Mark Knopfler has long been regarded as one of the premier electric guitar fingerstylists in the game. In recent years, though, Knopfler says, his playing has moved even more in the fingerstyle direction.

Though he still has reverence for the guitar pick, the Dire Straits man says that his move toward fingerstyle has been one of the byproducts of his overall shift in technique in the 2020s.

Speaking to Guitar Player in a 2024 interview, Knopfler revealed that he's “started using more and more fingerpicking and less and less plectruming.

“I think lack of use, plus three bouts of COVID, probably phased out the plectrum for me. I just kept losing them and would be fingerpicking more — not necessarily fingerpicking better, just more. And it proved to be just a bit more comfortable for me.”

That said, Knopfler — self-effacing throughout his discussion with GP — is on no high horse about his fondness for fingerpicking, even saying that using a pick is inherently better.

“I want to bow to the plectrum and say it’s a superior thing,” Knopfler said. “It’s louder. It’s faster. It’s got a better signal. It’s the best amplifier there is. I didn’t give it up until recently. I was capable of playing things with a plectrum quite a lot, and I would do all the rhythm parts with one all the time.”

Elsewhere in his chat with GP, Knopfler — to an arguably ridiculous extent — went in further on what he sees as the deficiencies as his playing, saying that his “grip on the guitar has gotten even worse.

“[His] songwriting — it takes you away from concentrating on playing, and it accentuates the simplicity of a lot of my stuff that I want out of the guitar,” the guitarist said.

“I’ve almost become a sort of a half-player in the sense that I only tend to play half the notes that are there that I could play, and my fingering is all wrong. I don’t hold the neck properly; I hold the neck like a plumber holds a hammer, not in a proper, artistic way.”

Rarely does a single song make someone a guitar hero, but Mark Knopfler was catapulted to fame when Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing” became a hit in 1979, a year after appearing on the band’s self-titled debut album. Among his many fans were two men known for their ability to spot guitar talent: Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan.

By then, Fagen and Becker had worked with greats like Steely Dan founding guitarist Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, as well as Larry Carlton, Jay Graydon, Elliott Randall and Dean Parks. Upon hearing “Sultans of Swing,” they decided to bring Knopfler in for their next record, Gaucho.

As Knopfler recalls, Dire Straits were on tour in the U.S. when he got the call inviting him to join the Gaucho sessions in New York City. He was onboard.

“I’d gone through this period of loving Steely Dan records,” he tells Guitar Player magazine.

But upon arriving, he quickly lowered his expectations for the session.

“I certainly wasn’t expecting to walk out at the end of that day and have anything on the record that they would keep. The story that I got from Gaucho’s engineer was something like, ‘Man, you ought to see the guys crawling out of this place,’ so I didn’t expect to emerge victorious at all.”

Indeed, Fagen and Becker were known for trying out numerous guitarists — and even entire bands — on their recording sessions, so no one knew until the record came out whether their contribution had made the cut.

“It wasn’t like they played musical chairs with the guys in the band,” said Rick Marotta, a frequent Dan drummer on later album sessions. “They played musical bands!”

The track they selected for Knopfler was “Time Out of Mind,” where his electric guitar soloing would be added in the intro, middle and end. To his surprise, he was performing an overdub rather than playing with a group.

And while Fagen and Becker typically provided players with charts and discussed what they were looking for, the process was far from straightforward and could last hours for what ultimately amounted to mere seconds of music.

“We don't make our records in the same way,” Knopfler tells Guitar Player. “It took us about three weeks to do each of our albums. But with this session, the process seemed so much more painstaking, which is just a different way of making a record.”

Knopfler — who likely played his red 1961 Fender Stratocaster on the session — said he was given no charts.

“I just listened to tapes and then played over them. I could have been given the chords, but some of those fancier ones I don't know the names of and probably couldn't play.”

Knopfler’s approach was the one that came instinctively.

“What I always try to do is respond to the song,” he says. “I’ve always rebelled against theory. Guitar playing for me is a compulsive activity. I'm not against learning technique, however, and I'm certainly not against acquiring new knowledge. I don't have any favorite keys that I play in. To me, different keys have different colors, different qualities, so I like playing in lots of them.”

Still, he likened the experience to “getting into a swimming pool with lead weights tied to your boot.” The effort was labored and painfully slow.

“I must have played those chords a thousand times in the studio,” he says.

Becker understood Knopfler’s reaction.

“I think he definitely felt that, because he would play something and it was okay, then we’d like it later.”

If Knopfler was initially put off by the duo’s approach to recording, he ultimately enjoyed the experience and the outcome. And, all things considered, it went more smoothly than his painful studio experience a few years later with Bob Dylan.

“I really enjoyed that,” he tells Guitar Player of the Gaucho session. “It was strange at first, however, because it seemed like such a rarefied atmosphere. I was very pleased with the results, but I don't really see that as being my scene.”

The saying “Don’t meet your heroes” is one worth heeding, particularly if you’re in the creative arts. The pure feelings we harbor for artists when they’re afar often become tarnished by exposure to the all-too human qualities they exhibit in person, often to extremes.

