I have been a a huge fan of Mark Knopfler since the time when Sultans of Swing came out in the late 70ies . I was thirteen and especially the guitar style left a great impression on me, and made me start to play the guitar.
As Mark Knopfler’s guitar always sounded way better than my attempts, I began to study every single piece of information I could get hold of. This way, over the years I got a lot of knowledge about

* equipment
* playing techniques
* electronics and modifications
* music theory
* recording techniques (I even wrote one of Germany’s most popular books on this, also I wrote a column called Recording at home in Germany’s Keyboards magazine for some years)
* vintage guitars and amps

In 1996 I created a website called the Dire Straits Guitar Page with lots of information on Mark Knopfler’s guitars, amps, and effects. It was referred to from uncountable websites, and many other sites copied information from there (sometime 1:1 incl. pictures and even layout).

In later years I often was rather busy, so upates became scarce. Besides, I didn’t like the idea of giving insider information for free  and some people steal it for their own pages, without giving credits at least. So I thought about doing it more professionally (I was self-employed, so time meant money) and I was thinking about selling ebooks or tutorial files.

However, I had the feeling that making money with knowledge is rather difficult: besides copyright issues there is the problem that as soon you sold something to the first customers you cannot prevent that they spread this knowledge in forums or on their own sites. Also I like the Wikipedia idea of making knowledge free for everyone and got into some inner conflicts.

So I decided to publish information for free again. A blog seems to be a good solution because I don’t have to create huge sections of a website before publishing them (you know, many ideas but never finding time to do it properly). Instead I can start wherever I want with single articles, being as long as I find time to write that particular moment, and let it all grow slowly. With the categories function readers can later still find information without chaos.

Giving quality information for free means no direct money from doing so, but like many other blogs or pages I included Google advertising because it is context sensitive which means the adverts blended in match the content of the article automatically. So you don’t get useless adverts but adverts that might be interesting for the readers.

I really enjoy writing about what I am fascinated in myself, and it would be a dream to have more time for it. Unfortunately the formula is still “no money from it = time required to earn your living somewhere else”. But let’s see what the future will bring.

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