Guitars

How close is the VFS-1 Pickup to the Original Fender Vintage and the DiMarzio FS-1?

I recently introduced the new VFS-1 pickup as an alternative to the F500T-style (Schecter-style) pickups in our loaded pickguards, and I already started to work on some video demos of  the complete VFS-1 pickup assembly , the first of these should come within the next days. What I can present today is a side-by-side comparison of the new VFS-1 pickup against the two pickups that inspired us to design this model: the DiMarzio FS-1 (which Mark Knopfler had in the neck position of his red Fender Stratocaster when he started Dire Straits), and a ‘real’  Fender vintage Strat pickup – remember, the VFS-1 is a tapped pickup which gives you two different sounds, so we need to compare it to both.

VFS-1

To get the true picture, I first recorded a few chords and licks with one of my Strats, one which features a DiMarzio FS-1 (a rather old model from the early 80ies, vintage itself) in the neck position and a 1955  (!!)  Strat pickup (no rewound, all original) in the middle position.  The recording was done directly into a PCM recorder at 24 bits  (using a good buffer of course to catch the full sound of the pickups), no effects, no amp, just as direct as possible.

Then  I opened the guitar (after I had measured the exact distance between the pole pieces and the strings), put out these two pickups, and installed two VFS-1. The one in the neck position runs on the full coil (DiMarzio sound), the one in the middle position on the tapped coil (vintage sound). I adjusted them to exactly the same distance between  strings and magnets, then put the strings (the same!) on again, and recorded the same chords and licks with this setup.

As it is almost impossible to play the same licks at exactly identical volume and with 100% the same ‘touch’,  I  often played two or three versions of each licks , sometimes with different attack (soft, medium, loud).

Can the VFS-1 really compete with these (and even both of them)? A '55 Fender Strat pickup (left) and an old DiMarzio FS-1 (right) which are normally in my guitar
Can anything sound as good as a real 1955 Stratocaster pickup?

The result

The following video lets you hear the results for yourself.  I replaced the audio track from the camera with the high-quality version from the PCM recorder. Remember, the guitar was recorded directly, no amp or effects, not even EQ, no nothing. Instead of showing one complete  recording first and then the other, I edited the files to have corresponding licks directly behind each other. (I will try to offer a download possibility of the uncompressed WAV file soon in case someone feels that youtube’s conversion algorithms  might have deteriorated the sound quality of the video).

I myself must say that I am fascinated how close we managed to get to the sound we wanted. Harry Häussel’s pickups generally have highest reputation – at least here in Germany and already among ‘people who know’ all over the world – but given the fact that we had to deal with two totally different sounds, and thus two totally different pickup designs, I think the result is astonishing. I really felt to check twice I had not confused any files and used audio from the same pickups, but – I give you my word – it is true, nothing has been done wrong, faked, or changed.

The VFS-1 for the neck position to get the early Dire Straits sound

Besides from being used optionally in the loaded Schecter-style pickguards, the VFS-1 is ideal for all Dire Straits fans to put it into the neck position of any Strat to get the fat DiMarzio sound. I have the DiMarzio FS-1 in some of my Strats but I often miss the vintage neck-position sound, with the FS-1 you have it all and lose nothing. I used the 2 & 3 position (neck & middle) with the DiMarzio and a vintage pickup on my attempt to recreate that Sultans of Swing sound for the Puresolo competition since it sounds noticeably different from the in-between position with two identical pickups, more open, less nasal.

If youI don’t like to change the look of a guitar with additional switches (like me),  you can replace one tone poti with a push/pull poti (also available in our shop) to switch between the coil taps.  It is no problem to wire the switch of the push/pull in such a way that you get the sound you mainly use at the pushed-in position, and then pull it when you need the alternate sound.

Check out the VFS-1 in our shop

(Note: Due to high demand I have only a limited stock of the VFS-1 at the moment, new ones are expected soon.  It might take a few days for delivery for this reason.)

Guitar in general, Guitars

The VFS-1 – New pick-up for our Schecter-style pickguards

Our loaded metal pickguards are now available with a new pick-up model: the VFS-1. V stands for vintage, F for fat, (and S for Strat).