Producer Rick Rubin writes in his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, “Many great artists first develop sensitive antennae not to create art but to protect themselves. They have to protect themselves because everything hurts more. They feel everything more deeply.”

Mark Knopfler found out as much when he had a chance to produce his boyhood idol Bob Dylan in 1983. The album he was selected for was Infidels, a record that found Dylan returning to secular music following three albums of songs inspired by his experience as a born-again Christian.

Knopfler had helped out on one of those releases, playing guitar on 1979’s Slow Train Coming, the first disc in Dylan’s “Christian trilogy.” The album arrived shortly after Knopfler’s own ascendency to guitar hero status courtesy of Dire Straits’ 1978 self-titled debut and its hit song, “Sultans of Swing.”

“I was hugely influenced by him about the age of 14 or 15,” Knopfler told Dan Forte in an interview published in Guitar Player’s September 1984 issue. “I heard Bob Dylan from the very beginning, the ‘Hard Rain’ days, and went with him all the way up, and I'm still with him. I still think he's great. Blood on the Tracks is one of my favorite records.”

It’s a remarkable sentiment given that Dylan had put the guitarist through the ringer just one year before, while making Infidels. The former folk icon selected Knopfler to produce him after considering and rejecting David Bowie, Elvis Costello and Frank Zappa. Dylan felt inexperienced in the modern recording studio environment and needed someone who was up to speed with technology. His trio of rather bizarre choices suggests he was also looking to make a sea change in his musical approach and sound.

As it turns out, the songwriter had pretty much sewn things up on his own before Knopfler arrived and recording began at the Power Station in New York City, in April 1983. It was the first inkling Knopfler had that he would not be driving the sessions as much as navigating them, guiding the players through Dylan's temperamental fluctuations.

Dylan's choices for band members dictated Infidel’s strong rhythmic vibe and highly polished style. For the rhythm section he hired bass guitarist Robbie Shakespeare and drummer Sly Dunbar, a tandem better known as Sly & Robbie who found fame both as producers and as Island Records recording artists, where they also produced acts like Black Uhuru, Wailing Souls and Grace Jones.

Dylan had likewise selected former Rolling Stones lead guitarist Mick Taylor, possibly before choosing Sly & Robbie. The two had met the previous summer, and Dylan had begun showing him his new songs months before recording began.

Knopfler, for his part, brought in keyboardist Alan Clark and engineer Neil Dorfsman, who had worked on Dire Straits’ 1982 album, Love Over Gold, and Knopfler’s soundtrack for the movie Local Hero. As one of the album’s musicians, as well as its producer, Knopfler was paired with Taylor, who played slide guitar for much of the record.

The result was the sound of two virtuosos lending their fluid electric guitar chops to what many consider to be one of Dylan’s best albums from his later catalog. Combined with the strongly syncopated rhythms of Sly & Robbie, they helped Infidels achieve a remarkable, and successful, shift in style for Dylan, as exemplified by standout tracks like “License to Kill,” “Neighborhood Bully,” “Sweetheart Like You” and the stunning lead track, “Jokerman.”

“I suggested Billy Gibbons, but I don't think Bob had heard of ZZ Top,” Knopfler told Guitar Player. “It would have been great to have done that with Billy.”

As Knopfler would soon find out, working with his hero was anything but smooth. Dorfsman’s recollections of the sessions are vivid and excruciating.

“I don’t want to use the wrong word, here, but Bob was also a little bit of an agent provocateur, or he even had a little saboteur in him,” Dorfsman told Uncut. “If things were going maybe too well, in somebody else’s definition, he would consciously make an effort to make that stop.”

On one session, Dylan took the tinfoil wrapper from the sandwich he’d had for lunch and began flexing it, accordion style, into the microphone. ”It was just his way of saying, ‘I’m bored with this, I don’t want to do this particular song anymore,’” the engineer recalled.

Dylan also announced one night that he wanted to start recording a Christmas album immediately. “We all laughed, thinking, He’s just messing with us,” Dorfsman said. “But, of course, years later, he subsequently came out with a Christmas record. It was kind of intimidating, challenging, but also hilarious in its own crazy way.”

Tasked with keeping the sessions running smoothly, Knopfler found himself frustrated at how differently it was going from what he had initially imagined.

“I know that it really, really bothered Mark, that song choices were dictated a little bit, and were turning out to be different from the song choices he thought we were going in to do,” Dorfsman said. “I could feel the air just sort of going out of Mark a little bit, when he realized that the traditional role of the producer was not going to be in play on this record... I’m sure it was very frustrating to Mark.”

Knopfler admitted as much — albeit with admirable diplomacy — when speaking with Forte for Guitar Player.

“Was it difficult producing Dylan?”

“Yeah. You see people working in different ways, and it's good for you. You have to learn to adapt to the way different people work.

“Yes, it was strange at times with Bob. One of the great parts about production is that it demonstrates to you that you have to be flexible. Each song has its own secret that's different from another song, and each has its own life. Sometimes it has to be teased out, whereas other times it might come fast. There are no laws about songwriting or producing. It depends on what you're doing, not just who you're doing. You have to be sensitive and flexible, and it's fun.

