Visitors of Mark Knopfler’s latest Get Lucky tour might have wondered about one of Knopfler’s new guitars which he used on stage for the last song each night – Piper to the End. This song features  (live and studio) the Electrajet built by Luthier Don Grosh.

Don Grosh started his company Grosh Guitars in 1993, “with the singular goal of producing the world’s finest custom electric guitars and basses” (quote Grosh website). Each guitar is built from high-quality materials and parts by a small team of experienced luthiers under control and direction of Don Grosh himself. The product range covers models with both Fender or Gibson influence.

Mark’s guitar is the Electrajet, a Fenderish design which looks like a blend between a Stratocaster and a Jaguar or a Jazzmaster.

The Electrajet normally has an alder body, although ash or mahagony are optional. Grosh uses only hand-selected (“tap-tone matched”) old-growth tone woods. Unfortunately at the moment there is no information on the details of Mark’s guitar but it does not seem to differ much from the standard configuration except the brown tortoise pickguard instead of the standard one in aged white. The neck is maple with a rosewood fingerboard (brazilian rosewood is available at a 400$ extra charge). The tremolo system is a vintage-style Gotoh or Wilkinson Stratocaster bridge, while the jack plate seems to be adopted from the Telecaster.

The pick-ups are two handcrafted P90 – manufactured by Grosh, or optionally by Fralin. The original P90 is a Gibson single coil pick-up which has a warmer and fatter sound than a Fender single coil like in the Stratocaster.

Knopfler’s Electrajet seems to be in aged white. All Grosh guitars feature a hand-rubbed ultrathin nitrocellulose laquer finish which allows the wood to “breathe”.

The Electrajet is priced at $ 2,950 (base price, additional costs for optional features) for the custom version, or at $ 2,000 for a standard version. A detailed list of the differences between both and much more information on the Electrajet can be found on the Grosh website.

I can’t tell whether Mark used the Electrajet for other songs than Piper To the End. Here he played the bridge pick-up. I had the impression it did not went through his Reinhardt amps but through the Tone King Imperial. The sound was sharp (because of the bridge pick-up) with some warm distortion.

Below are some pictures from the recent tour which show Mark with the Electrajet.

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After seeing Mark Knopfler live on  the recent Get Lucky tour I can confirm that he plays different MK Signature Stratocasters on stage (compare the post on Guitars on the get Lucky tour). In Oberhausen und Amsterdam he seemed to play four different red MK Strats:

#1 – on Border Reiver

This one is tuned to Eb which of course does not mean an open tuning but one half note lower than standard tuning, something Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughn did to get a fatter sound without having trouble with playing techniques like string bending.

still looking for good picture

#2 – on What it is & Sailing to Philadelphia

Just like on the last tour, he probably has 010 string gauge on this one. Serial No is SE 00000 (confirmed for 2008 tour)

still looking for good picture

#3 – on outro of Romeo & Juliet and on Sultans of Swing

Probably with 009 string gauge again (confirmed for the Kill to get Crimson tour), with a wireless camera mounted on headstock. This one has a comparatively light rosewood fingerboard. On the 2008 tour he played these two songs on Glenn Worf’s MK signature Strat, which has a lighter, more orange colour. This might be the same guitar again.

#4 on So far Away

On some gigs he played the ’54 Stratocaster, but seems to use another MK signature with heavy strings (wound g string) now. Easily to recognize on pictures because of the narrow guitar strap.

One of Mark’s signature  Strats has the serial no SE 00001, but I cannot tell for sure which of the four guitars this is. The one on So far away has a nice slightly flamed headstockk, but the flame/grain pattern seems to be different than on the 00001 Strat. Maybe it is the one on Border reiver?

I am looking for good pictures of guitars   #1 and # 2 to contrast them all here. If you have any, please send them to me so that I can put them into this post.

And if you wonder where I got the information about the guitars of the 2008 tour from, check out this video in case you don’t already know it:

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Visitors of the recent Get Lucky tour have seen the Tone King Imperial on stage again, located between two red Marshall cabs just like on the previous tours. I had ideal seats for the two concerts I have been to (Oberhausen and Amsterdam) and tried to make out for which songs Tone King was used, actually by trying to hear if the sound comes from the Marshall cab or from the Tone King.

