Romeo and Juliet is a song I have been playing on my National for many years, but I never tried to play the wonderful ending of recent live versions where the piano leads through a rather unusual chord sequence. Yesterday I played around with the piano a bit and had a look at this.

After the last verse Romeo and Juliet features a two-chord sequence over which Knopfler plays solo: Bb (or Bbmaj7) and C.

When the drum stops, this sequnce (Bb – C ) is repeated two more times. Next comes a sequence of five chords, the piano is the dominating instrument here:

Bb – Am – G – F (9) – E

Note that Romeo and Juliet is in the key of F, so you would expect a sequence that leads to an F chord. This one however completely ignores the key – the G and especially that last E do not belong here in any way. Thus it functions as a surprising change in the mood of the sound, highlighting the carefully constructed composition. Wonderful.

To hear what I am talking about, check the following youtube video, starting from 8:55 :

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In this article I will cover a little chord progression that Mark Knopfler apparently discovered some day and – as he sees himself mainly as a songwriter – directly translated into a song. He often learned such little patterns and licks by accident – finding something when playing for hours – or learned them from one of his mates, people like the great Chet Atkins, pedal-steel player Paul Franklin, or Richard Bennet.

Here is a little audio clip where Knopfler plays the particular riff I am going to talk about. Here he plays it in the key of G, one full note lower than in the Vic and Ray example below.

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This pattern appears in the song Vic and Ray from Knopfler’s first solo album Golden Heart (1996). It starts with an A7 chord fragment, followed by a G chord with the B in the bass, and finally another A chord, with the C# in ths bass.

First as a tab:

Here as pictures, showing each of the three shapes you have to play in red:

Note that from shape one to two, one note (the g on the d-string) remains the same and can be sustained, and that the third shape is the same as the second, just two frets higher which means you simply need to slide two frets higher. Check out my video below for left hand fingering (I found there are two ways that work for me).

Adding a chromatic transition chord for Money for Nothing lick

It was only recently when I realized that the funny chromatic licks that Knopfler played at the beginning of Money for nothing in Nimes on the On Every Street tour (1992) make use of the same pattern, you only have to add another shape – the chord between shape two and three in the pictured above:

Then move it to the key of G (two frets lower), followed by the same pattern in C, next in D, and you have those chords for Money for nothing (see my video, at 5:10 it also contains a link that takes you directly to a clip showing Knopfler playing that thing in Money for Nothing).

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Summer is here and with it my summer holidays, so the ideal opportunity for some more song tutorials here in my Mark Knopfler guitar blog. This time I will explain the song Down to the Waterline – the first song on the first Dire Straits CD (1978).

Down to the waterline is surely another highlight of early Dire Straits. It is one of the oldest Mark Knopfler songs, one of 5 songs included on the demo tape Dire Straits recorded in summer 1977. It is the opener of the first album and was planned (however never released) as a second single, following the band’s first single success Sultans of Swing.

It is in the key of Bm and features many guitar licks and stuff that is typical for this key but also a lot of surprises like some unusual chord changes in the middle solo or some chromatic notes.

I am explaining the whole song in a youtube video or – to be precise – in two parts since youtube allows only clips up to 10 minutes. I am showing the song as I would play it – which is a mixture of the studio or some live versions. As always, it is not about the most accurate transcription of a particular version, but about the idea behind those licks, chords and solos.

Video Part 1 (Intro, verses, chords, first solos)

Video Part 2 (middle and last solo)

Knopfler probably played his Fender Strat S.-No. 80470 on the CD version of this track, possibly over a Fender Twin and/or his brown Fender Vibrolux amp. Besides some reverb and slight distortion from the amp, the guitar sound is compressed, possibly by the Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer. However, noone knows for sure about the gear actually used on the first two CDs, and there is a lot of rumour around.

Some notes on the gear I used for this video

self-built clone of the Mark Knopfler Fender Strat S.-No. 80470 (mainly of Fender parts) , into Morley Volume pedal, into MXR analog delay, into Music Man HD 212 amp

recorded by the mic of a digi cam.

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Today I want to feature a little software that was available as a free dowwnload on the official Mark Knopfler site some years ago. It is a flash mixer with individual tracks of the song Sailing to Philadelphia, in other words, a software mixer that does not only allow to listen to the individual instruments but also to adjust the volume of these. For this reason it was described as “Anatomy of a track”.