“I’d say I was more disciplined. But I think Bob is much more disciplined as a writer of lyrics, as a poet. He's an absolute genius. As a singer — absolute genius. But musically, I think it’s a lot more basic. The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.”

Regardless of the trials he endured, Knopfler maintained his love for Dylan’s work on the album, particularly the song “I and I.” He was particularly moved by the song’s first lines: “Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed / Look how sweet she sleeps, how free must be her dreams / In another lifetime she must have owned the world or been faithfully wed / To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams.”

“To hear the first lines of ‘I And I,’ that's enough to make anybody who writes songs want to retire,” Knopfler told GP. “It's stunning.

“Bob's musical ability is limited, in terms of being able to play a guitar or a piano,” he explained. “It's rudimentary, but it doesn't affect his variety, his sense of melody, his singing. It's all there. In fact, some of the things he plays on piano while he's singing are lovely, even though they're rudimentary. That all demonstrates the fact that you don't have to be a great technician.

“It's the same old story: If something is played with soul, that's what's important. My favorite records, by and large, aren't wonderful technical achievements, with the exception perhaps of people like Chet Atkins. But generally speaking, all you've got to do is listen to a Howlin' Wolf album. That's just soul.”

It would have been safe to assume that, following last year’s record-breaking auction, it would be a long time before another Mark Knopfler–played guitar went under the hammer. Yet, a Baldwin/Burns Double Six solid-body 12-string guitar, used extensively by the Dire Straits man, has defied the odds. It is expected to sell for more than $40,000 when it goes on the block at U.K. auction house Gardiner Houlgate on September 9.

Knopfler sold a staggering 123 guitars via Christie’s in January 2024, raking in roughly $11 million. Just under 30 of those instruments fetched $100,00 apiece, while the standout was a 1959 Vintage Gibson Les Paul Standard that sold for $876,000.

It's little surprise Knopfler acquired so many guitars, given that he has been an inveterate collector throughout his career.

“I still stop and look in a guitar shop window when I pass one on the street,” he told Guitar Player just last year. “Nose up against the glass, that whole thing.”

The unusual Baldwin/Burns Double Six wasn’t one of his impulse buys, however. Knopfler “borrowed” the guitar for a rather extended 50-year period from his pal Jeff Sadler, a fellow northeast England native best known for his work in the folk-rock group Lindisfarne. Sadler bought the guitar in the mid 1970s before lending it to Knopfler. The pair, who were school friends, regularly traded and shared gear.

In Knopfler's hands, the Double Six found employment both in the studio and on stage. It was prominently used in the recording of “Angel of Mercy” and “Portobello Belle,” both from Dire Straits' 1979 sophomore album, Communiqué, and it appeared onstage at Wembley Stadium at 1986 show for the Prince’s Trust (now the King’s Trust). Knopfler also used it to perform “Sailing” at the show with Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton.

The Double Six is one of several models sold by Burns in the U.K. and rebranded by Baldwin for sale in the U.S. (Burns is the same firm behind Jeff “Skunk” Baxter’s bargain six-string, which he played on a disco classic.) The Double Six remained in Knopfler’s hands until last year. It had been earmarked to feature in his Christies fire sale. Upon discovering it in the trove scheduled to go on the block, Knopfler had the guitar returned to Sadler.

Now Sadler has put the guitar up for auction. It's set to be sold in the Gardiner Houlgate auction along with two other notable electric guitars: a 1957 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120 owned by Jimmy Page, and a 1989 Takamine FP-360SC acoustic-electric used by Pete Townshend.

The Double Six isn't one of Knopfler's better-known guitars, nor is it associated with a major hit record. Although Communiqué is certified Gold in the U.S. and Platinum in the U.K., it produced no major hit singles and is the only Dire Straits record not represented on the Dire Straits/Mark Knopfler compilation album Private Investigations.

Still, the weight of its reputation and the fact that it remained by Knopfler's side for so long is enough to warrant an estimated $40K sale price.

“Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits had a huge influence on music and guitar players not just in the 1980s and ’90s, but through today,” says Gardiner Houlgate auctioneer Luke Hobbs. “I’m confident that this guitar will attract a lot of attention from fans and collectors alike — particularly as it has such a great story behind it. There's lots of provenance to this guitar.”

Visit Gardiner Houlgate for more information ahead of its sale on September 9.

Elsewhere, Knopfler has revealed the iconic guitar tone of one of the band's biggest hits was a stroke of dumb luck, explained why the most challenging aspects of Dire Straits' live shows had nothing to do with guitar playing, and detailed how a cheap guitar inspired his most famous guitar solo.

He's also discussed the one guitar he is “never without.” Like the Burns 12-string, it's another guitar he acquired from a friend and fellow rock legend.

Dire Straits mastermind Mark Knopfler raised over $11 million when he auctioned off 123 of his guitars and donated a quarter of the proceeds to charities.

While 28 of the axes sold for over $100,000, a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard with a sunburst finish smashed records as it went for $876,000.

But Knopfler couldn't let go of all his guitars — he’s already detailed a few of those too-good-to-lose instruments with Guitar Player.

