Here you will find an alternate take of the Sultans of Swing first  solo from the recording session for the first album at Basing Street Studios in February 1978. Unfortunately the quality is more than poor, you might guess where it is coming from…

It is not so much different, but it is for sure not the take  that was released. This can maybe heard best between 0:15 and 0:22 where the phrasing and some notes are different, similar to some live versions or to the version from Pathway Studios.

And that’s the neck pick-up, I’d think the FS-1, isn’t it?

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.

"Buy me a beer" - donate for the site via PayPal. Or buy a backing track in my online shop :)

Related articles

• Trying to recreate that Sultans of Swing sound – The gear I used on the Puresolo competition.
• Rasgueado and other flamenco techniques in Sultans of Swing
• Rhett Davies and the sound of the first Dire Straits album
• Sensational: Sultans of Swing guitar track solo – without backing tracks – from Guitar Hero 5
• Sultans of Swing: Studio version vocals alone, karaoke track, plus the last seconds – unheard before
• Another key element of the Mark Knopfler guitar style: Quarter note triplets – with example tabs

Like many others,  I recorded an entry for the Puresolo competition (you could play your solo over one of the following backing tracks:  Sulans of Swing, Calling Elvis, or Speedway at Nazareth). I always find it a bit frustrating to take part in such a competition because as it seems nobody knows before who decides basing on what criteria (authenticity, accuracy, originality, creativity, …??) Anyway, as the backing track was really great – the original recording of  Sultans of Swing without the lead guitar -  I simply used the opportunity to try how close I can get to the sound of the original. Note that you had to record the guitar with Puresolo’s software which did not allow you to fix mistakes later, so you had to play the whole song in one part and leave in all mistakes, or try it again with a second attempt.

Instead of a link to the competition entry, you will find a  player module with my version  at the end of  this post, mainly because Puresolo only plays back uploaded stuff in a horrible quality (something like 64 kbs). The guitar sound is surely not 100% as the original but closer to it than any of my previous attempts so I thought you might be interested in some details on the gear and settings.

The gear I used

I first played a few guitars I had here to see which one sounds closest over the backing track. I originally felt to go for one with a maple neck, but finally my ’62 Strat with rosewood fingeroard had something the others had not. This does not mean that Mark also played his rosewood Fender Strat instead of his maple-neck, you can never be sure of these things.

I first played the guitar through a Morley volume pedal which makes the sound generally sweeter (it takes out some harshness) but for this particular recording I felt I need a lot of treble, so I left out the pedal. For the same reason a Fender Pro Reverb made it compared to an old Music Man amp. I dialed in enough treble and put on the bright switch. The sound was much brighter than I normally play here in the room but sounded alright over the backing track.

I tried an exciter effect – an old Pearl Thriller – which made the sound even shine a bit more.The last effects I used was some chorus and a limiter. Here I took a software plug-in from my Creamware Scope system.

I used an old Schoeps CM64 tube microphone which sounded sweeter than the Shure SM 57.

Which Pick-Ups?

The next decision was the pick-up combination to use. Normally you’d say Sultans of Swing was the bridge & middle pick-up. I am still not sure what it was but bridge & middle definitely did not sound right here. The middle pick-up alone was too sharp, so I ended with the neck & middle pick-ups. However, note that this Strat has a Dimarzio FS-1 in the neck position, and this pick-up has a totally different impedance than a stock Fender Strat pick-up. This is why it does not sound as nasal when you play it together with another pick-up.

I had rather thin (08) strings on the guitar, maybe too thin. I also did not more experimenting to get that little bit of distortion that seems to be on the original recording. It sounds like an abrupt clipping, maybe from the desk (?!).

So, here is the result in uncompromised sound quality (MP3 320 kbs) as I can hear it from my hard disk. Unfortunately Puresolo compressed everything down to 64 kbs directly after the upload, what a shame since some of the entries are really great!

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.

Simply click on the blue progress bar to make the player play a different part of the song.

