This site is on Facebook now: check it out here. From now on you can follow interesting news there as well, or simply  let the world  know that you like this site

I admit I am still rather new in the world of Facebook, and probably do not fully understand all possibilities and options of Facebook yet, but I am sure that good ideas will come after a start has been made (your input is – as always – appreciated!)

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

Related articles

• Mark Knopfler’s Grosh Electrajet
• Mark Knopfler on facebook and myspace
• Guitar refinishing – nitro vs poly and how to remove a polyester finish
• Recommended artist: Chris Rea – some rare video clips
• Different ways to record a clean guitar – sound clips for A/B comparing
• How to avoid RSI for guitar players – part 2

Visitors of Mark Knopfler’s latest Get Lucky tour might have wondered about one of Knopfler’s new guitars which he used on stage for the last song each night – Piper to the End. This song features  (live and studio) the Electrajet built by Luthier Don Grosh.

Don Grosh started his company Grosh Guitars in 1993, “with the singular goal of producing the world’s finest custom electric guitars and basses” (quote Grosh website). Each guitar is built from high-quality materials and parts by a small team of experienced luthiers under control and direction of Don Grosh himself. The product range covers models with both Fender or Gibson influence.

Mark’s guitar is the Electrajet, a Fenderish design which looks like a blend between a Stratocaster and a Jaguar or a Jazzmaster.

The Electrajet normally has an alder body, although ash or mahagony are optional. Grosh uses only hand-selected (“tap-tone matched”) old-growth tone woods. Unfortunately at the moment there is no information on the details of Mark’s guitar but it does not seem to differ much from the standard configuration except the brown tortoise pickguard instead of the standard one in aged white. The neck is maple with a rosewood fingerboard (brazilian rosewood is available at a 400$ extra charge). The tremolo system is a vintage-style Gotoh or Wilkinson Stratocaster bridge, while the jack plate seems to be adopted from the Telecaster.

The pick-ups are two handcrafted P90 – manufactured by Grosh, or optionally by Fralin. The original P90 is a Gibson single coil pick-up which has a warmer and fatter sound than a Fender single coil like in the Stratocaster.

Knopfler’s Electrajet seems to be in aged white. All Grosh guitars feature a hand-rubbed ultrathin nitrocellulose laquer finish which allows the wood to “breathe”.

The Electrajet is priced at $ 2,950 (base price, additional costs for optional features) for the custom version, or at $ 2,000 for a standard version. A detailed list of the differences between both and much more information on the Electrajet can be found on the Grosh website.

I can’t tell whether Mark used the Electrajet for other songs than Piper To the End. Here he played the bridge pick-up. I had the impression it did not went through his Reinhardt amps but through the Tone King Imperial. The sound was sharp (because of the bridge pick-up) with some warm distortion.

Below are some pictures from the recent tour which show Mark with the Electrajet.

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

Related articles

• mk-guitar.com on Facebook
• Guitar refinishing – nitro vs poly and how to remove a polyester finish
• Recommended artist: Chris Rea – some rare video clips
• Different ways to record a clean guitar – sound clips for A/B comparing
• How to avoid RSI for guitar players – part 2
• Mark Knopfler on Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming

Over the last days I was working on a Strat project. I had some parts from a 70ies Japanese Strat copy, which together with an American Fender neck and a loaded pickguard should make a nice part-o-caster.

In the seventies many guitars were finished with polyester. This finish is like a coat of hard plastic (actually it is rather a resin). It is easy to apply because you can sand it without much danger of sanding through. This was Fender’s main reason for changing from nitro to polyester in about 1968. Before, a finish that was sanded through had to go back into the production process and had to be repainted, one of the reasons why it was common to find a finish over some other colour.

As far as sound is concerned, almost everyone agrees that a thin nitro finish that allows the body to vibrate much more than the thick plastic-like polyester  allows a better  sound with clearer treble. This might  surprise those who think that an electric guitar is  like a blog of wood and the sound depends only on the pick-ups and not on the acoustic qualities of the wood or other parts. But this is really the case, I can definitely hear how a Strat or any other solid-body guitar sounds from playing it without amplifier.

So it makes sense to remove a polyester finish and replace it with a nitro finish. Many modern guitars are finished with polyurethane by the way, which is a bit similar to polyester but thinner so the sound is not that much affected.

Removing polyester is tricky. The problem is that chemical paint strippers in most cases will not work. There are some types that are said to work more or less but the ones I tried did not. I solved the task twice some yeasr ago by sanding down the finish, but believe me this is nothing that you ever want to do. It takes ages to sand through such a thick plastic coat.

This time  I tried something else, something that was recommended in a guitar forum: heat. I used a cheap heat gun and a scraper, and with these tools the finish was off in about 2.5 hours, including the control cavity. I did not heat  until the resin bubbles (which others have described) because then I could only remove rather small pieces. With less heat it was possible to move the scraper under the poly coat and to run it between the wood and the poly so that I could remove rather big pieces of the poly coat. The wood was not hurt and looked almost untouched. I can imagine that if a guitar was refinished with poly over an existing nitro finish, it might be possible to restore the original finish this way.