Now he’s revealed that one other electric guitar stayed in his possession amid the charitable clearout: a blonde Gibson ES-330. He acquired it accidentally through a swap, and it’s a guitar that stays glued to his side when he's in the studio.

“Tony Joe White gave me his blonde Gibson 330 that he used for 'Rainy Night in Georgia',” Knopfler says in the latest issue of Guitar World. “We’d become pals, and Tony had switched to a Strat, and I was ’round at his house playing one day.”

The swamp rock guitar legend ,White is best known for that 1967 cut, which became more widely known when R&B singer Brook Benton covered it three years later and had a hit.

Knopfler says he’d given White an acoustic guitar as a present, and White wasn’t going to let his generosity go unnoticed.

“He reached under the sofa and pulled out this dusty old case,” Knopfler remembers. “And he says, ‘Mark, I want you to have this guitar. I don’t play it anymore.’”

If White's words didn’t make the state of the neglected guitar clear enough, the site before him did. He talks of a “sweat-pitted” fingerboard that had “shell shapes between all the frets.” Reluctantly, he took the guitar, but it was in desperate need of some TLC.

“I said, ‘I can’t take this, Tony.’ And he said, ‘Hell, take it; I don’t want the damn thing.’

"So I put a new fingerboard on it, and I’m never without that on a recording session,” he says.

Introduced in 1959, Gibson’s ES-330 model is overshadowed by its older brother, the ES-335, a semihollow model which had arrived earlier. Unlike the 335, which features a pair of humbuckers and a centerblock, the 330 has two P90 pickups and is fully hollow. Loyalists include Slim Harpo, the late swamp blues guiatrist, who was honored in 2021 with a signature ES-330.

Knopfler considers himself one as well.

“I love that guitar,” he says with pride. “Actually, in a lot of ways, I’d rather have a 330 than a 335 because the P90s are such wonderful pickups.”

His affection for the guitar – clearly a potent blend of its history, sentimentality, and sonic prowess — meant he couldn’t see it go last year, but that doesn’t mean he was happy to see others go.

“When you’re saying goodbye to that ’83 Les Paul and that Schecter Tele [it hurts],” he confesses, before putting on a brave face. “But it’s fine. You’re not going to sit and play all those guitars. It’s time to thin it out a bit. Give them another home. Let them be played by other people.”

That’s exactly the mindset that Jeff Beck’s widow, Sandra, had when she sent his collection of guitars, amps, and beyond to the auction block earlier this year. A similar figure, $10.7 million, was raised — including $1.3 million for his infamous Oxblood Les Paul — and, as per Sandra’s wishes, the guitars have fallen into the hands of other players.

Lenny Kravitz's foil Craig Ross has already been the benefactor of the auction, having been loaned Beck's $490,000 Yardburst Les Paul for a full European tour back in April.

Knopfler has been on the campaign trail to celebrate 40 years of Dire Straits’ legendary Brothers in Arms LP, on which he made a surprise confession about the best guitar solo he’s ever written. Spoiler, it isn’t “Sultans of Swing.”

He’s also said he’s “gotten away with murder” over the years, deeming himself a bang average player, despite those quick to label him as a guitar god.

Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms turned 40 years old in May. It was a record that solidified Mark Knopfler’s reputation as one of the finest guitar talents of his generation The band became poster boys of an all-new MTV era, and it has shipped 30 million copies worldwide.

That landmark anniversary has seen Knopfler on the campaign trail, and after telling a Spanish publication that he deems a guitar solo he wrote for a movie as his greatest slice of lead work. Now he’s said those clamoring to define him as a guitar hero, as the band’s fifth studio album hit fever pitch, were “just awkward.”

Granted, the 75-year-old is known to be a self-effacing interviewee. Apart from laughing about his ability to play Dire Straits’ most challenging song without looking, the guitarist has downplayed his picking techniques and said the songs of his hero are “enough to make anybody want to retire.”

So it isn’t a surprise to see him react humbly to such a thought. But speaking to Guitar World, he said he believes those who crowned him as a guitar god were barking up the wrong tree.

“The world is bursting with fabulous players,” he says. “Whether I’ve written a good song or not, that’s what counts to me. I gave up trying to be a great guitar player.”

Indeed, he’d rather be ranked for what he can do as a songwriter than solely for his electric guitar talents. The fact that Brothers in Arms is one of the best-selling albums in U.K. history — The Dark Side of the Moon, Rumours and Sgt. Pepper's… are the only guitar-based albums that top its 4.5 million sales — speaks volumes about his craft.

“I have enough to get by in the studio — that’s how I see myself as a guitar player,” he continues. “Not much more than that. But I can get away with it. If you’re the one who wrote the songs, you’re kind of allowed to be crap.

“The other guys are there, really standing by their instruments: ‘I play piano,’ ‘I play bass.’ Like, ‘I’m good at this and that’s why I’m here.’

“And boy, they are. I got away with murder.”

Knopfler has previously named one player far more deserving of a place in the guitar hero pantheon than he: Jeff Beck. The late great had featured on his all-star re-recording of “Going Home,” and Knopfler has revealed the pair were planning a collaborative album together before his death in January 2023.

During his conversation with GW, however, he turned his attention to the unsung guitar heroes: the session players.