The VFS-1 with white caps for that Alchemy look

Unlike our Schecter-style pick-up (which is very close to a Schecter F500T), the new pick-up has the “normal” sized magnet pole pieces, like a vintage Strat pick-up, and can be used with a plastic cap (the F500Ts do not allow to put a cap on them). So it looks and sounds similar to the Seymour Duncan SSL1s or APS-1 that Mark Knopfler played in his red Schecter dream machine Strat. But that’s not all, the VFS-1 has also a second outer coil to create  fatter sounds, similar to the DiMarzio FS-1 that Mark Knopfler played in his red Fender of early Dire Straits days.

The VFS-1
The tapped coil for a vintage Strat sound, the full coil for a fat Strat sound

In other words, the new tapped pick-up allows two sounds that can be toggled with the up/off/down mini switches of our pickguards. You will have the same 27 sound combinations from the three mini switches as with the F500T pick-ups. In the up-position of the mini switch the sound will be  much closer to the vintage Strat sound than the thinner but bassier  sound of the F500T.

The new pick-up is also ideal for all who would like to have a DiMarzio FS-1 in the neck position of their Strat for those Single-Handed-Sailor sounds but do not want to lose the normal Strat sound. You can e.g. switch the outer coil on or off with a push-pull poti (available here) so that the overall look of the original Strat is not changed.

The price of this pick-up is the same as of our F500T-style pickups, and the loaded pickguard also costs the same as with the old type (which of course will also remain available). Sound demo clips coming soon. [edit:  here is one which A/B compares the VFS-1 to both a 1955 Strat pickup and to a DiMarzio FS-1, more to come]

See the VFS-1 in our shop.

Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear, Vintage guitars

The Gibson Chet Atkins CEC – Classical Electric Guitar with Nylon Strings

This week I had a nice guitar here – a Gibson Chet Atkins CEC. The CE stands for classical electric, in other words a solid-body guitar with nylon strings and a piezo pickup, while the last C stands for conventional neck width (2″/5.1 cm  at the nut, a CE model with a neck width of 1.825″ / 4.6 cm was also available).

This guitar model was developed by Chet Atkins who approached Gibson with his prototype. The model appeared in Gibson’s catalogue in 1982, right at the time when Dire Straits recorded the Love over Gold album. This album features two songs – Private Investigations and the title track – on which a classical (=nylon-strung) guitar was used. Note that on the album it was NOT the Gibson Chet Atkins, however, Mark  Knopfler started to play it on stage for the Love over gold tour, right after recording the album. You can hear it e.g. on the Alchemy live album where it was used not only on Private Investigations and Love over Gold but also in the outro of Romeo&Juliet. Knopfler (probably) also used it on many sessions with other artists in the early 80ies,  e.g. with Phil Everly or Paul Brady.

   
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Specs

The body is not all solid mahogany but features sound chambers to reduce weight and to make the sound more acoustic. The top is solid spruce or cedar. The neck is mahogany with a neck joint location at the 12th fret – like a classical guitar. The scale is 25 1/2″, the fingerboard and the bridge are from ebony.

The pickup system consists of six individual piezos that are installed under the bridge. The pickup signal is preamplified in the control cavity (that consequently houses a 9V battery), a volume control and the (active) tone control is located on the rim of the guitar (later models have a bass and treble control). A really useful feature are six trim pots inside the control cavity that allow to adjust the volume for each string individually so that you can equalize volume differences easily.

The guitar here i a CEC with the wider nut, I suspect – it is not easy to see on pictures – that Mark Knopfler had the CE model with the more narrow neck. For me the wide neck is nothing I am used to, nevertheless the guitar is not really difficult to play.

Sound

The Gibson Chet Atkins produces a faithful classical guitar sound, and can be played even at high volume without the risk of feedback. Of course a ‘real’ classical guitar might produce the typical sound even better – for this reason Mark Knopfler probably replaced the Gibson with a Ramirez on the On Every Street tour in 1991/2.

