Brazilian rosewood is one of the greatest woods for fingerboards. Unfortunately this tropical tree – Dalbergia nigra – is on the CITES list of endangered species so that strict restriction were put on trading this wood in 1992, the reason why Brazilian rosewood was found on many vintage guitars but hardly on new guitars (which often use Indian rosewood as a substitute). Vintage Guitar Show cancelled Germany’s biggest vintage […]
******************* Update: Soon after Sky Arts aired Guitar Stories, the full video appeared on youtube: ******************* As most fans will already know, Sky Arts 1 will broadcast Guitar Stories on October 16 at 10pm (some more info on Guitar Stories’ facebook page). Presented by John Illsley, Mark talks about his most important guitars. In addition to the first trailer, a few more preview clips appeared recently which I put […]
It is always a nice surprise to see “historic” pictures or recordings appear from the very early Dire Straits era. This time no pictures but a recording from the Talking Heads tour in early 1978 – to be precise , from February 5 at the Greyhound Croydon. This was the last gig of the Talking Heads tour on which Dire Straits were the support band, 5 days after the gig […]
These pictures are nothing new neither secret, I saw them for the first time so many years ago in a J.J. Cale songbook. I stumbled upon them again today, and just thought that these are simply worth to have a look at (and I know that J.J. Cale ranks high among us Mark Knopfler fans). Just to make it clear: this is not what the guitar looks like from the […]
In the evening of September 6/7, Mark Knopfler and his band played a surprise performance at the Range Rover event at the Royal Ballet School in Richmond Park, where Land Rover revealed the All-New Range Rover, the fourth generation of the world’s most capable and luxurious SUV. The audience consisted of leaders from business, film, television and sport. Many of these were long-standing Range Rover owners and enthusiasts keen to […]
In the following you will find a tab of a lick in the song Bluebird from Mark Knopfler’s last album Privateering. It is the lick the last solo starts with (2:40 – 2:43). I like this lick because I thought it sounds unusual and thus interesting when I first heard it. While I often immediately know on what scale or idea a MK lick is based when I hear it, […]
This week Privateering was released, Mark’s new double-CD album. As there will be a lot of reviews anyway, I will focus on some particular aspects like guitars, sounds, songwriting techniques etc in my review. Likewise, I will not discuss anything related to lyrics. I will tell you what I love but also what I personally would have liked to be different. The album is still very fresh for me after […]
I recently wrote various blog posts about ‘new’ pictures from some early Dire Straits gigs (e.g. here or here). Normally it happens only rarely that such new pictures appear – we are talking about a period more than 40 years ago, a time before digital cameras existed – but these days again someone pointed me towards another set of nine pictures on Flickr, this time from the gig in Hamburg, […]
Here are some videos with the Mark Knopfler Schecter Dream Machine Strat SN 8001, the guitar I had the chance to play a few weeks ago (see A trip to Mark Knopfler’s sunburst Schecter Strat ). The amp was a Tone King, not the Imperial but a Metropolitan combo, no effects except reverb from the amp. The strings were 09-42. In the following three videos I played some distorted sounds and […]