“Those guys that really know their business,” he says. “Making a living with their instruments — that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

“I remember, in the solo band one day, I said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry about the [mistake] in so and so.’ And Richard [Bennett, guitar] said, ‘Well, the singer is always right!’”

Tim Pierce, one of the busiest session players in the business, might be prone to agree, and he's previously spoken about the demands of being a jobbing studio musician.

“We had quite an arms race in our neighborhood,” he reveals. “People would go, ‘Okay, that sounds good, but do you have a Fender Jazzmaster? Do you have an old Tele? How about an old Supro baritone?’ If I didn't bring everything and they asked for something, I’d have this sinking feeling because I wanted to say yes to every request.

“You try to be smart enough to judge what the artist wants from the guitar,” he continues. “Do they want it big and distorted? Do they want it clean and in the background? These are decisions you have to make, often in the first few minutes.

“Sometimes you’ll play something that you believe in with all of your being, and they’ll say, ‘Nah, we don’t like that. What else you got?’ Your ego gets crushed, but you have to bring it back and try something different.”

Those situations can lead to horror stories, as another accomplished session player, Steve Lukather, knows all too well.

Meanwhile, Knopfler has discussed the moment he discovered the power of fingerpicking, and a somewhat overlooked pedal in the architecture of his sound, which helps him mimic the human voice.

Neil Dorfsman, who was behind the desk for Brothers in Arms, has also revealed that one of the record's most famous guitar tones came to be after a stroke of dumb luck. Perhaps that's what Knopfler alluded to when he said he's gotten away with murder.

You can probably count the number of electric guitar players who don’t use a pick on your fingers and toes. A quick sampling includes Jeff Beck, Lindsey Buckingham, Ritchie Kotzen and Robbie Krieger in the rock world; blues slide players include Albert King, Albert Collins, Bonnie Raitt and Derek Trucks; and jazz giants who go plectrum-less have included Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass.

And then there’s Mark Knopfler. Few electric guitarists in Guitar Player’s history have spoken about their discovery of fingerstyle to the degree Knopfler has. In 2023, the last time we spoke with the former Dire Straits guitarist, he told us he had finally ditched the pick entirely due to “lack of use, plus three bouts of COVID.”

“I just kept losing them and would be fingerpicking more — not necessarily fingerpicking better, just more,” he added. “And it proved to be just a bit more comfortable for me.”

But where did it all begin for him? It turns out he told us that story 30-some years ago, when he dug deep in his history with fingerstyle for a June 1992 cover feature.

As he recalled, the moment he discovered “the Knopfler sound” occurred entirely by chance.

“I was sleeping on the floor in somebody’s apartment. They had a cheap imitation of a Gibson Dove acoustic with unbelievably light strings. It was like playing an electric guitar, but there was a little bit of sound to it,” he explained.

Due to the late hour, he had to play quietly. “You couldn’t really strum or bash it, so I had to fingerpick.

“As I was flying around this guitar, I realized I was doing things with my fingers that I could do with a pick, and also some other things that I wouldn’t be able to do with a pick.”

The moment resonated with him in particular because it gave him an instant connection between his intentions and his expression on the guitar.

“Playing with your fingers has something to do with immediacy and soul,” he said. “You’re absolutely in touch with what’s going on. And that can lead to other things too.”

In Knopfler’s case, “other things” includes playing fingerstyle with an electric guitar, which is where he’s made the biggest impact.

But there’s another element to Knopfler’s sound that can’t be overlooked. As he told us, “On the electric, I developed the sound a bit further with a volume pedal. Just a simple Ernie Ball pedal. It gives you more of a speaking voice, something that approximates a steel guitar.

“I always wanted that. I can’t sing, so the guitar becomes a voice in many ways. You’re not looking at Bonnie Raitt here.”

Which helps to underscore something intrinsic to Knopfler’s style: He’s as apt to use a sharp attack as he is to quickly fade in a note like a violinist gradually applying pressure to their bow. It's a hallmark of his style and one that guitarists have taken note of ever since the release of Dire Straits' breakthrough single, “Sultans of Swing.”

“That’s more like a voice coming in, isn’t it?” Knopfler quipped, before adding, “But sometimes I’ll make a meal of the attack: With my thumb and fingers I’ll do a little flurry.

“I’m just as interested in attack as lack of attack.”

How he creates that flurry is itself a point of interest, something that he sees apparent both in boogie and flamenco.

“It’s the same as the boogie rhythm. In other words, the fingers do a pickup before the downbeat. The downbeat is with the thumb. This applies to rhythm playing, which is my greatest joy, as well as solo playing. You anticipate the downbeat with a pickup, a brush from either one or two fingers.

“A flamenco guitarist will swirl the fingers up and then — wham! — hit the downbeat. It’s a cheapened, mediocre version of that.”

Knopfler said he has tried thumb- and fingerpicks, with no success.

“I dispensed with thumbpicks and fingerpicks a long time ago. A fingerpick doesn’t give you a down blast if you want one. And the thumbpick separates your thumb from your fingers.”

As for fingerstyle, it’s not without its drawbacks.