One problem of many classical guitars – and also of the example shown here – is intonation. As the bridge does not have individually adjustable saddles like on an elctric guitar, and neither  a ‘compensated’ bridge design with different lenths for the different strings, the guitar never perfectly intonates all notes. If you tune the open strings, the bass note on e.g. the low e string is out of tune at the higher frets, and there is almost nothing you can do against it.

Here is a video I recorded with this guitar (if video jumps make sure slide show above is not running):

Dire Straits/ Mark Knopfler live pictures and videos

Dire Straits – Portobello Belle – The Point, Dublin, 1991

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 does not include Portobelle Belle (and neither some other rare songs performed there like Fade to Black, Long Highway, or Iron Hand). In fact it seems that Portobelle Belle was performed on that tour in Dublin only (correct me if I’m wrong) – well, it is a”song about a long gone Irish girl …”

This version starts with a sax intro by Chris White and ends with a ‘pedobro solo’ by Paul Franklin  (pedobro = an acoustic pedal steel with a dobro resonator, built by Paul Franklin’s father I think), and it is generally rather different from previous or later version. Mark plays the National Style-O it seems (it is an audience recording so the sound is not perfect) It does not feature much spectacular guitar playing, but a great version anyway. Enjoy!

Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear

The wrong colour of the first Mark Knopfler Signature Strats

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 decal with Knopfper’s signature you would not have believed that this guitar should have anything to do with Mark Knopfler. I saw two more of these in other shops only a bit later, and both also had the darker red, something that looked similar to Fender’s Dakota red of the 60ies (see this blog post for more info on Fender’s different red finishes).

This picture compares both colours

I must say that I was disappointed by the look of the first signature Strats, and I could not understand why the ones that Knopfler played on stage looked so much brighter. Was it just the stage lights that caused this impression? A few months later I saw another one on the Frankfurt Music Fair, and this one was as I always had imagined it to be: a bright red like in the early days of Dire Straits. From an insider I got the information that indeed the first production run was a wrong colour due to a mistake. Rumours say that when Knopfler found the first signature Strat in a London guitar shop that also had the wrong colour, he was upset and made Fender to correct the mistake immediately.

The Dakota red guitar from the picture above

It seems noone knows exactly how many of the darker ones were produced. I somewhere read a figure like some 30, but if I take into consideration that alone in my city I saw three of them in the shops, plus what I read in internet forums,  I believe there must be far more.  As it seems the serial numbers do not really give an answer to how many there are because darker ones  exist with serial numbers higher than of Hot Rod red ones. I heard that Glenn Saggers, Mark Knopfler’s guitar technician, started to file a list with the serial numbers of the wrong-coloured  guitars. If you own one of the dark ones, you might use the comment function of this blog post to tell us the serial number, maybe we can find out more this way.

Otherwise those darker guitars were identical to the later ones, and theoretically they might become a special collector item due to their limited number.

And another one (picture courtesy duytvalentino)

 

Dire Straits/ Mark Knopfler live pictures and videos, Misc

Video Clip of Dire Straits – Lady Writer – Pinkpop Festival 1979

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 to this video: Lady Writer, the complete song,  in great quality. I really have never seen this one before, so I thought it might be worth another blog post.

It also includes a few backstage scenes from before the gig, and from the end of the set. Also, due to the various camera positions, you get a glance of the backstage line, and even on the floor where Mark’s effects were place, normally well hidden behind those monitor speakers (e.g. at 0:49 or 4:49). We can see the Morley vloule pedal and, left from it, the MXR analog delay. There seems to be a third little box about a feet left from the MXR. Of course the picture quality is not good enough to see any details, but nevertheless. I oberserved something similar in the Rockpalast videos, see this blog post.

Mark added a second Music Man amp (HD -130 212) just a few weeks ago (I guess about March ’79). One month later (July ’79) this second amp got speakers with an aluminium dust cap, but here it seems to be the “normal” paper ones (whhich definitely makes a change of tone). David played his Peavey Deuce amp with an Ampeg speaker cabinet, like he did that whole year. There are a lot of other amps on stage, a little bit behind the Straits’ amps which should have nothing to do with them, remember this was a festival with many bands.

