From now on you can buy the Hotcake overdrive pedal in our online shop. This is the overdrive pedal that Mark Knopfler used on his 2005 Shangri-La tour, and probably on other occasions as well. The Hotcake is built by Paul Crowther in New Zealand since 1976. It has a best reputation among players around the world – Stevie Ray Vaughn also played one.

For us Mark Knopfler fans it is obvious that it can only be good – why else should Mark, who can surely afford any pedal in the world,  have chosen the Hotcake? In very short, it IS good because (a) it sounds good and (b) it is a high-quality product, made of best component. It is reliable, has a low noise floor, and is very stable.

What I really like about it is that it does not alter your clean sound, unlike other overdrive units that even with minimum (or no) distortion totally change your tone. With the drive control down, the Hotcake is totally clean, and your sound is identical to what it is without. For this reason it is also ideal to boost your guitar signal to get more drive from a tube amp.

When you turn up the drive control you get any desired amount of distortion, starting with a subtle crunch, over a creamy overdrive (picture 4 shows Knopfler’s setting for the song Boom like that), to a fat and thick distortion. In fact even with a single coil guitar and the drive at maximum you get much more distortion than with typical tube screamers.

The sound is really as you hear e.g. on the 2005 tour, just listen to the crunch of Mark’s Silvertone guitar on Boom like that. I will try to make some sound clips or a demo video soon.
Check it out in the online shop

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Related articles

• Mark Knopfler’s Guitar Rack of the 2008 Tour
• Mark Knopfler’s effect rack of the Making Movies tour in 1980/81
• Gear on one of the first Dire Straits gigs on the Clapham Common bandstand
• Gear on Dire Straits’ first TV appearance at Old Grey Whiste Test
• Gear and settings on my last youtube videos
• Mark Knopfler’s Amp and Effect Settings on the On Every Street tour

With this blog post I will try to compile some info on Mark Knopfler’s effect rack for his latest tours – based mainly on pictures of his 2008 tour. Probably the same rack was also used on his latest 2010 tour.

Here we have a picture of the full rack:

The Devices

Tuner – On top we have a chromatic tuner, as it seems a Korg DTR2000.

Power conditioner – The second device we can see is a Furman power conditioner (not sure about the exact model). A power conditioner stabilizes the AC power supply and removes voltage peaks that can be dangerous for the following devices.

Preamps – Below the tuner there seem to two units with various preamps by D.A.V electronics. These are used to raise the guitar signal to the correct level that is required to feed the various studio effect devices we can see a bit below.

Switching - The next unit seems to feature individual switches for the various effect feeds. The control on the left is a gain control, followed by various push buttons, each witch a green pilot light. I guess here Mark’s guitar technician Glenn Saggers mutes or activates the different aux effects.

Delay - Next comes a TC Electronis 2290 Dynamic Delay -  a state-of-the-art digital delay. Note that Mark has two of these, the other one being the last device (bottom).

Reverb – Next we see two Bricasti M7 reverb units. Bricasti is a relatively new company founded by some ex-Lexicon employees. One of these costs about 3.700 Euros ! Note that these were not used at all because it was prefered to put a reverb on the guitar sound on the mixing desk.

It will hardly be a surprise that the rack features only components of the highest available quality. While the previous racks built by Pete Cornish featured Cornish’s own signal preamps and buffers, now these are by D.A.V. (Dave Electronis) – a company that also supplied Knopfler’s  British Grove recording studios. Possibly the switching unit was also supplied by them (?). We can assume that the overall logic behind the rack – sending effect feeds in parallel just like studio mixing desks do – is still valid for this rack.

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

Related articles

• Mark Knopfler’s effect rack of the Making Movies tour in 1980/81
• The Hotcake overdrive pedal
• Gear on one of the first Dire Straits gigs on the Clapham Common bandstand
• Gear on Dire Straits’ first TV appearance at Old Grey Whiste Test
• Gear and settings on my last youtube videos
• Mark Knopfler’s Amp and Effect Settings on the On Every Street tour

One of the commentators to my previous blog post (on the Rock Pop TV gig Dire Straits did on December 20, 1980) asked for Mark’s effect rack. He triggered this blog post in which I would like to put together all information I have about it.

The Making Movies ( On Location) tour was the first tour on which Mark used a fully loaded 19″ effects rack. Some of the devices were probably  still  used on the Alchemy tour, and some of them even on the Brothers in Arms tour. Later Knopfler had a rack built by Pete Cornish.

