This week-end I found time again to record another cover version - Brothers in Arms. After Six Blade Knife and Wild West End, this is the third video I put some additional effort into, which means I did not record the  audio with the microphone of the camcorder but with the gear in our homerecording studio. Nevertheless it should be considered rather as “live video” and not as studio recording because I played the  guitar plus the vocals in one complete live take – without any overdubs and without correcting little mistakes to leave it in a more authentic state.

This time I recorded four takes all in all and then decided which one to take. The backing tracks were done some time ago – regular readers might remember the blog article about recording the acoustic guitar (my Gibson MK-81) and another one where I jammed to it and played a few solos.

Recording gear

I recorded all audio with Cubase and a Creamware Scope system (now by Sonic Core) with which I also mixed the final tracks. The Hammond B3 emulation is also from the Scope system, and so is the reverb and all other effects (except a bit spring reverb from the guitar amp, and a sleight delay from the MXR analog delay). The drums are from Native Instrument’s Battery, a VST plug-in in Cubase.

Maybe you are wondering how I synced the Cubase audio to the digital video file: in fact I did not sync them at all. Instead I recorded the audio in Cubase,  and filmed myself while playing the guitar plus vocals. I later imported the video file and the mixed audio track into a friend’s Adobe Premiere. Here I visually aligned both tracks so that the waveform of the master audio track and the audio of the video file start simultaneously – at high zoom this is pretty easy to achieve. I found that for some reason both tracks do hardly drift apart over a time of just a few minutes. Then I simply muted the audio of the video file so that you hear the master audio only – that’s it. The same I did with the second video file.

Gear used here – signal chain

Gibson Les Paul Custom ’74 (10s strings)
Morley Volume pedal
MXR Analog Delay
Music Man HD 130 212
Shure SM 57

Some notes on how to play it and how to get the sound – dynamics are the key

I guess there are a zillion tabs around that tell you which notes to play (I myself never play or learn anything from using tabs, by the way), so I am not going to talk about this stuff here again. Besides I improvise a lot here: I found that as long as you stay in the G#m scale you can play more or less what you feel to and it sounds alright, the rest are all those licks I remember hearing in one of the many version Mark Knopfler did of this song. Each time I play it, I play it totally different, I never stick to a particular version.

What however seems important to me is the use of dynamics. What I mean is to remember that good music consists of loud notes which are contrasted with low, subtle notes. Many players I see on youtube seem to play everything rather loud. The problem is that when you start a song like Brothers in Arms and hit all those first notes at – let’s say – 80% percent of maximum strength, you cannot go really higher to highlight other notes. If you however start at rather 20% – which I am doing here – you have more to add later. Besides, the sound will be completely different. Be aware that Youtube also compresses the dynamics, so in the room I played with even more contrast between loud and quiet notes than you are hearing here. Similarly, something like the original Sultans of Swing is played with a huge dynamics range (which is later reduced technically for some other reasons) and this causes a huge sound difference compared with playing with a small dynmaics range. I guess I might come back to this topic with a dedicated future blog article.

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

Related articles

• Dire Straits – Wild West End – Cover by Ingo Raven
• Cover version of Dire Straits Six Blade Knife
• Dire Straits at the Hope & Anchor pub 1977 – new picture
• Sultans of Swing – backing track for long live version available
• Dire Straits Water of Love guitar tutorial
• Video Clip of Dire Straits – Lady Writer – Pinkpop Festival 1979

Wild West End from Dire Straits’ first album has always been one of my all-time favourite songs, so it is no wonder that it is one of the songs I recently started to practice a bit. Of course you will never come to a point where you think that you really can play it (at least not the way you feel it should be played like), but a few days ago I nevertheless recorded and filmed me playing this  song,  to capture its current state so to say (see video below).

I played the lead guitar together with the vocals live in one take, over a self-produced backing track (before many will ask again: at the moment I do not sell any backing tracks but I am working on a solution to offer them soon).

Here is a “little secret” about the way I filmed the video (before some Sherlock Holmes might notice it anyway): As I have only one camcorder, I cannot film different views simultaneously. For this reason I mimic’ed the lead guitar in a second take for the close-up scenes (I thought some of you might like to see some details what the fingers are doing). Same for the rhythm guitar which I did not film when recording it for the backing track (it was in fact the same guitar shown here, a beautiful blonde Fender Telecaster).

The  gear I used

The lead guitar is  a US Fender Vintage Stratocaster ’62 which lost its finish some years ago – played into a Music Man 212 HD 130, mic’ed with a Shure SM 57.  Effects are a Morley volume pedal and the green MXR analog delay. I added some EQ’ing, a limiter (!) and some reverb in the mix (the reverb of the Music Man was also on). That long stereo echo at the end of the intro was also from the desk (the “desk” and the effects are all software in my case).

The rhythm guitar was tuned to Open A and capo’ed at the 5th fret (thus open D). I played it directly into the desk and added a bit of EQ and reverb. As said, it is a wonderful Telecaster, played with both pick-ups on, all controls up.

But now, here is the video, I hope you will enjoy it.