Dire Straits/ Mark Knopfler live pictures and videos, Misc

Video snippet of Dire Straits – In the Gallery – Pinkpop Festival 1979

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 awful quality. This one is better quality (although only b/w), unfortunately only half a minute 🙁 Enjoy nevertheless 🙂

Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear, MK guitar style and licks

Suhr Custom MK-1 and Pensa Custom MK-1

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 Bob Bradshaw and became master builder at Fender’s Custom Shop. Later he started his own company – Suhr guitars. For this reason the first guitars were called Pensa-Suhr, and  after John  left simply Pensa. John Suhr also builds guitars similar to the MK-1 (although for legal issues he has to change some details) – if you want a MK-1 you basically have to decide if you want it from the same place or from the same builder.

Pensa Custom MK-1

This guitar is from 1993 and differs in some details from the original MK-1. The body top is not maple but koa, while the body itself is still from mahogany. The shape of the upper body horn is different – the horn is thinner and longer. It has a SPC mid boost but it is not activated with a push-pull poti. Instead, a third poti gradually blends between the normal and the boosted sound. See the pictures for more details:

Two EMG SA and one EMG 85 pick-ups

 

Suhr Custom Carve Top (MK-1)

This wonderful guitar is from 2006. Note that apparently for legal reasons the official name of this guitar is not MK-1 – only Pensa are allowed to use this model name. It has a mahogany body with a 3/4″ quilted maple top, a maple neck with Indian rosewood fingerboard, Floyd Rose tremolo, abalone dots, EMG pick-ups etc. The top of the guitar is really astonishing – almost three dimensional. We found it sounds darker and warmer than the Pensa.

 

In this youtube video you can see me playing both of them – including riffs from Money for Nothing, Heavy Fuel, No can do, …. The guitar goes directly into the amp, the distortion is from the amp – a Music Man RP112 65. The SPC mid-boost is enabled on both guitars.

Guitars, Mark Knopfler gear, Vintage guitars

Comparing different guitars

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 nice on the particular guitar.

The guitars were:

1 – Part-o-caster

This guitar is basically a copy of Mark’s Fender  which he used on that early Dire Straits stuff. It is not too accurate, wrong body wood, one-piece maple neck instead of laminated maple fingerboard etc. but it sounds nice in most situations. In the neck position it has a DiMarzio FS-1, in the middle position an old vintage Strat pick-up. One of the tone potis was replaced with a rotary switch that allows all kinds of pick-up combinations, even fat humbucker-like sounds.

2 – 1974 Gibson Les Paul Custom

70ies Gibson are surely not that much sough-after but this one is a nice guitar. It is tobacco sunburstwhich resembles a faded sunburst of those 50ies Paulas. Originally the plastic parts were black but they were replaced with white ones to look more like an ’58 Les Paul.

3 – 1983 Squier Stratocaster

These very first Squiers were really great, almost all of them sound cool. I put one of my loaded Schecter-style pickguards on it that allow a total of 27 sound combinations from the three tapped pick-ups.

4 – 2006 Suhr MK-1

This guitar looks and plays like a dream – and it sounds fantastic, too. The top is one of the fanciest I have ever seen, the wood looks almost three dimensional. Unfortunately it is here only for a couple of days, a guitar you can easily fall in love with.

5 – Fender Stratocaster

What to say about this one? The neck pick-up is not original (a FS-1), bare wood finish, needs to be refinished but it looks cool as it is, too.

6 – 68 Fender Telecaster

The late 60ies Telecasters are really cool, so is this one. The combination of the ash body with the maple cap neck  sounds really bright, but alwasy war at the same time. The neck pick-up is a Japanese copy, the owner still has the original pick-up that needs to be rewound.

7 – 77 Greco Super Sounds

Greco guitars are better known under tha Ibanez label. I think the domestic guitars were called Greco, the export guitars Ibanez. It sounds amazing – especially for its price! The gold anodized metal pickguard is not original.

Here you can vote for which one sounds best to you. You will see the results so far after voting.

Which of the 7 guitars sounds best to you?

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