the best

The bulb (right) shines on the LCR (center), if this is not covered by the cloth

As the bulb needs electric power, the pedal is powered via mains line voltage, no external 9V adaptor like modern pedals! Since the power indicator bulb is part of the circuit, it means when it blows the pedal is dead. Fortunately replacing the bulb is simple and cheap.

The pedal way is extremely long. This means you can control the volume precisely, but you have to move your feet quite a lot. You get used to this, I have no problems with it. You can adjust how quickly or slowly the pedal reacts with a screw that changes the position of that black cloth. And you can adjust how easily the pedal moves with the two screws that hold the pedal. The whole thing is very stable, you can rest your foot with a lot of weight on it without problems.

One thing that is remarkable is that the pedal changes the sound, even when pushed down completely (full volume). This is due to the – compared with other guitar gear – extremely low input impedance which dampens the resonance peak of any passive guitar pick-up. It sweetens the sound of a Stratocaster pick-up. Without it that Dire Straits sound would definitely have been harsher.

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Imitating the sound of a freight train whistle seems to be an obligatory part of all blues players’ vocabulary. For this purpose Mark Knopfler often uses a particular chord, a chord that appears on songs like Eastbound Train or Gravy Train (live), but also on the The Bug.

The chord in question is often called a 6/#9  chord (sometimes also denoted as 6/10). Remember, the numbers indicate the interval from the root note, so it is a chord with the 6th scale note added, and the sharp 9th note.

In C the 6th note is an A, the 9th is a D, but here we have a sharp nine, which is a half note higher, a D# (or Eb if you see it as 6/10 chord).

So our C 6/#9 would be (e.g.): C, E, G, A, D#

As a guitar player you probably want to leave out one or the other note (we only have 4 left-hand fingers), so we might get e.g. : C, G, A, D#

The following diagrams shows how to play these notes.

as tab:

or as chord chart:

Move the chord to the 14th fret position, and you will get the E 6/9+ (Eastbound Train) or – one octave lower – to the 2nd fret (The Bug)

In Gravy Train this chord appears as A 6/9+, which is at the 7th fret posiotion.

Here is a sound clips with the ‘train excerpt’ from the mentioned songs:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Keep on whistling

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(At the end of this article you will find a matching video for all who prefer watching to reading)

An acoustic guitar has normally heavier strings than an electric guitar because you want a loud and rich sound. With an electric guitar you don’t need that much volume because you can adjust the sound easily with the amp. Consequently playing the acoustic requires more strength and finger pressure, and some techniques like string bending are much more difficult or – e.g. on the wound g string – not really possible.

At home I normally play acoustic guitars the way they are supposed to, fingerpicking or strumming with heavy string. For that lead stuff I take an electric guitar which I often play without amp at home. While this is loud enough for practicing in most situations , it surely wouldn’t hurt if it was louder, like an ‘acoustic’ electric guitar so to say (I have friends who favour semi-acoustics like the Gibson 335 for this reason).

One day I found another, even better solution: I took an acoustic and simply put really light strings on it. This way I can play it like an electric guitar. One the other hand, the warm sound of a an acoustic has also to do with the different kind of strings used on them – normally bronze or phosphor wound. And these are not available in thin, electric-guitar like gauges of course. No problem, I take a normal set for acoustic guitar (like a 012 – 056) but I use a thin 09 string for the high e-string (the unwound strings are the same material for electric and acoustic guitars anyway). Then I use the e-string of that set for the b-string, the b-strings for the g-string, and so on. The low e-string is left over. So, if your set is e.g. 12, 16, 22w, 32, 42, 56, this will result in 09, 012, 16, 22w, 32, 42 – pretty much a standard gauge for electric guitars but in bronze or phosphor-bronze.

I recommend to relief the truss-rod of that guitar a bit to match the lower string tension. The Martin DXK2 I use for this purpose (a rather cheap Martin model) sounds of course different than it did before but still sounds great for all kind of stuff and plays like an electric, great for practicing. Something to try out – I love it.

Here is the video for this article:

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It cannot be answered with 100% certainty which string gauge or brand Mark Knopfler played on e.g. the first Dire Straits album or on Communique. There were a few interviews with major guitar magazines, but unfortunately none of these asked for strings.

For a long time the earliest information was from the Making Movies tour book which listed Fender Extra Lights for this tour. However, this was late 1980 and Knopfler meanwhile had changed to a different guitar (Schecters instead of vintage Fenders) and completely different gear (e.g. all that rack stuff).