It seems the Tone King was used on Donnegan’s gone and Piper to the End in Amsterdam (they did not play Donnegan’s gone in Oberhausen). By the  way , on the last tour (Kill to get Crimson) it was used on Cannibals, True love will never fade, Our Shangri-la, and Postcards from Paraguay.

Here is a picture of the amp settings in Amsterdam:

I guess the clean channel (left) was for Donnegan’s gone,  while the hotther right channel might be used for Piper to the End.

Of course I am not 100% sure, and the amp might have been used on other song’s too. If you can add some info, please do so with the comment function.

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On the recent Get Lucky tour I became aware of a little technical detail I had never paid attention to before: I was sure that the guitar cable coming from the guitar would first go into the Ernie Ball volume pedal and then back to the area on the right side behind the stage where Mark Knopfler’s effect rack and amps are placed. Instead, I observed that a long cable leads directly from the guitar to where the amps are. In other words, the input amp of the effect rack (or some other) seems to be the first part in the signal chain. Here the signal is boosted to line level, then (before or after the other effects in the rack) it seems to go back to the volume pedal in the front area on stage, and back to the effect rack again from where it runs to the amps.

I always wondered why Mark’s volume pedal behaves different than the Ernie Ball pedals  I have tried out (the response curve seems to be totally different, see here for more). Maybe Mark’s pedal really has a different poti (like some rumours say), or it just reacts differently because it works on a much higher signal level (after the first gain stage in the effect rack the signal becomes “active”, which means more level and a lower impedance). Theoretically it is also possible that Mark uses the version for line levels of the Ernie Ball pedal, which has a 25 kOhms poti instead of the 250 kOhms of the standard version.

I tried my pedal with a low impedance signal to see if it makes any difference: it did not, but I could not test with a higher level yet.

Another consequence of this signal path is that the long first guitar cable surely changes the colour of the tone. The longer a cable is, the higher its capacity which means it moves down the position of the pick-ups resonance frequency peak. It acts like a small capacitor put into the circuit. This way the cables capacity can easily shift the resonance peak of a standard Fender pickup (normally at about 6 kHz) to something like 3 or 4 kHz, which means that glassy high end at 6 kHz is reduced and the “presence” frequencies at 3-4 kHz are boosted.

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The US leg of Mark Knopfler’s 2010 Get Lucky tour is over, and we in Europe are looking forward to the next part. Due to the new recording policy on all MK concerts,  there seem to be less videos on youtube than we had the years before, but still we have some On the base of mainly these videos I put together a list of the guitars Mark has used on the different songs on this tour so far:

Red MK Signature Fender  Strat(s)

Of course he played his signature model, and probably more than just one. He played it on:

Border Reiver, What it is (not confirmed) , Sailing to Philadelphia (not confirmed), Romeo & Juliet (outro solo), Sultans of Swing

The guitar on Border Reiver is tuned to Eb (one half tone lower than standard tuning). On the 2008 tour he played one Strat with 010 strings on What it is and Sailing to Philadelphia, and another one (owned by Glenn Worf) with 009s on Sultans of Swing and Romeo & Juliet, might be similiar on this tour.

Gibson Les Paul

The following songs seem to be the ’58 Les Paul. I can’t tell if the ’59 was also used.

Why Aye Man, Hill Farmer Blues, Cleaning my Gun, Speedway at Nazareth, Brothers in Arms

Fender  ’54 Stratocaster

So far away

I first listed So far away for the MK Signature Strat, because of this video (bad quality, red or sunburst Strat?) but on all other ones I have seen so far it it the sunburst ’54 Strat.

Pensa

Telegraph Road (2nd part)

National Style-o

Romeo & Juliet, Telegraph Road (part 1 – until “three lanes moving slow”)

Don Grosh Electrajet

A rather new addition to Mark Knopfler’s collection.

Piper to the End

Martin 0040S

The Ragpicker signature model

Get Lucky, Marbletown

Danelectro

Tuned to open E, slide

Donnegan’s gone

(No information yet)

I cannot tell which guitars he played on the following songs. If you have been to the US tour or know more from other sources, please use the comment function to let us know.

Prairie Wedding, Monteleone, Remembrance Day, Coyote

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