You only need to download one file (mixer.exe) and simply start it on your computer (it requires flash), the individual sound files for each track are already included. Unfortunately the sound quality is not very good due to a heavy compression, and it is only the first two minutes of the song. You will see individual mixer channels for drums, lead guitar, vocals (both Mark Knopfler and James Taylor on the same track), acoustic guitar, bass, and another track for both keyboards plus pedal steel guitar.

It is fun to mix the tracks as you want, and it is very interesting to hear the tracks alone. As effects are already included for each track, you can hear details like the reverb or delays on the lead guitar. And of course it is great to figure out what Knopfler actually plays. Unfortunately the tool does not allow fast forward / backward, so you always have to start from the beginning again.

A real gem is the acoustic guitar, a fingerpicking played by Knopfler that was later overdubbed. Note how his unique way of playing adds so much rhythm and groove to the song, something that unfortunately was never recaptured on live performances of this song. I also tried to play a similar picking on the video I made for another article of this blog, so you might want top check out this one again to see the fingering.

The lead guitar was the white ’64 Stratocaster that Knopfler played also on stage during the Sailing to Philadelphia tour. You can clearly hear reverb, compression and delay on this track, also note the deep bass, and the percussice attack.

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Have a look at the following chords, these are all chords for the song True Love Will never Fade, the opener of  Mark Knopfler’s latest album Kill to get crimson. Each chord is played for one bar:

C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C C F F C C Dm G C C F F C C Dm G F G  C C F F C C Dm G C C F F C C Dm G C Dm G C Am F G F G C F Dm G C C F F C C Dm G C C F F C C Dm G C C F F C C Dm G C Dm G C Am F G F G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C C F F C C Dm G C C F F C C Dm G F G  C C F F C C Dm G C C F F C C Dm G C Dm G C Am F G F G C F Dm G C C F F C C Dm G C C F F C C Dm  C C F F C C Dm G C Dm G C Am F G F G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G C F Dm G

Theoretically it is no problem to play the song from this list of chords, you simply have to follow the list and try not to get lost

One way to avoid getting lost is  writing the chords next to the corresponding words of the lyrics, something that is common among  singers who accompany themselves. You surely have seen this approach, it might look like this:

Finding structure

The solution above is common but not ideal because it does not reflect any structure.

You might ask yourself  how you can play such a song without a paper, like professional musicians do on stage? How can you learn a list of 126 chords by heart?

The answer is easy: you need to be aware of its structure, of the patterns and logic it is built up with. Without structure, understanding is not possible. Without understanding, learning and remembering is extremely difficult. It is similar to understanding a huge mixing desk: you might wonder how someone knows what to do with so many knobs and controls, there are actually hundreds of them. But when you have a closer look, you will see that there are several channel strips that all have an identical set of controls. And the controls of each channel strip are structered again in e.g. the EQ section, the aux controls for effect sends, the monitor section, and so on. As soon as you understand it, the number of controls is no problem anymore, and you can find the right knob for each job within short time.

Let’s apply the same logic to this song now. First we arrange the chords in groups, or sections. The first group is the intro of the song, and it consists of the first 8 bars. In fact you will find that certain numbers – e.g. 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 32, … – play an important role in music. These are very often  powers of two.  Indeed music and mathematics are more related than you might think. If you look at these 8 chords, you will see that there is a group of 4 bars (C F Dm G) that is repeated ( 2 x 4 = 8, be aware of the powers of two).

Intro

C F Dm G C F Dm G

Let’s go on and try to identify such groups. After the intro, someting like a chorus begins (“True love will never fade…”). First it is important to understand that the structure of the lyrics has normally to do with the structure of the music, but both are not the same in all details. From the lyrics you might think that the chorus starts when Knopfler sings the first word “True…”, from a musical point of view however, it actually starts with the last word of the line “…fade”). The other words are what is called an upbeat figure, or simply upbeat. They lead over into the next part. A similar upbeat can be found at the beginning of the next part, which starts  with the last word of  “I wonder if there’s no forever…”  at 0:37. Until then, we  have a total of  the following 10 chords:

Chorus

C F Dm G C F Dm G C C

A closer look reveals that we have the same group of 4 chords as in the intro (C F Dm G) which is repated, plus two bars of a C chord that are something like a filler to connect the part with the next. The 10 bars can be subdivides in 4 + 4 + 2, and  we might write it like this instead:

C F Dm G – C F Dm G -  C C

The third part – we might call it verse – starts with “…forever” (0:37). As the following part that starts with “I don’t know what brought you to me” sounds almost identical (melody, chords), we can consider it as a repetition of the part before and call it Verse B , while the previous verse A consists of the following 18 chords.

