Learn Guitar Online, Dire Straights: 3 Tips for Creating the Guitar Sound from Mark Knopfler

Mark Knopfler’s unique guitar playing style is an important part of Dire Straights’ instantly recognizable sound.

Aside from his work with the Dire Straights group, Mark has been featured in works by other well-known artists such as Chet Atkins, John Fogerty, Bob Dylan, and Eric Clapton.

While Knopfler is known efficiently for his fingerstyle guitar playing, during recording sessions Mark uses a pick for rhythm guitar parts to give the guitar more definition.

Here are three tips to help create that famous Dire Straights guitar sound.

Tip 1: triads played on strings 2, 3 and 4.

A major part of Mark’s style revolves around triad playing. Triads are simply three note chords, this very basic theoretical concept can be found everywhere in keyboard study methods, yet it is barely mentioned and certainly not developed to its full potential in guitar study material. conventional.

The concept is to stack the notes of a scale on top of each other, like a layer cake. By stacking the notes using the interval of a third, the diatonic scale in the key of C major creates the following chords.

Chord 1 = C major (CEG), Chord 2 = D minor (DFA), Chord 3 = E minor (EGB), Chord four = F major (FAC), Chord 5 = G major (GBD), Chord 6 = A minor (ACE), chord 7 = B diminished (BDF), the eight chord is the same chord as the one C major chord (CEG), just one octave higher.

If we take these triads and play them on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th strings of the guitar, you’ll immediately hear how Mark Knopfler creates his clear style of guitar chords. This triad style of chord playing is so clear and defined because there is no duplication of notes in the chord.

To convert these triads to strings 2, 3 and 4 we will need to reverse the chords, this is simply a matter of placing the lowest note of each chord on top of the chord, in other words we rearrange the sequence of notes in the chord .

Playing the triads produced from the C major diatonic scale on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th would produce the following inversions: C major (EGC), the “E” is played on the fourth string, the ” G” is played on the open third string and “C” is played on the second string.

Preceding the D minor chord on the same set of strings we would arrive at the following: D minor (FAD), “F” played on the fourth string, “A” played on the third string, and “D” played on the second string.

Tip 2: harmonic minor scale

Mark Knopfler favors the harmonic minor scale to produce contrast and tension in his playing. The harmonic scale is simply the natural minor scale with a sharp seventh note.

Here’s a quick way to move your head (and fingers) around this scale.

C major = do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do

it has a relative minor scale (the “A” natural minor scale) that contains exactly the same notes just in a different order.

A natural minor = A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A to create the “A” harmonic minor scale we only need to tune the 7th note. thus the harmonic scale “A” = A,B,C,D,E,F,G#,A

Tip 3: learn to recognize chord progressions

One of the most popular Dire Straights songs would have to be “Sultans Of Swing” which is based on the same chord progression as “Greensleeves”. It’s no wonder people like this song, it’s because we’re comfortable with the chord progression, there’s something familiar about it.

The band Metallica uses this same chord progression for their song “Nothing Else Matters”.

Here is the progress:

Dm/// | C/Bb/ | A7/// | A7/// ||