Romeo and Juliet is a song I have been playing on my National for many years, but I never tried to play the wonderful ending of recent live versions where the piano leads through a rather unusual chord sequence. Yesterday I played around with the piano a bit and had a look at this. After the last verse Romeo and Juliet features a two-chord sequence over which Knopfler plays solo: […]
In this article I will cover a little chord progression that Mark Knopfler apparently discovered some day and – as he sees himself mainly as a songwriter – directly translated into a song. He often learned such little patterns and licks by accident – finding something when playing for hours – or learned them from one of his mates, people like the great Chet Atkins, pedal-steel player Paul Franklin, or […]
Summer is here and with it my summer holidays, so the ideal opportunity for some more song tutorials here in my Mark Knopfler guitar blog. This time I will explain the song Down to the Waterline – the first song on the first Dire Straits CD (1978). Down to the waterline is surely another highlight of early Dire Straits. It is one of the oldest Mark Knopfler songs, one of […]
Today I want to feature a little software that was available as a free dowwnload on the official Mark Knopfler site some years ago. It is a flash mixer with individual tracks of the song Sailing to Philadelphia, in other words, a software mixer that does not only allow to listen to the individual instruments but also to adjust the volume of these. For this reason it was described as […]
The b5 notes means the flattened fifth note of any scale. If we have e.g. a C-major scale (c – d -e -f -g – a – b – c ), the fifth note is the g , and if this note is flattened, we get the gb. The same logic works with any major or minor (or other) scale. The following video demonstrates the usage and the position of […]
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 […]
This time I will start with some very basic stuff: major and minor chords. Every guitar beginner soon learns that there is e.g. an A major chord, and an A minor chord. Obviously they are similar, they just differ in one single note (in case of the first position chords, in the example it is either the 2nd (A) or 1st (Am) fret on the b string). You need to […]
Here comes an article not really related to guitar but possibly interesting for everyone who likes to listen to music. The term “loudness war” is something you might have come across when talking or reading about modern music productions. There is even a Wikipedia article on this matter. I will explain in short what exactly is meant with it, and I will give some listening samples from Knopfler / Dire […]
The last poll about what you would like to read here is still running (so vote if you haven’t yet), but it seems to be clear that many readers want to read about licks (or rather want to see something as video I guess). So here a quick reaction (to be honest, I started to work on this video anyway 😉 ) This post is about a typical Mark Knopfler […]