“Because I’m playing with my fingers, I need good amplification,” Knopfler explains. “The best amplifiers are picks. As soon as you lose the pick, you lose a lot of level. It changes the tone and, in terms of genre, it changes the legitimacy of what you do.

“So if I’m playing a straight blues or something with my fingers on an electric guitar, I have to think slightly differently.

“But I could never keep picks anyway, so I just play the way I do and dial up the right sound on the tube amp.”

As for Knopfler’s moment of fingerstyle enlightenment, take note of when it occurred: at night, when he was tired. It turns out some important discoveries have come to him in those moments between lucidity and sleep. It turns out he’s been learning that way forever.

“Ever since the beginning,” he says. “I’ll fall asleep playing and my fingers will just be flying about.”

He offered an example of an epiphany that came to him at the bewitching hour.

“Falling asleep on holiday on this last break,” he told us back in 1992, “I discovered that the [third and fourth finger] anchor I use actually mutes the acoustic.”

The knowledge made him change his technique.

“I’m playing more fingers off. Anchors aweigh! With an acoustic it sounds so much better.

“This is elementary stuff,” he acknowledged, “but it took me 20 years to find out.”

Bill Forsyth’s 1983 comedy-drama Local Hero boasts two rather lofty accolades. Not only does the film have an indelible 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but its soundtrack features what Mark Knopfler believes is the greatest guitar solo he’s ever written.

It might feel like a sensationalist claim from a guitarist whose back catalog includes chart-smashing hits like “Sultans of Swing” and “Money for Nothing,” which have 2.3 billion Spotify streams between them, but the events of recent years have perhaps skewed things for the Newcastle-born musician.

The film is set in a fictional town on the coast of Scotland. It follows the representative of an American oil company as he pays a visit ahead of the company's purchase of the surrounding land and property.

Knopfler, by that point four albums deep into his Dire Straits career, was tasked with scoring the entire film. He penned “Going Home,” the movie’s main theme after taking inspiration from the Scottish landscape and interweaving snippets of traditional Scottish songs as he went.

“It’s [recorded on] a cheap guitar, it sounds very direct,” he tells Spanish newspaper El Pais. “I did everything wrong, but I think they’re perfect notes.”

In hindsight, he feels the fact that he didn’t slave over the song, and went for feel over thought, has proved its saving grace.

“I think it turned out well because I didn’t take it to the extreme of getting into trouble,” he continues. “I just said what I had to say. I didn’t go too far. I tried to portray the place, the people, the rocks, and the water. For me, it was a portrait of a place, an idea, a local hero.

“For me, the most important thing in a solo is the melody. I value simplicity over complexity. I’m not good enough to improvise like a jazz musician.”

The film scooped one BAFTA award — for Best Direction — from seven nominations and was, in 1999, listed as one of the top 100 British films of the 20th century. It was also adapted for the stage in 2019, premiering at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh.

Newcastle United Football Club, meanwhile, which Knopfler supports, has since adopted the song for the team's walk-out music, while Knopfler gave the song a special charity re-release last year. It helped raise funds for the Pete Townshend-backed Teenage Cancer Trust.

Townshend would go on to feature on the track — “Pete came through the door first armed with a guitar and an amp, he told Guitar Player — and it opened the door to over 60 more contributions from huge names.

Recorded either at Mark Knopfler’s London base, British Grove Studios, or remotely, even Dweezil Zappa’s still unreleased shredathon, “What the Hell Was I Thinking”, pales in comparison.

Eric Clapton, Steve Cropper, Buddy Guy, Alex Lifeson, Tony Iommi and David Gilmour – reading the credits is a who’s who of guitar greats. Beyond that, father-and-son pairing Ringo Starr and Zak Starkey handle drums, Sting plays bass, and Roger Daltrey plays harmonica.

“They just kept coming,” Knopfler had chuckled when reflecting on the project with GP. “Pete came and we plugged [his amp] in, and Pete played a chord. And we were happening, because when Pete plays a chord, it stays played.

“And then I think Eric Clapton came through the doors the next day, and Jeff Beck had recorded something at his place, which was so beautiful. Then David Gilmour came over, and everyone was playing great, and I was really knocked out.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, the likes of Joe Bonamassa, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai were tracking their own contributions. Then, “I came in one day and Bruce Springsteen was all over it.”

The organizers behind the project “just didn’t stop,” Knopfler says. The glut of talent the song boasts has them to thank.

“I remember saying, ‘How are we gonna deal with all this? This is going to be 30 miles long!’”

Revisiting the track and seeing so many other stars swarm the studio to play their part in its new iteration, perhaps made Knopfler reconsider the impact of the song, and its solo.

It also features what is largely considered one of, if not the last, guitar parts Jeff Beck recorded before his death on January 10, 2023. However, Mick Rogers has since cast doubt on that; he believes he has Beck's last-ever recording.

“Jeff was just something other, y’know?” Knopfler says, solemnly. “We’d just begun some talks, through management, about doing an album together. I’m really sorry we didn’t get to work together.”

The guitar Knopfler used to track his parts on the new version of “Going Home” – a 2021 Les Paul Standard Goldtop – was later sold at auction for over £400,000 (about $540,000).