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

Related articles

• Dire Straits – Brothers in Arms – Cover by Ingo Raven
• Version without backing tracks of my Wild West End video
• Cover version of Dire Straits Six Blade Knife
• Dire Straits at the Hope & Anchor pub 1977 – new picture
• Sultans of Swing – backing track for long live version available
• Dire Straits Water of Love guitar tutorial

I got a new camera for Christmas, so I immediately tried it out and filmed a few clips. Here are two acoustic guitar covers of Boom like that and Song for Sonny Liston. In both cases I did not play the complete song but a 2 minutes and something version (especially Sonny Liston has so many verses that I felt it to be a bit boring when playing it alone).

The guitar is a weird Gibson from 1976, a MK-81. The MK series was Gibson’s attempt to combine the latest physical research results with traditional guitar building. Basically the MK series was a flop and was soon dropped again, but I love this guitar. It sounds nice in all situations.

Boom like that

Boom like that is standard tuning with a capo at the 3rd fret. I don’t play the riff exactly as Knopfler plays it (e.g. he plays  a slightly different bass with the thumb). I simply started to play it this way for no particular reason. I also added a ‘c’ note to the second chord (Bb, so I get a Bb9). I heard Knopfler doing this and totally loved it, although he normally does not play it this way I think.

Song for Sonny Liston

Also standard tuning, this time with a capo at the 4th fret.

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

Related articles

• Dire Straits – Brothers in Arms – Cover by Ingo Raven
• Dire Straits – Wild West End – Cover by Ingo Raven
• Guitar portrait: 1976 Gibson MK-81 acoustic guitar (Mark series)
• Mark Knopfler’s amp settings on Fender Hot Rod Deluxe (Boom like that promo, Germany 2004)
• Cover version of Dire Straits Six Blade Knife

During the last weeks I played around a bit with the backing tracks from the Jam with Dire Straits book by Total Accuracy. Some of these are great and sound very good. Unfortunately, the  one for Sultans of Swing seems  almost unusuable to me because of the harsh rhythm guitar sound. Since I still had a Cubase file with the MIDI drum part of Sultans – something I did with a cover band I played with in the mid 90ies – I decided to revive it. It was  programmed for the Alesis SR 16 drum computer we had in those days, but now I used it with Battery, a VST instrument by Native Instruments.

The backing tracks

Battery allows you to load many different drum kits, and to replace drum sounds with your own samples. As I love the sound of the first Dire Straits album, I sampled the snare and a bass drum from this CD for that authentic drum sound. Since this was a lot of fun, I also made a backing track for Six Blade Knife. The drum part is very simple so this was not too much work. What I did to make it sound less sterile was to analyze the micro groove pattern of Six Blade Knife and tranfer it to the MIDI drum part (the Cubase experts will know what I am talking about).

Next I added the bass track and a rhythm guitar. The bass was an old Precision bass, while I used my blonde  ’70 Telecaster for rhythm. I admit I was lazy, so I played the guitar directly into the desk.

Both tracks are nice to jam with, especially since our little homerecording studio has a small PA now, no need for headphones all the time anymore. We even have a few LED lights now. The days of the old -fashioned halogen spots seems to be almost over. The new LED spots need only a fraction of the electric power, and you can mix every colour with the RGB LEDs of one single spot. I programmed some lighting scenes and triggered these from the Cubase arrangement. I used two digi cams for filming myself  jamming with the Six Blade Knife track.

Guitar sound

It is basically a live recording, vocals and guitar played live and recorded with Cubase, no post editing. Except a bit EQ there is no post processing on the guitar, no compression, no effects. The reverb was from the Music Man amp, and delay was my green MXR analog delay. The signal chain is pretty much what Knopfler played during the Communique tour.

I used the Shure SM 57 for guitar, and for the vocals. It is basically a mic for guitar or snare drum, but for some odd reason I always liked it better for vocals then the Shure SM 58.

I play different licks here and there whenever I play one of these songs, most licks origin from some old live recordings, others are my own versions. I don’t think it makes much sense to copy a particular version of the song, but I tried to copy the overall feel.

The video

I never have done a two-camera video before, but this was really easy. I put the sound recording on one audio tracks and imported the video files on two different video tracks. After enabling the wave form display of the sound file and of the audio tracks of both video  tracks, I only had to adjust the video files so that the sound of all of them was in sync, then I switched off the sound of the video tracks. LED lights are not ideal for filming – at least not the affordable ones – so some colours do not look as good  on video as they did here, but all in all this was not a problem.

So, here is the final video. Let me know what you think of it here, or leave a rating or a comment directly at youtube (you get there directly when you click on the video while it is playing).

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

Related articles

• Dire Straits – Brothers in Arms – Cover by Ingo Raven
• Dire Straits – Wild West End – Cover by Ingo Raven
• Two interesting live clips of Dire Straits Six Blade Knife
• Dire Straits at the Hope & Anchor pub 1977 – new picture
• Sultans of Swing – backing track for long live version available
• Dire Straits Water of Love guitar tutorial