As many of you might already have noticed, I recently added a forum to this site.

We have the comment function below each blog post which has been used to discuss everything that is related to the post subject, but many times completely new threads emerged within the comments which became easily off-topic in a way. For this reason – and to make it possible for readers to start a new thread any time – I added a proper forum. The forum plug-in I found for this purpose is really great and offers a lot of cool functions. Almost every feature you know of other forums is here, too (like directly embedding youtube videos or pictures, PM’ing other members, and so on.

You can get to the forum via the link under ‘Pages’ at the top of the left sidebar. And there is a list of the latest forum posts a bit below in the sidebar, you can also get to the forum by clicking on one of the list entries.

You need to register to post but don’t be afraid, you will not be pestered with many newsletters or such. This is mainly to avoid spammers.

So after the last few days of testing I officially announce the new forum with this post. I hope there will be many interesting discussions, looking forward to it

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Mark Knopfler’s “Sultans” Strat (ser.-no. #68354) is from 1961. The second red Fender Strat he played with Dire Straits (ser.no #80470) was from about the same period (apart from the question in how far it was original Fender at all). For this reason I put together a table to give you a survey about the distinctive features that are different on a 1961 Strat compared  with earlier or later Strats.

	1961 Strat	before	later
Body wood	alder (ash for models in blonde)	light ash (swamp ash) until 1956	heavy ash in the 70ies
Fingerboard	slab board made of Brazilian rosewood	one-piece maple nack until 1959	curved rosewood venue from mid 1962 on, optional maple board in the late 60ies, one-piece maply neck available in the 70ies again
Pick-ups	staggered pole-pieces, formvar wire insulation, magnetic northpole on top	magnetic southpole on top in the early 50ies	enamel wire insulation from about mid 1964 on, flush polepieces from 1974 on
Pickguard	three layers (white/black/white) pickguard of celluloid, fixed with 11 screws, screw #3 between middle and neck pick-up	one layer plastic pickguard (or bakelite before 1957) until 1959, fixed with 8 screws (a few models with three layers and 8 screws in 1959)	screw #3 moved to middle pick-up in 1963, three layers plastic pickguard from 1965 on
Bridge	6 individual bridge saddles made of bent steel, separate steel tremolo block,	same	no separated tremolo block from 19xx on, diecasted bridge saddles,
Laquer	thin nitro laquer, standard was three tone sunburst (yellow/red/black), many custom colours available	thin nitro laquer, standard was two tone sunburst (yellow/black) until 1958, only a few (and rare) custom colours available	glossy polyesther finish from 1968 on
Tuners	made by Kluson, stamped with one line with “Kluson deluxe”	same	stamped with two lines with “Kluson deluxe” from 1964 on, made by Schaller from 1968 on
Pick-up switch	3-way	3-way	5-way from 1977 on
Body contours	deeply contoured - individual differences due to hand work	deeply contoured - individual differences due to hand work	becoming less contoured from the mid 60ies on
Stratocaster decal	gold “spaghetti logo” with two patent numbers	gold “spaghetti logo”, no patent numbers until 1960,	In late 1964 Fender changed to the fatter gold transitional logo,black logo from 1968 on three patent number 1963-1964, later 4 numbers
Peghead size	small	small	big head from 1966 on
String holders	one butterfly string holder	one round holder until 1956	two string holders from 1974 on
Number plate / neck fixation	4 screw number plate with stamped serial number	same (1954 models sometimes with serial number on tremolo plate)	stamped with big F from 1966on, three hole number plate from 1972 on
Serial numbers	5 digits, ca. 50 – 80,000 range	lower numbers	higher, starting with the letter L from 1964 on, 6 digits from 1965 on

Detail pictures

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Everyone who has seen Mark Knopfler live on one of his recent tours might have notived that cool-looking turquoise combo amp next to Knopfler’s Marshall cabinets. Knopfler’s second guitarist Richard Bennet also plays one. It is the Tone King Imperial.

Tone King amps are built from selected quality parts by Mark Bartel in Baltimore. Mark does all the woodworking, upholstery, and electronics assembly himself to have total control about the sound and quality of his products.

The Imperial is a two-channel combo with reverb and tremolo. The output power is about 20 watts, coming from two 6V6 tubes. The two channel make use of 12AX7 pre-amp tube, and one 12AT7 driving the reverb, just like Fender amps from the sixties or seventies. In fact it reminds me a lot of a black-face Fender Deluxe amp, which also has a similar layout and one 12″ speaker. In fact you can read on the Tone King website that the rhythm channel aims for that Fender black-face sound. A volume, treble and bass control is all that is required here. Of course the spring reverb – a fundamental ingredient of the Fender sound – works for both channels (note that on Fender amps it only affects the second channel). It will not surprise you that the reverb circuit uses the same two-spring reverb tank  (acutronics) and the same tubes like Fender.