Meanwhile, the “Brothers in Arms” producer has revealed how a stroke of luck resulted in one of the record’s most iconic guitar tones, and Knopfler has named the most challenging Dire Straits song to perform, and it has nothing to do with the riffs.

Mark Knopfler has been celebrated for his guitar tone since Dire Straits dropped their self-titled debut album in 1977.

From the moment guitarists heard the album hit “Sultans of Swing,” it was evident that Knopfler was a player to listen to and learn from. Beyond his evident talents as a guitarist — which would grow over the years as he moved from using a pick to playing exclusively with his fingers — Knopfler has displayed a keen sense for getting just the right tone from a Fender Stratocaster or any other guitar he’s strapped on.

Once “Sultans of Swing” reached the top 10 in the U.S. and U.K., Knopfler continued to refine his sound leading up to the group’s fifth studio album, 1985’s Brothers in Arms.

The record — which features the guitarist's 1937 National Style O resonator guitar on its cover — was an indisputable smash. It would spend nine weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 chart, becoming the first album to be certified 10-times Platinum in the U.K. and selling more than 30 million copies worldwide over the years. For that matter it was was the first album in history to sell more than one million copies in the then-new CD format.

Among the album’s key tracks, nothing stood out quite like “Money for Nothing,” the second single released from Brothers in Arms. Once again, Knopfler’s guitar was front and center, as he defines the song's bluesy rhythm with a now instantly recognizable intro riff.

In creating its snarling, midrange tone, Knopfler was attempting to cop a Billy Gibbons vibe, using his fingers to play a Gibson Les Paul Junior through a Laney amp.

But as producer Neil Dorfsman points out, the sound of Knopfler’s guitar was entirely accidental, a tone they discovered by sheer chance while the guitarist was warming up for the session.

And it all came down to mic placement.

“One mic was pointing down at the floor, another was not quite on the speaker, another was somewhere else, and it wasn't how I would want to set things up," Dorfsman reveals. The set up was "probably left from the night before when I'd prepped things for the next day and hadn't finished...

“Whether it was the phase of mics or the out-of-phaseness, what we heard was exactly what ended up on the record. There was no additional processing on that tune during the mix.”

Dorfsman's recollection was shared on Dire Straits’ TikTok account, where it was included as a caption in a short video to celebrate the release of the 40th anniversary edition of Brothers in Arms.

Reportedly, Dorfsman and Knopfler later attempted to re-create the sound using the same gear and mics but were unsuccessful. Put it down to the magic of the moment, captured for eternity on tape. Either way, it just goes to show what can happen sometimes when you stop thinking and just let the magic happen.

Of course a key part of that tone is Knopfler's decision to use his fingers instead of a pick. As the guitarist revealed in a 1979 interview with Guitar Player, he began changing from pick to fingers in the mid-1970s while performing with his pre–Dire Straits group, Cafe Racers.

"I used to use a pick until a few years ago, when I started getting more and more involved with playing without one," he told us. "Then, a sort of synthesis happened between fingerpicking and getting plectrum-type effects by just using my fingers.

“Eventually, I found myself doing things with just my thumb and two fingers that I couldn't do with a pick. But I still use a plectrum now and again for strumming or for playing on acoustic tracks."

In related news, Knopfler has revealed the source of his inspiration for ditching his youthful aspirations of playing like Jimi Hendrix picks and developing his own more folk-blues influenced style. Surprisingly it's not a famous guitarist but an unknown player from his own neck of the woods.

Growing up, Mark Knopfler was just like any other young guitarist. He chose the biggest players to identify with and emulate.

In the end, however, it was a humble guitarist from his own environs — the North East of England — who had the biggest impact on his guitar journey.

In a new career-spanning interview with BBC Radio 2’s The Rock Show, Knopfler details how fingerpicking revolutionized his guitar playing and how that connected him to the unlikely influence behind one of his greatest riffs.

Until very recently, the Dire Straits man had never truly ditched the guitar pick. Rather, his most defining works, including the stomp and shuffle of “Sultans of Swing,” shone a spotlight onto the pick-free parts of his back catalog.

“Some people fall in love with classical music and want to be a classical musician, or they want to play classical guitar or Spanish guitar,” he says. “I just want to play skiffle and rock and roll.

“I just wanted to be B.B. King or Jimi Hendrix. I loved them both,” he says. “I was playing with a pick then all the time, on electric. I was learning to fingerpick, but that was all I wanted to do. I’d be playing ‘Voodoo Child’ or I’d be playing ‘Purple Haze,’ or ‘Hey Joe.’”

Over time, fingerpicking grew in prominence. Meanwhile, Knopfler — who calls himself “inherently lazy” — became increasingly frustrated that he could never find a pick when he neded one.

That's when the lightbulb went on: the idea that changed his music — and his tone — for the better: He discovered the benefits of fingerpicking, which went beyond not having to search high and low for a guitar pick,

“The attack of your fingers is gonna be more rounded, softer, which maybe is a characteristic of mine,” he says of his eureka moment.

As for that guitarist who influenced him? He was the boyfriend of a friend's older sister.