The rack was on the right side of the stage, near Knopfler’s two Music Man HD 130 amps. It was visible from the audience but almost all pictures we have from the various gigs of the tour do not let you see anything more than some control lights and some knobs. The main source of information we have is the On Location tour book that does not only contain the closest picture of the rack but also a list of the built-in effects. Unfortunately the list is not too accurate and only mentions a handful of devices, but no concrete model numbers or such.

The list reads like this (see explanation below):

Customised rack comprising:

Deltalab Delay Unit
Flanger
Master R Reverb
Roland Equalizer
Mantec Switch Unit
Roland Choms Echo
Mantec Preamp Main Transformers
Morley Volume Pedal
Mantec Remote Switching Unit

With the help of the picture I managed to identify most of the devices. Here  is what I found out:

Deltalab Delay Unit: Deltalab DL-4 Time Line

The Deltalab is a very early digital delay – this was really high tech stuff in 1980!

 

Master R Reverb: MicMix Master Room Reverb XL-305

The Master Room Reverb was a stereo spring reverb, typically used in studios instead of in guitar racks. Both channels had different decay times to create a very special reverb. In fact MicMix modified the common Accutronis springs to get exactly the result they wanted.

Flanger: MicMix Dynaflanger

MicMix was a US company that was mostly known for studio reverbs and this special flanger device. The Dynaflanger was also used by Frank Zappa who created some astonishing sound effects with the help of two of these flangers. A unique feature was that the delay time could be controlled by the envelope of the incoming signal – in other words a loud note lead to a different flanger setting than a soft tone, the effect reacted musically to what you were playing.

 

Roland Equalizer

I could not determine the exact model number of this graphical equalizer. It seems to be a mono device with  31 bands with a height of two rack units – like the common EQ-131 but this one was only one unit. It was possibly used for the National resonator guitar.

Roland Choms Echo: Roland SRE 555 Space Echo

This one is another representative of Roland’s Space Echo series, basically an RE-501 as 19″ rack version. Like all the other space echos, it makes use of a tape loop to record and playback signals, something that modern devices do digitally. A tape loop was the only way to create long delay times since analog delays became duller with rising delay time, and digital devices costs a fortune and mostly did not have enough memory for long delays.

The SRE 555 also features a chorus effect which sounded great in combination with the delay.

 

The Morley volume pedal is the same model he used before, we don’t know at which point it was inserted into the system.

 

The rack itself was said to be from “Mantec”. Unfortunately I did not find anything about such a company. Nevertheless, it seems to be evident that the first stage of the rack was a pre amp that boosted the signal to line level which was required to drive the following studio effect devices. Probably the effects were not in a direct one-after-the-other chain but were used inparallel – just like you do with studio effects connected to a mixing desk.

Knopfler controlled everything with a foot controller that featured big coloured foot switches so that everything was easy to operate – especially on a dark stage.

It seems the rack had 8 effect ways – at least there are 8 control lights. Interestingly these can easily be seen from the audience, even on the dark stage.  Checking videos from this era, it might be possible to tell which effects were switched on or off on different songs, compare the two yellow lights on the pictures below. If  someone finds the time to do so, you can use the comment form for this blog post to let us know.

 

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Related articles

• Mark Knopfler’s Guitar Rack of the 2008 Tour
• The Hotcake overdrive pedal
• Gear on one of the first Dire Straits gigs on the Clapham Common bandstand
• Gear on Dire Straits’ first TV appearance at Old Grey Whiste Test
• Gear and settings on my last youtube videos
• Mark Knopfler’s Amp and Effect Settings on the On Every Street tour

As promised in the comments on one of the last articles, I tried to find all pictures of one of Dire Straits’ first gigs – the one at the summer party for Charlie Gilett’s Honky Tonk Radio Show, on the Clapham Common bandstand, September 10, 1977. Unfortunately there are only 4 pictures it seems, not 5 or 6 as I hoped (the one on the sleeve of the Honky Tonk Demos compilation turned out  to be the same as the one in Michael Oldfield’s book about Dire Straits).

First the two pictures from the Vibrolux article again:

Knopfler is tuning his # 68354 Strat here (the ’61 with rosewood fingerboard), plugged into the brown Vibrolux. You cannot really see what the amp next to it is, but my guess is a blackface Fender Concert Amp, the same you can see in this article of this blog. I suspect it was borrowed from Mark’s Notting Hillbilly friend Brendan Croker. On the right side you can see the neck of another guitar: Mark’s ’59 Gibson Les Paul Special. The bass amp seems to be a …, well, a weird amp .

