******************* 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 […]
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 […]
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 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, […]
The loaded Strat pickguards in the vintage Schecter style have been available in brass and white aluminium for a while now, but from now on they are also available in black aluminium. You can chose between two versions: with the VFS-1 or the F500T-style pickups. As both are tapped pickups (two different sounds for each pickup), you will get 26 different pickup combinations and thus 26 different sounds. The black […]
According to Guy Fletcher, the songs on which Mark plays the Tone King Imperial are: True love will never fade Shangri la Prairie wedding Dark is the night/Donegan’s Gone Postcards from Paraguay Let It All Go I guess this is meant to be true rather for the latest tours than for the studio albums (click here to find out what gear was used on them), and it matches what I […]