Verse A

F F C C Dm G C C F F C C Dm G F G  C C

You can see that the first 8 bars start with the same chords as from bar 9 on, and the last two bars are just a filler to link to the next part, so let’s write it like this:

F F C C Dm G C C  – - F F C C Dm G F G  – - C C.

And we can subdivide those groups of 8 bars to groups of 4 bars:

F F C C –  Dm G C C  – - F F C C  – - Dm G F G – - C C.

We see that the first and the third group are identical, while the second and the fourth are similar but not the same. The difference are the chords F G (red) at the end of the third group, they are inserted, they change the pattern. If you left them and played the two bars of C instead, you would have a simple repetition which is on the one hand more logical, but on the other hand it sounds a bit surprising this way, and thus adds something new to the song.

The whole section seems to be repeated with the following verse B (1:14 to 1.44) that can be subdivided in a way similar to verse A:

Verse B

F F C C –  Dm G C C  – - F F C C  – - Dm G C

If you compare it to verse A, you will see that both differ just where those chords previously discussed appear (red). Instead of the F G C C we have only one single bar C here. The total number of chords is for this reason only 15 which is very unusual (16 or 16 + 2 would be normal). We can say that one bar of C is missing, Dm G C C would be normal here (and would in fact sound logical). Leaving out this chord breaks the pattern and again adds something unexpected, it highlights the following part by breaking the rules.

This next part might be called bridge. It consists of 8 bars, and it is followed by 4 bars of the chorus pattern, and finally two bars C to fill to the next part, so we have:

Dm G C Am – F G F G (bridge)

C F Dm G (chorus)

C C  (fill)

All of the following sections are repetitions of these first parts. In detail, we have the

Solo (first 8 bars of verse A)

Verse B (15 bars)

Bridge (8 bars)

Chorus (4 bars)

3 x Chorus (12 bars)

2 x Chorus (solo, where ride cymbal starts)

C F G

The last chords again break with the pattern. The expected would be  something like C F Dm G C, with the last C as the final chord (the song is in the key of C so it should end on a C). The way it is here, however,  sounds again unexpected and thus adds something.

The following chart shows the complete structure of the whole song. I also used different colours to indicate different and related parts. Compared with the unstructered list of 126 chords at the beginning of this article, you can see at one glance which part comes next, where something is repeated, and where something happens that breaks a standard pattern (red chords) . The number of different parts that you need to learn is kept to a minimum.

Some general notes on structure

At all those positions where a new part begins, a traditional note sheet would display a double bar line. Normally a drummer plays a crash cymbal there, and he might play a drum break before to usher in the start of a new part (on this song the drummer does not because the drum track is kept extremely simple). The beginning of a new part is also a  typical position where new instruments might come in (e.g. note how the electric guitar comes in at the beginning of the first verse B), and the overall volume of the song might change here (note that commercial CD are often mixed at a  rather constant volume as a consequence of the loudness war).

Working with a band

I made the experience that when you work on a song with a band, it is extremely helpful to work with musicians who understand such a concept, and who think in terms of such a structure. Only this way everyone will know e.g. where to start best within the song to practice a particular part of the song, or how to play a difficult piece in a loop to get used to it or to bring it to perfection within shortest time. Everyone will know where to pay attention because something is unusual.

The drummer automatically knows where to play the crash, where to play a break, where to change from hihat to ride, and so on. And only this way you can easily communicate with the other band members: everyone will know what is talked about, what is meant with bridge, first part, second half of … , and so on.

This is common knowledge among good musicians of course, but I know of many who still have not realized these aspects, sometimes even after playing their instruments for decades. But it is never too late for learning

Note: An analysis of the chords that appear in this song and their harmonic relation can be found in the article about the circle of fifths.

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

Related articles

• The Circle of Fifths: What is it for? – plus: example analysis of Knopfler songs
• Eastbound Train: opening chord analysis
• The bridge section between Expresso Love and Down to the Waterline on the Making Movies tour
• Chord changes in News on live version of the Making Movies tour
• Mark Knopfler – You can’t beat the house – Variations of the standard blues scheme
• Chord changes for ending of Romeo And Juliet

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