For your enjoyment, here are a few rare pictures of Dire Straits. They are from a concert in the Zirkus Krone building, Munchen, Germany, on May 29, 1979. After February 1979, they returned to Germany in May, still on the Communiqué tour. The gear used on this part of the tour has changed slightly against February: Mark still played the #80470 maple-neck Strat (see also this article on his two […]
In May 1979 Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits drummer Pick Withers were invited to play on Bob Dylan’s new album, Slow Train Coming. This was not the first session Mark Knopfler was asked to play on (he already played on the Steely Dan song Time out of Mind and with Mavis Staple before), but it was the first session for a complete album. The idea came from Barry Becket and […]
Have you ever tried to transcribe a solo from a recording and you wished you could hear that guitar better in the mix than you actually did? Or did you ask yourself if there is chorus or not, or any other effects? Instead, the vocals, the bass, the drums, everything is louder than what you are trying to listen to, and for this reason you have no chance to hear […]
The bootleg Dire Straits – Leeds – January 30 (31?), 1978 is one of the earliest Dire Straits live recordings (actually the only earlier live recording is only one song – Eastbound Train from the Hope & Anchor pub, London, December 1977). This bootleg concert was recorded about one week before the recoding sessions for the very first Dire Straits album. This gig was the last of a short England […]
After the portrait of the fiesta red 1983 Squier Stratocaster, today’s article features another Japanese vintage Squier, this time an ultra-rare model in all original pink metallic finish. Since all important facts about that great JV series that was available in 1982-83 only have been mentioned in two previous articles (the mentioned portrait of the fiesta red 1983 Squier Stratocaster, and the article about Japanese vintage guitars), I will not […]
This week was again a rather busy one, so not much time for the next article. All I have is a video of me playing Romeo and Juliet on that National Style-O (read style-“Oh”, the letter not the number, see this article for some detail pictures of this guitar), but there are no instructions or explanation. If you want you can check it out nevertheless, see below. This guitar is […]
This article is about a “two-strings scale” sometimes called Memphis Scale. Normally these two strings are not adjacent strings, instead you skip one string and play licks e.g. on the D- and B-string (as in the video examples below), or on the G- and high E-string. With the help of these licks you will increase your vocabulary on the guitar. Whenever you are in danger of running out of ideas […]
On the Making movies tour in 1981, Mark Knopfler played a Rickenbacker guitar on Portobello Belle. To my knowledge only one single picture exists with this guitar which is the one below. Since I have this picture at a rather high resolution, I also put in an enlarged version with just that guitar. I would be lying if I said I am an expert on Rickenbacker guitars, so feel free […]
Here is an original drawing from Schecter Guitar Research showing the wiring layout of a vintage Schecter Stratocaster pickguard with those F500T pick-ups. I found it in an old German book about guitar electronics from the 80ies, and it seems to be pretty rare so I want to share it with you. It is the same layout that should originally have been in all of Mark Knopfler’s Schecter Strats. An […]
What I mean with double-string bends are licks that are played on two or more strings and one or more of these are bent. Such licks appear in countless Mark Knopfler or Dire Straits songs. The following video clip demonstrates how to use such licks, and their relation to the chords they are based upon. Note that the last licks (Once Upon a time and Sultans of Swing) were covered […]