Fender Extra Lights were pure nickel strings with gauges 09, 11, 15, 24, 32, 40 (they have different gauges these days: 16 instead of 15, 42 instead of 40 !). On the next tour he also played 09ers (Deam Markley Custom Light: 09,011,016,026,036,046) so it seemed he was a 09-player in all those years.

It was only a few years ago that I bought a guitar magazine from 1980 with Knopfler and his red Strat on the front cover on ebay. This was Musician from July 1980.

Besides the rather informative interview there was an info box about Mark Knopfler’s gear on the last page of the interview which lists guitars (e.g. his brand new Schecters) and amps/effects (still the old stuff from the Communique tour, mind the interview was before the Making Movies tour), and it said which strings he played, and these were not 09ers as assumed, but …

Fender Super Lights

Fender Super Lights was a 08 set (08, 11, 14, 22, 32, 38), also pure nickel. Of course the magazine does not say explicitely that these were used on any of the first CDs or on the first tours, but nevertheless, it is the earliest available information.

I myself had started to use thinner strings on most of my Strats since a few years before because I had the feeling they make some particular licks sound more like those old Dire Straits sound, also Fender and almost the same gauges as the Super Lights (only difference: I favour a 09 instead of 08 for the high e string), so I can indeed say that to me 08 sounds pretty good.

There is still the saying that big strings give you a big sound, so people like Stevie Ray Vaughn favoured extremely heavy strings, and also Knopfler seems to have gone more and more towards heavier strings over the decades. However, to me that Sultans sound is still one of the best I have ever heard and absolutely unique, so why not using a rather exotic sting gauge for it? And besides, 08s were rather common in the 70ies, you could get them everywhere and only recently they have disappeared from most shop shelves. The good thing: Fender still makes them, and who know, maybe this artice will help that they never will discontinue them

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Mark Knopfler has used a volume pedal almost since the very first beginning of his career. He does not only use it to adjust the overall level, but also for his characteristic volume swells that make a note fade in just like a violin. In short, he hits the note with the pedal all the way back to remove the attack, then presses it down to fade in the note.

For the first years he used a Morley volume pedal, but later he changed to a model by Ernie Ball. This is common knowledge that can be found everywhere in the internet.

I bought one of these Ernie Ball pedals many years ago. However, I found out that mine basically does what it is supoosed to do, but in detail there seem to be some differences to the way Knopfler’s pedal works. Over the years I had some good opportunities to watch him operating the pedal on stage, and I noticed that he often takes volume back to let’s say 70 – 80 % of the pedal way (100% = all the way down, full volume), and the volume of the guitar becomes slightly lower (maybe also 70 – 80% volume).
When I set mine to 70 or 80%, the volume is considerably lower, maybe just 50%. In other words, mine changes the volume quite a lot as soon as you take it back just a bit. This makes it rather hard to set the volume to the desired level, one fraction of an inch too much and it is too low.

I also noticed that he can create very ‘fast’ volume swells easily, which means the attack is filtered out but the note comes in quickly. When I do it, the volume comes in slowly, I have to press it down a rather long way – and very fast – until the note really cuts through.

It seems that the poti in Knopfler’s pedal behaves differently than in mine. The behaviour of a poti can be displayed as a curve, see this diagram:

Mine behaves like the blue curve (comes in slowly while the last inch of the pedal way changes a lot) whereas Mark’s rather does the opposite (red curve).

I found the solution in an interview with Mark’s guitar tech Glenn Saggers. He said that Mark is only happy with a particular poti that Ernie Ball once used, but which is not installed in later models anymore (some recent models allow you to change this curve by the way). They even gathered a supply of that old potis in case it worns out and must be replaced.

I later tried a second and even a third Ernie Ball pedal, but all of them had the same curve as mine.

One day I accidentally found a solution that works for me, without having to buy a new poti or to spend any cent at all (and I admit I had no idea where to get such a poti). I swapped the input and the output jack because I accidentally plugged the guitar cable into the amp jack (output) of the pedal and the cable to the amp into the guitar input jack. And voila, it behaved exactly as I want it to do.

There is one side effect of this which I have to mention. This way the pedal swallows some treble end when not pressed completely down (all potis do so but this way the effect is a bit extremer). However, this is no problem for me since the softer tone fits nicely to low volume, while full volume cuts a bit more. If you use one of these and have the same problems, try it out and let us know what you think about it.

Update: I recently found out how to modify all those Ernie Ball pedals with the wrong curve (basically all after the mid 80ies).

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