The second channel also features just three controls: volume, tone and mid-bite – so no bass and treble control here, just on a small Fender tweed amp from the 50ies. The mid-bite adds a midrange peak and tightens the low end, controling the overdrive tone character that can be blended from Fender tweed to Marshall style.

The speaker is custom designed and labelled with ‘Tone King 33′ – manufactured by Eminence (who also built the speakers in most silver-face Fender amps in the 70ies and 80ies).

The recommended retail price for the Tone King Imperial is 1995 USD. More infos on toneking.com.

On the last (2008) tour Mark Knopfler played his red Schecter Telecaster on the song Cannibals through the Tone King Imperial, his ‘54 Stratocaster  on the song Our Shangri-La, and his signature MK Strat on Postcards from Paraguay and  True love will never fade. I guess it is the ‘king of clean’ for him and that he hardly ever uses the second channel. Another song to feature this fine amp is Hard Shoulder from Get Lucky (played on a Gretch 6120).

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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 never know for sure. However, I recently read some articles or interviews with Rhett Davies – the sound engineer on the first Dire Straits album. He told a few interesting things about recording the Avalon album with Roxy Music in the early 80ies – so from ‘almost’ the same time as the Straits’ debut album (1978). I think some of these things were general preferences and might be true for the Dire Straits album as well.

Here are a few excerpts (from Sound on Sound):

One feature of Rhett Davies’ production style that surprised Bob Clearmountain when they first worked together was his willingness to print effects to tape with instrument recordings. “Generally speaking, and this applies to Avalon, if we were working on a particular sound and that sound had a delay or a reverb, I would print that with the signal. I love delays. We used the Roland Chorus Echos a lot, and I still do today, I love them.

My guess is – if it was not a Roland Jazz Chorus, as some rumour says at least for Sultans of Swing – then  it maybe was the Roland Space Echo 301 which was mentioned by Rhett Davies in an article on a Bryan Ferry solo album in 2007, while the famous Roland Dimension D was as it seems introduced later,  around 1979. Knopfler also had a 301 in his guitar rack on the Making Movies tour in 1980/81.

continued:
Quarter-note triplet delays are my favourites. [Check out my article about quarter note triplets if you are not familiar with the idea behind them] Anything that creates cross-rhythms is what I was always looking for, so if we were working with a rhythm box, I’d always be experimenting with delays, just to create something more than the plain thing that was there. Obviously it depends on the instrument, but if you’re talking about basic backing-track instruments then you’re trying to create something.

My concept was always that anybody could put the track up and push the faders up and it would sound as it’s supposed to sound. When we mixed Flesh & Blood, Bob couldn’t believe it, because nobody printed delays with the signal. If it was something like the lead vocal, I’d print that to a separate track, but we were still working on 24 tracks, and if it was a guitar and that was part of the sound it got printed. Roxy enjoyed working that way, because there’s nothing worse than thinking ‘It doesn’t sound as good as it did last week, what’s different? I’m sure that’s the same setting.’ This way, it’s always there, and it makes a faster way of working. I could put a track up in a minute and it was ready to do an overdub, so if we had musicians coming in that we wanted to try on two or three songs, it was really fast just to change the tape, and the song was ready to go. I also always used to try to keep an instrumental rough mix on tape as a working mix, so you could just whack up two faders and it was there.

So, maybe the chorus was the 301. The Space Echo 301 was – as the name suggest – mainly an echo – a tape delay to be more concrete, but it also has a chorus effect. I remember that Mark was once asked about the delay in the intro of Down to the Waterline, and his answer was:

“I have no idea what that was. Rhett Davies was the engineer on that record, and he’s in love with Roland Chorus Ensembles, so it might well have been that. I actually use a Roland onstage. ” (from this interview with Guitar Player magazine)

I think if Davies tend to record effects with the instrument onto the track, the rumour of the Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer as the compressor on this album becomes a bit more likely. Too bad we will maybe never know for sure. I did a Google search for Rhett Davies but to no avail: he does not have a personal homepage or something else which allows us to contact him, at least I have not found anything so far.

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I just got this picture via email (thank you Wolfgang of the Dire Strats tribute band) which shows the settings on the Fender Hot Rod Deluxe amp that Mark Knopfler used for a promo gig in Germany, 2004. He played live the song Boom like that on a German TV show.

Volume 5 ; Drive 2.5 ; Treble 9, Bass 4 ; Middle 7.5 ; Master 4 ; Reverb 0 ; Presence 9 (note that all knobs go up to 12)

Unfortunately it is hard to see the position of those three push buttons (bright, more gain, channel select) .

The Hot Rod Deluxe is a 40 watts tube amp (3 x 12AX7, 2x 6L6) with reverb and one 12″ Eminence speaker. I presume that the amps for those promo gigs were borrowed for that evening.

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