Picture number two:

John Illsley already has his Precision bass, and David seems to play the black Telecaster Thinline that Mark plays on Water of Love in later concerts. Both the picture above and this let us assume that David plays the Tele through the Concert amp, but theoretically it is possible that Mark plays through both of these amps (just like in the Roundhouse, January 29, 1978), and that David plays through an amp outside the picture, e.g. on the left side of these amps. There is absolutely no evidence for it, just a vague feeling …

The following picture is the one from the Michael Oldfield book. Meanwhile it  turned out that it is cropped  in the English version of the book,  while the French version includes a full-size version of the same pic (Thank you for sending me the pic, Jean-Francois) . The difference is just some mere 15 %  at the right side, but these 15 % just show an essential detail: the backside of the Strat.

… and a zoom:

Unfortunately you cannot really find any new information about the early Dire Straits Strat here, the resolution of this black/white picture pretends us from seeing any interesting details. I am almost sure that this is the same Strat as in the pictures above (the # 68354, which probably still was bare wood finish here), and that Mark plays the Les Paul Special. A lot of cables on the floor, why not some effect device never seen before which would finally tell us why Mark’s guitar sounded so beefy, warm and fat on some of these old recordings? Well, dream on…

… and here the fourth picture:

… and a zoom into it:

I can imagine that it is taken just some seconds before or after the one before, so I think he plays that Gibson on both pictures. Note that pedal: a colorsound. This can be a volume pedal, but more likely it is a wah or rather wah/volume (most of the colorsounds you find are this combination). They came in different colors, like yellow, blue, silver, purple, etc. It is a bit noisy but sounds really fine otherwise, it has its own character, like most good wahs have. I even  remember reading somewhere that Mark used a wah on this or the very first gig they did on a lawn before their house in Deptford, London.

Some other bands that played on this summer party gig were the Darts and Rico. In the evening of the same day Dire Straits played in the Hope & Anchor pub in Islington.

The photographer of all these pics is Andra Nelki.

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Related articles

• Dire Straits 1979 concert photos from Liverpool and Birmingham by Alan Perry
• Gear on Dire Straits’ first TV appearance at Old Grey Whiste Test
• The Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer compressor – Did Mark Knopfler really use it?
• What is this? – Unidentified guitar effect on early Dire Straits stage
• Mark Knopfler’s Morley Volume Pedal
• Dire Straits at the Hope & Anchor pub 1977 – new picture

I recently watched the video clips of Dire Straits performing Sultans of Swing and Lions live on the British Old Grey Whistle Test again.  It is one of the earliest videos that exist, recorded in Manchester on May 15, 1978, about three months after the first CD.

Sultans of Swing

Lions

Let’s have a look at the gear we can see in this clip. Knopfler plays his red maple neck Fender (# 80470) with the greenish pickguard that originally belongs  on his other red Strat (click here for more info). The black volume knob is missing, just like on all pictures from early ’78. He had the brown guitar strap on all pictures before late October 1979, an easy way to tell the year an old Dire Straits picture is from. The intro and the middle solo of Lions are played with the middle pick-up it seems, the verses and Sultans of Swing with bridge & middle pick-ups.

The amp is a silverface Fender Twin Reverb, probably the same he played with a Marshall cab on the two videos  from middle 1978 (a playback of Sultans of Swing and Wild West End from June 12, and Sultans of Swing in the Revolver show, July 9.) He actually had the Twin until October 1978 when he replaced it with the Music Man HD 130 212 .  David plays a Twin, too. There is another guitar amp: a small Peavey backstage amp, on the left side of the stage near the bass amp. I have no idea what it is intended for. On the mentioned playback videos of Sultans of Swing and Wild West End you can see it there as well (note that although these are only playback, the stage is properly built up with all their normal  gear it seems, maybe for the next day’s gig, Sheffield, June 13).

Knopfler definitely uses the Morley volume pedal here. And the green MXR analog delay can be seen on the right side of the microphone stand at the beginning of Sultans of Swing. What is strange however it that at the beginning of Lions Knopfler taps with his right foot on two effects it seems, first the MXR right of the microphone stand, then on something left of it (but right of the Morley). I have no idea what this is, but this article seems related here. Maybe a compressor or some boost?

The sound on both clips is fat and warm with some distortion. If you have ever played a silverface Twin this is a bit surprising because the Twin is rather associated with a crsip, cristal clear sound.

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Related articles

• Gear on one of the first Dire Straits gigs on the Clapham Common bandstand
• Mark Knopfler’s Sultans of Swing amp – The brown Fender Vibrolux
• Mark Knopfler’s Morley Volume Pedal
• Tone King Imperial: Played on which songs?
• The Hotcake overdrive pedal
• Sultans of Swing – backing track for long live version available

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