All the poly chips had a weight of about 125 grams (4.4 ounces), and in the case of one of those jobs I did a few years ago it was even 200 grams (7 ounces), so the guitar becomes noticably lighter.

Sound differences

As said, there is definitely a difference, but it depends on the thickness of the poly coat, and it is still a subtle difference. The high end is clearer while the poly sounds more compressed. Some years ago I made a sound sample to document the difference between the poly finish and the bare wood so you can decide for yourself. The sound difference when playing the guitar yourself appears even bigger than on this clip. The sample was recorded with the same strings and the same setup, one time before the job, and again immediately after. What you hear are the harmonics at the 12th fret. You can click into the blue status bar to a/b compare it at different positions.

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.

Should I or shouldn’t I?

The question if the amount of work and the costs are worth the increasement of sound or not cannot be answered generally. First it must be said that refinishing an original Fender – even if it is one of the least desired, heavy 70ies Strats – drastically decreases the value of the guitar! Even those Japanese vintage guitars like the first Squiers, Tokai Springy Sounds, Grecos and so on, will be worth more with the original finish, even if it is poly (the more expensive ones were sometimes nitro anyway).

If you however have a guitar that was refinished anyway, you have not much to lose. If you are not sure if your finish is nitro or poly (polyester or polyurethane) you can find it out with the following trick: take some ordinary paint thinner and apply it to a tiny spot of the finish (e.g. under the pickguard or near the tremolo springs). If it solves the finish (paint is removed or it becomes dull) it is nitro, if not it is poly.

I think almost all of Mark Knopfler’s guitars are nitro, at least his vintage guitars, the Schecters, the Pensas and the MK signatures are. I can’t think of one that might be poly, maybe his blue Fernandez (but maybe not), but I don’t know about some of the odd ones like his Teisco Spectrum, the Eco on “Song for Sonny Liston”, and some more. His two red Fenders from that early Dire Straits days were both refinished but these do not seem to be poly, either.

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

Related articles

• mk-guitar.com on Facebook
• Mark Knopfler’s Grosh Electrajet
• Recommended artist: Chris Rea – some rare video clips
• Different ways to record a clean guitar – sound clips for A/B comparing
• How to avoid RSI for guitar players – part 2
• Mark Knopfler on Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming

Most people who like Mark Knopfler might know Chris Rea, who has been popular especially here in Europe since the 80ies. Due to health problems, he ended his active career some yeasr ago.

I first heard of him in 1983 when a friend of mine who was also into Dire Straits at that time told me about a concert he was at with the then super-group SAGA. It seemed he did not like them that much, but he was enthusiastic abouth the support act that noone had heard of before, a guy who played a clean guitar sound similar to  Dire Straits on an old fiesta red Stratocaster: Chris Rea. It was the same week when Rockpalast broadcasted a Chris rea concert from a small club in Bochum (very near to the place I lived then here in Germany), so I did not miss this concert (and even taped it with  a cassette tape – this was before people had video recorders). I recently found a few clips from this and other concerts concerts on youtube and want to share them with you.

The first track was the first one of the concert, so the first I ever heard. It is called “Nothing’s happening by the sea“. Chris plays his red Strat which is tuned to open E through a clean silver-face Fender Twin Reverb (and a brown Fender Bandmaster for distorted sounds).The bass is also cool: a fretless Steinberger, note how it interacts with the guitar licks. Unfortunately the uploader of this clip disabled embedding so I cannot show it directly here on this site, instead click here to open it in a new window on youtube.

A second early track that never made it to a hit is Candles. This time Chris plays a Strat in standard tuning. This clip is from an open-air Rockpalast concert on the famous Lorelei Rock above  the river Rhine in Germany, a place where Dire Straits also played on a festival in 1979.

And finally, one of my all-time favorites of Chris’ setlist, the song Steel River from the same concert as the one before. It is amazing how the song develops through different stages from a slow ballad to the rock outro. Also that break at 4:30 is pretty cool. Have fun!

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

Related articles

• mk-guitar.com on Facebook
• Mark Knopfler’s Grosh Electrajet
• Chris Rea Bombollini – live from Loreley 1985
• Guitar refinishing – nitro vs poly and how to remove a polyester finish
• Different ways to record a clean guitar – sound clips for A/B comparing
• How to avoid RSI for guitar players – part 2

There are countless ways to record an electric guitar. While some of these do not really work for distorted guitars, you have even more choices when you want to record a clean guitar: you can plug it directly into the mixing desk, or use a DI-box before. Then there are special recording solutions like digital or analog pre-amps that also emulate the influence of the guitar speaker or even the microphone. And of course there is still the old-fashioned way – using a guitar amplifier and one or more microphones.

