During the last weeks I played around a bit with the backing tracks from the Jam with Dire Straits book by Total Accuracy. Some of these are great and sound very good. Unfortunately, the one for Sultans of Swing seems almost unusuable to me because of the harsh rhythm guitar sound. Since I still had a Cubase file with the MIDI drum part of Sultans – something I did with […]
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 […]
The song In the Gallery of Dire Straits’ first album seems to be in a strange key. The official songbooks transcribe it in the key of Bbm. On all live versions Dire Straits played it in Am. So, why is this? If you listen carefully to the CD version and and try to play along with your guitar, you will notice that Bbm seems to work better than Am, but […]
As promised in the comments on one of the last articles, I tried to find all pictures of one of Dire Straits’ first gigs – the one at the summer party for Charlie Gilett’s Honky Tonk Radio Show, on the Clapham Common bandstand, September 10, 1977. Unfortunately there are only 4 pictures it seems, not 5 or 6 as I hoped (the one on the sleeve of the Honky Tonk […]
Jean-Francois wrote in a comment: I didn`t know where to post this : Somme years ago, I remember you talked on mKnews forum about Six blade Knife on 17/02/1979 in Cologne that has a longer solo in the middle than usual. I`ve never heard it. It would be very nice from you if you could send it to me, or at least put it on your blog. Also, I`ve never […]
Today I surfed into some early Dire Straits photos I have never seen before on flickr.com. These belong to – guess who – Dire Straits’ bass player John Illsley. He has his own photo channel there. Check out! John Illsley’s photo stream Update: I meanwhile also found a comment from John about these pictures on his great looking site at johnillsely.com: Dire Staits in 1978 ————————————- Thanks to Henk for […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]