The title track from Dire Strait's 1985 Brothers in Arms album is a virtuosic tour de force of Mark Knopfler's minimalism and feel. I'm not sure of the guitar he used on this tune, but it sounds like a humbucker and sustains like a set neck; which leads me to assume it's either a Les Paul or maybe the Suhr I've seen him pictured with. I am not adding a transcription of the guitar parts because the things I want to point out are beyond sheet music. Throughout the song Knopfler has a very distorted sound but manipulates the volume control of the guitar to give it the dynamic range of a violin. It sounds like he is setting the volume of the guitar somewhere around the middle or lower which combined with his light fingerstyle touch almost cleans up completely. At 0:50 he does a great volume swell up past the point the guitar was set at, making one of the only phrases he starts on beat one jump right out. It's a great thing, if you are always playing in the middle, you can go up or down. If you are balls out the whole time, you have nowhere to go but down. The melody he plays at the beginning (which doesn't go beyond one octave) sets up the melody for the rest of the solos. I love how the guitar melody isn't really related to the vocal melody at all, it stands on it's own. During the vocals, there's practically no guitar playing. A great lesson for lead players accompanying lead singers. The times he does play while there is singing is to double the melody of the final line of the chorus, perfectly setting up the solos which never stray far from the melody he laid out at the beginning of the song. This is really important, and really difficult. Try learning the melody Mark plays and improvise within it on your own. "Music is the space between the notes".
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