"Buy me a beer" - donate for the site via PayPal. Or buy a backing track in my online shop :)

Related articles

• Speaker shoot-out for the Mark Knopfler sound: Electro Voice EV 12L, Celestion Vintage 30 & G12M “Greenbacks” in 4 x 12 cabinets
• The iSound-ST – New sounds for the Stratocaster – Does it help to get the Mark Knopfler sound?
• Alternate Sultans of Swing solo take from first album session – unheard before – exclusively on mk-guitar.com
• Rasgueado and other flamenco techniques in Sultans of Swing
• Rhett Davies and the sound of the first Dire Straits album
• Sensational: Sultans of Swing guitar track solo – without backing tracks – from Guitar Hero 5

Sultans of Swing from Dire Straits’  first album is surely one of THE songs that comes to mind when talking about fingerstyle guitar playing. In addition to Mark Knopfler’s unique playing style it also features some striking Spanish-sounding elements, starting from the chord  progression itself to some flamenco-like strumming techniques – which is this blog article, or rather the embedded video, is about.

The typical flamenco stroke is called Rasgueado (the Spanish word for strumming) – a particular “roll” of your right hand fingers. I am  really no master of the true flamenco style but I realized many years ago that Knopfler plays  something like this in numerous songs, and practised something that sounds similar – my version of the Rasgueado. I can do it in two different ways: pinky first to index finger, or vice versa. Both sound different but I am not completetly sure which one Knopfler makes use of (possibly both).

The video explains how I play it. I think the idea becomes clear. So, enjoy!

PS: The rasgueado sounds great with distorted power chords, too. Give it a try!

"Buy me a beer" - donate for the site via PayPal. Or buy a backing track in my online shop :)

Related articles

• Alternate Sultans of Swing solo take from first album session – unheard before – exclusively on mk-guitar.com
• Trying to recreate that Sultans of Swing sound – The gear I used on the Puresolo competition.
• Rhett Davies and the sound of the first Dire Straits album
• Sensational: Sultans of Swing guitar track solo – without backing tracks – from Guitar Hero 5
• Sultans of Swing: Studio version vocals alone, karaoke track, plus the last seconds – unheard before
• Another key element of the Mark Knopfler guitar style: Quarter note triplets – with example tabs

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.

"Buy me a beer" - donate for the site via PayPal. Or buy a backing track in my online shop :)

Related articles

• Sultans of Swing solo
• How to get that Sultans of Swing Sound – Mark Knopfler played 08 strings?
• Unusual double-string bend in Sultans of Swing and Once Upon a Time
• Dire Straits Water of Love guitar tutorial
• Video Clip of Dire Straits – Lady Writer – Pinkpop Festival 1979
• Early Dire Straits radio interview from 1978

I reported about the vocals only and karaoke tracks of Sultans of Swing in the last post. If you read all the comments there you will already have heard the latest news: a guitar-only track is also available. They all seem to be from the Guitar Hero 5 game.

It seems the makers of the game had access to the multitrack recording of Sultans. The guitar track does not only include the lead guitar but also the rhathm guitars, switching between both which means you hear the rhythm guitars whenenever the lead guitar is not playing. When it is, you hear only the lead guitar. I guess this was done with a gate using a sidechain input. A gate is a device that can shut down another track while the input signal is above a specified level.

It is really amazing to hear the guitar alone, after knowing the song for over 30 years. There are many details which you simply couldn’t hear in the mix – lot’s of “noises” like scratche and dead notes, some low level tones etc. Also you can clearly hear the chorus effect, probably from the Roland Jazz Chorus, and there seems something like a compressor or rather limiter that even introduces some distortion.

As it seems you cannot buy these tracks but they are part of a game software, and as it is only one instrument and not a full composition – I guess it does not inflict with copyrights when I put in a sound clip here:

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.

"Buy me a beer" - donate for the site via PayPal. Or buy a backing track in my online shop :)

Related articles

• Alternate Sultans of Swing solo take from first album session – unheard before – exclusively on mk-guitar.com
• Money for Nothing on Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock
• Trying to recreate that Sultans of Swing sound – The gear I used on the Puresolo competition.
• Rasgueado and other flamenco techniques in Sultans of Swing
• Rhett Davies and the sound of the first Dire Straits album
• Sultans of Swing: Studio version vocals alone, karaoke track, plus the last seconds – unheard before

Older Posts »