All of these possibilities have some advantages so it is impossible to say which one is best in a particular sitaution. The video of this article (below)  demonstrates some of these different approaches. This way you can hear yourself what you like and what not. Remember however that there are so many variables even in each single approach, e. g. the pre-amplifier can give you a signal that is much brighter than the guitar amp or much darker – depending on your settings. Nevertheless, the video should reveal some general sound differences, like the very bright direct out of the amp or the rather muddy sound when plugged into the desk with a certain input impedance. You will always hear the same guitar playing the same riff with the same guitar cable (with exception of #3)

Version 1 – Directly into the mixing desk

Here the guitar is plugged into on of the phone-jack inputs of a mixing desk. These are normally designed for line-level instruments like keyboards or pre-amps. The lower volume of the guitar is no problem, but a guitar expects an input impedance (resistance of the input) of a few hundred kOhms. A normal line in has only something like 10 – 100 kOhms however. This circumstance leads to a strong reduction of the guitar pick-up’s resonance peak. This is the frequency at which the pick-up is loudest. It is a result of the pick-ups electrical values like the number of windings and the resistance of the wire of its coil. Typically the frequency is somewhere in the range from 2 – 7 kOhms, and the effect is more pronounced with a single coil pick-up – a reason of the characteristic sharp treble you associate with a Fender guitar. With a too low input impedance these frequencies are dampened and the sound easily becomes a bit muddy.

Version 2 – Using a guitar effect as DI-box

One way to avoid the problem described for version #1 is to use a so-called DI-box (DI for direct injection) – a little device that has a proper input impedance and is plugged between the guitar and the mixing desk. There is another possibility to have the same effect that does not require to buy anything new: use any of your guitar effects as a replacement for the DI-box. A guitar effect has of course a proper input impedance for a guitar, and this is even true if the effect is switched off (with exception of a few effects with a so-called true hardware bypass). You can hear on the video that the sound is much clearer, you have more treble.

Version 3  demonstrates the influence of the guitar cable

This is the same setup as in version #2 with exception of a different cable between the guitar and the effect. Here I used a long guitar cable (9m = 30 ft. ) instead of the 3m (10 ft.) cable used on the other versions. The sound is darker. This effect has nothing to do with the quality of the cable or its internal resistance. Instead it results of the capacity each shielded cable has. It acts like a capacitor which changes the resonance frequency of the pick-up (see  version #1).  For example, a Fender Stratocaster pick-up has a resonance frequency about 6 kOhms, but if you connect a capacitor to it, this frequency moves down to maybe 4 kHz (with a small capacitor of a few hundred pF) or maybe even to 2 kHz with a slightly bigger capacitor. You can easily measure the capacity of a guitar cable and you will find values up to more than 1nF ( = 1000 pF) .  The capacity has to do with the size of the cable: if all other dimensions are the same, a cable with 20 ft. will have a capacity twice as high than a cable with 10 ft. – no matter if both cables are low or high quality.

Version 4 – The POD

The POD by Line 6 was one of the first digital amp emulators. These convert the guitar signal into digital data and use mathematical algorithms to imitate the effect of a vacuum tube, a guitar amp circuit, or even a guitar speaker. Note that the picture was taken later and does not show the setting used on the recording.

Version 5 – A Tubeman tube pre-amp

The Tubeman by Hughes & Kettner is an analog device that uses a real tube. It has gain and volume controls plus different tone controls and allows a great variety from clean to heavily distorted sounds. It has outputs for  a mixing desk or a guitar ams (with or without speaker simulation). Note that the picture was taken later and does not show the setting used on the recording.

Version 6 – A guitar amp with a microphone

The heading says it all. In this case a Music Man guitar amp with a Shure SM57 microphone. The SM57 does not cost much and is something like a standard for recording guitars.

Version 7 – The direct out of the amp

Some guitar amps have a direct out. With this jack the signal from the pre-amp stage can be routed into another power amp or into a mixing desk. However, the guitar speaker is important to shape the tone, it actually cuts all frequencies above something like 6 kHz. As the speaker is missing now, you get a very crisp but sometimes rather harsh sound. Especially for distorted guitar sounds, this almost never leads to good results.

Note that the amp setting is the same as in the previous example (!)

What does it sound like in the mix?

The next video sequences demonstrate how some of the previous setups sound in a complete mix. All the raw sounds have been slightly EQ’ed, and some compression, reverb, and delay has been added.

You will hear:

a) Directly into the desk through the effect (see version #2)

b) The POD (see version #4)

c) The Tubeman (see version #5)

d) The mic’ed amp (see version #6)

e) The direct out of the amp (see version #7)

The video is in youtube high quality. If you have problems with bandwidth, you can watch it in normal quality directly at youtube, click here.

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

Related articles

• Recording distorted guitars – The digital POD vs the analog Tubeman
• Micing a guitar amp with two microphones
• mk-guitar.com on Facebook
• Mark Knopfler’s Grosh Electrajet
• Recording acoustic guitar with two microphones – Audio Technica AT 4050 and Schoeps CM 64
• Sailing to Philadelphia to mix yourself

Older Posts »