Month: May 2009

Guitar in general

Mark Knopfler’s 1938 Gibson Advanced Jumbo acoustic guitar

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Mark Knopfler owns two beautiful vintage Gibson acoustic guitars which he seems to play a lot on his studio albums these days. One is a 1953 Gibson Southerner Jumbo, the other a 1938 Gibson Advanced Jumbo which I would like to feature in this article. Both have a sunburst finish and thus look a bit similar at first glance. Besides the different body shape, the different fingerboard inlays tell you the model when you see Knopfler playing one of these on any pictures or videos. While the 1953 has double parallelogram pearl fingerboard inlays, the 1938 has the so-called diamond and arrowhead inlays. The Advanced Jumbo was only produced this way from 1935 to 1940 (but was reintroduced in 1990) , and only about 300 […]

Amps

Musitek guitar amp – predecessor of the Dire Straits Music Man 130HD 212

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I recently saw this extremely rare amp offered on ebay  – a 1974 Musitek combo amp that looks very similar to the “Dire Straits” amp – the Music Man 130 HD 212. In fact Musitek was one of the names  under which the very first amps were produced before the company was renamed to Music Man (see this article for more info on Music Man amps). As this was the first and only time I have ever seen such an early model, I want to feature it with this article. The overall control layout was already identical to the later Music Man amp. The only difference I can see is a rotary switch with the positions ‘Off – Low – Normal – High’ at the […]