I think Knopfler sounds is 40% amp and 40% pickups.
I'm not so sure :lol:
I think it's 20% amp, 20% pickups, and 60% how he plays the thing (maybe even 10/10/80).
When the original albums were coming out, I loved the sound he was making and fixated over it for a while... Actually, right from the start, the single Sultans of Swing, I was going "HOW does he do that?!?! It's FAB..."
Years later I played a lot of bass and a lot of slide on resonators - so I learnt to leave the pick alone. That started creeping into my ordinary six-string playing, both electric and acoustic. Nowadays, even if I'm holding a pick, I'm quite often palming it without even realising...
Anyway, over the last few years, when I'm working out a lead part and taping it, no matter what guitar/amp/amp modellor I'm using (or even acoustic), when I get it roughly how I want it, I sit back and listen... and invariably I have a moment of "oh bluddy hell it sounds like Mark Knopfler again... :roll: ...oh well, leave it in..." :lol:
I don't know how he plays now, but back at the height of Dire Straits he played with a thumb and two fingers (index and middle) anchored together as one. It appears that, for lead lines with fingers, that's how I do it... and I really dig in, really PLUCK the strings. This means that many of the notes plucked with the anchored fingers, especially the accented ones, are actually "snapping" on the fretboard as they sound. That seems to be part of the secret of this Knopfler sound - a lot of attack and not so much note after it (you encourage/maximise the note sustain with your right hand) and once you start doing it like this, it's hard to stop... and... it comes out of strats, teles, even Les Pauls, etc, clean or dirty.
Btw, I've got the impression that Ritchie Blackmore was doing it in public before Mark Knopfler. I do know that MK made a conscious decision to ditch the pick in Dire Straits to get a "different" sound to distinguish him from all the other guitarists... I sometimes wonder whether he'd been listening to RB's solos on MIJ (like I was) thinking "woo! that's a cool sound when he does that! (Of course it might have been someone entirely different - Richard Thomson, mebbe?)
