Category: MK guitar style and licks
The opening lick of the last solo in Bluebird
Posted onIn 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, […]
Videos from a trip to Mark Knopfler’s sunburst Schecter Strat
Posted onHere 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 […]
Keys for all Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits songs
Posted onI 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 […]
Albert Lee – a recent live version of Setting me up
Posted onI 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 […]
Sultans of Swing – backing track for long live version available
Posted onDire Straits Water of Love guitar tutorial
Posted onIn this blog post you will find another guitar tutorial video, this time not about a certain aspect of Mark Knopfler’s guitar playing but one that explains how to play a particular song again, similar to the ones I did about Down to the Waterline some time ago. As Down to the Waterline is the first song of Dire Straits’ first album, I thought why not go on with the […]
Mark Knopfler Signature Strats vs. 1964 Stratocaster
Posted onIn the videos below we were comparing two Mark Knopfler Signature Strats to a 1964 Fender Stratocaster, also in red (fiesta). Talking about red, note that one of the signature Strats is in the ‘wrong’ colour the very first ones came with, while the other one is the normal hot rod red. It is always interesting to hear how different three Strats will sound, even Strats of exactly the same […]
First demo of the VFS-1 pickguard
Posted onAfter the last video in which I already compared the VFS-1 pickup to a 1955 Fender Strat pickup and to the DiMarzio FS-1, here is a first demo of the complete Schecter-style pickguard with the VFS-1 pickups. I was jamming in the Mark Knopfler style over a self-produced 2 chords backing groove on my metallic pink Strat, which is mainly a 1983 Japanese vintage Squier but with a new bird’s […]
Suhr Custom MK-1 and Pensa Custom MK-1
Posted onThis 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 […]