Again I found something nice on youtube I personally have never heard before: Portobello Belle from the On Every Street tour in 1991, performed at The Point in Dublin.. I have had one “official” bootleg (= silver pressed CD) called Strait to the Point from a Dublin gig of that tour (August 26 – they played there for 5 nights from August 23 – 27) but the one I have […]
The Mark Knopfler Signature Stratocaster was introduced by Fender in 2003. Officially it was available in one colour only – Hot Rod Red. However, the first production run was in a different colour. I remember when I first saw one in a shop in 2003: it did not look like on Fender’s product pictures, or like Mark Knopfler’s famous red 1961 Strat, instead it was much darker. Without the headstock […]
That’s the nice thing about internet: I just released the other blog post about a little snippet of In the Gallery which I found on Youtube the other day where I stated that no other video clips (except of a snippet of Lady Writer in bad quality) exist from the Pinkpop Festival in 1979, when a reader of this blog – Brunno Nunes – added a comment with a link […]
I was surprised to find this video today which starts with an excerpt of Dire Straits – In the Gallery – live from the Pinkpop festival, Gelen/Holland, June 4, 1979. The whole gig was broadcasted on TV in 1979 but it seems those video tapes then disappeared – at least I don’t know of any rebroadcasts, and thus of no video clips anywhere, except some parts of Lady Writer in […]
This time I am checking two great guitars, a Suhr MK-1 and a Pensa MK-1. The Suhr is the one that you could already see in this video. Both belong to the same person, a collector from Germany. Some background on the first MK1 The Pensa-Suhr MK1 was built in 1988 by luthier John Suhr at Rudy Pensa’s guitar shop in Manhattan. Suhr worked there before he built amps with […]
For this week I had some nice borrowed guitars around which made me record a short youtube video comparing them with some of mine, all played over the same amp with the same setting – only the volume knob was adjusted for each. This was rather a spontaneous session recorded with the camcorder mic. I tried to play both some similar licks on different guitars and different licks that sound […]
This blog post is not about a Mark Knopfler amp but still has a clear connection to Dire Straits: the Peavey Deuce VT was the amp that David Knopfler played on stage with the band between 1978 and 1979, and thus contributed to the band’s unique sound. The Peavey Deuce VT was built from 1978 to the early eighties. Before, a similar model called Deuce (without the VT) was […]
Today I was jamming a bit on the acoustic guitar and still had the camcorder ready from the last video yesterday, so I simply let it run a bit and recorded this sponatneous version of Dire Straits’ “Where do you think you’re going”. If you wonder about the sound or even about the string bending on the acoustic – check out this old blog post about the string gauge on […]
Here is a youtube video that demonstrates some of the 36 possible pick-up combinations of our loaded Schecter-style pickguards. Each pick-up can be switched to the full or tapped coil which means a fat sound or a vintage-like sound. This way you will not only get new combinations that are not possible with the standard 5-way switch like bridge & neck or all three PUs, but you can also mix […]