I found this in the AMIT forum and thought it might be very useful info for us guitar players. The author – nickname foma – allowed copying it, so here it is, a list of all keys with the songs in that key. It even included the songs of Privateering, Mark’s coming album (to be released September 2012). Thank you, foma 🙂 Quote: >>>>>>>> It’s the statistics of almost all […]
The late 70ies were long before the invention of the digital camera. There would be so many more pictures of all kind of events if everyone could take pictures as easily as today. As this was not the case, the majority of all pictures of rock bands from that time were taken by professional photographers who sold them to magazines or newspapers, making their pictures public this way. For this […]
Today I found a picture showing Dire Straits live in 1977, before they recorded their first album. At this time the famous red ‘Sultans’ Strat was not refinished to red yet but still had the bare wood finish in which Mark got it (probably earlier that year). There are a few pictures around that show the guitar with this finish but all of these are of rather poor quality (and […]
Jim Kelley was a small manufacturer of boutique amps who started his business in the late 70ies. He started with only one amp model, a single channel amp with 6 tubes and just 3 knobs. The later dual channel was still based on this model. Compared to other boutique amp that were favourits at that time – namely Mesa Boogie or Dumble – the Kelley amps followed a different approach. […]
I recently got a reliebable information about the guitar and the amp that Mark used for the solos in the song One World of Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms album (studio version, 1985). I put up a quiz with five possible question for you to find out the answer, hoping this way you have some fun and can check if your ears and general knowledge are good enough to let […]
The good thing about running a website about Mark Knopfler and his guitar sound and style is that you get in touch with so many other people who share your interest. I guess everyone who is really interested in this topic sooner or later finds his way to this site. So it happened that one day a customer who bought two of my iSounds in my online shop told me […]
I think I wrote a blog post about Albert Lee’s cover of Setting me up from the first Dire Straits album before (see here). Today I surfed into this video clip on youtube which I really like a lot. It is a bit on the slow side, much slower than e.g. Albert’s live version that was featured on Eric Clapton’s Just one Night live album. It seems the older you […]
Some days ago I got the French version of the Dire Straits book by Michael Oldfield. Unlike the English version – which price meanwhile skyrocketed on the used-book market as it seems – I got this one for a couple of Euros on ebay. Nevertheless, I guess it is a clear indicator that you are a crazy MK fan if you buy a book in French and your French is […]
I recently got an old Dutch magazine called JOEPIE from February 1979 with a two-page story about Dire Straits. It features two pictures that show the band on stage at the Hope & Anchor pub. Dire Straits played there several times in late 1977: on September 10 (in the evening after they played the Clapham Common gig in the afternoon of that same day), on November 4, 11, and 18, […]
Although Portobelle Belle from Dire Straits’ second album CommuniquĂ© was played on so many tours, it seemed that there are no live videos of this song at all. It was played e.g. on each gig of the Love over Gold tour in 1982/3 which ended in the Alchemy live video concert but just this song was not included on the Alchemy video, neither on the original vinyl album or CD, […]