“It was a folk singer up in Northumberland, Joe Davidson," Knopfler reveals. "I remember, he taught me how to do that. That’s playing four notes to the bar with your thumb, and that changed everything for me because that’s what I wanted to be able to do. So it was like learning to ride a bike.”

The echoes of that moment live on in a song like “Money for Nothing,” even as the musical world he drew it from comes as a surprise. The song was the band’s biggest commercial success and an early darling of the MTV generation. But beneath the overdriven qualities of its riff, it isn’t a rock song.

“It’s a hoedown lick,” Knopfler tells The Rock Show host Shaun Keaveny. “That’s what it is.”

As he revealed in his Guitar Player chat last year, another key change to his playing style came early on came from his sister. The left-handed youngster was miming to a song on a tennis racket, pretending it was an electric guitar, when his sister flipped it around. That stuck with him, and it makes what he can do with his right hand all the more impressive.

At the end of the day, Knopfler isn’t ignorant of the benefits a pick can provide a player.

“It’s louder. It’s faster. It’s got a better signal. It’s the best amplifier there is,” he says.

But as a player who grew up idolizing plectrum-touting players — including the Shadows’ Hank Marvin, who was also a big influence on David Gilmour’s lyrical solo style — Knopfler found something different by following the path that suited him best.

In related news, the guitarist recently named the hardest Dire Straits song to play, which has nothing to do with complexity. On top of that, he’s spoken about the few guitars he could never get rid of and revealed that he and Jeff Beck planned to make an album together before the virtuoso’s death.

Mark Knopfler is such a talented guitarist that you might wonder what song, if any, gives him a run for his money. Better still, which of his own songs gives Knopfler the most grief when he performs it live?

You might think its "Sultans of Swing," DIre Straits' 1978 breakthrough hit. After all, everyone is completely tuned in for his electric guitar solo, a remarkable piece of work that Guitar Player's readers placed in the top 10 of our Greatest Solos of All Time list. What guitarist wouldn't be on edge when attempting to replicate that milestone?

But in fact, the Dire Straits tune Knopfler calls his most challenging is “Telegraph Road” from 1982’s Love Over Gold,. But as he explains, it’s the instrument he plays, rather than the part itself, that makes it such a hard mountain to scale.

Typically, Knopfler employs a 1930s National Style O to perform the song's intricate fingerpicking parts. And, as he tells Vulture, playing such an old guitar — rather than his usual Stratocaster-style model — can be very difficult.

“Some of the guitars are pretty hard to play,” he says. “Playing the beginning of 'Telegraph Road' always seems hard when you’re going from a spiffy electric to that old war horse. You’ve just got to brace your hands for an old guitar from the 1930s. So that’s all part of the challenge of that song, when the guitar itself doesn’t want to play pretty”.

He says the problem was worse in the past, when stage lighting relied on bright lights that generated a ton of heat. Back then, presenting the 14-minute tune was particularly daunting.

“Learning to play those longer songs before the modern lights came in was difficult,” he explains. “They got rid of the big old heavy lights, because if one of those dropped and hit you, you’re a dead person. And the new lights seem as though they don’t generate any heat at all.

"The old lights generated so much heat," he continues. "We were always drenched when we came offstage — literally soaked to the skin. Sweat would be stinging your eyes, so you learn to play with your eyes squeezed shut. I’m pretty sure I played a lot of that stuff without looking. That’s all part of the fun of it: figuring out ways around things.

“I remember someone putting a little note up at the front row that said, ‘More liquid gumption, please.’ I was spraying the audience with so much sweat that it was stinging them. I always used to think, Only rock and roll could do this.”

As Knopfler once said, “Having good chops definitely helps, but it’s not the whole story”. Playing an intricate epic on an instrument now approaching 100 years old when you're blinded by sweat is certainly one way of proving your mettle in less-incendiary circumstances.

In related news, the guitarist last year parted with 123 electric guitars as part of a huge $11 million auction. However, he told Guitar Player that there were some instruments he couldn't bare to part with.

The thorny subject of the greatest guitar solo of all time has long been a fiercely contested debate, probably because every solo is different. How do you compare, say, “Comfortably Numb” with “Crazy Train,” or “Stairway to Heaven” with “Sultans of Swing”? It’s impossible. Still, public opinion ebbs and flows, and we wanted to find out which solos currently rank among our readers as the greatest of them all.

So we ran a poll on GuitarPlayer.com to find out and here we present the results. We’ll take a look at the stories behind the songs and find out just what made those lead guitar breaks so great through conversations with Brian May, Kirk Hammett, Michael Schenker and others.

20. Gary Moore | “Still Got the Blues”

GUITARIST: GARY MOORE (1990)

The definitive blues guitar ballad.

Presented as the title track from his 1990 album, this wistful tune in A minor became Gary Moore’s calling card fairly late in his career, when he reinvented himself as a blues artist. There’s a point in the solo where you can hear the Belfast great switch from the neck humbucker to the bridge on the 1959 Les Paul Standard he nicknamed Stripe and start deviating from its main theme, mainly sticking within the A minor pentatonic scale, with a few notes from the Aeolian and harmonic minor scales.

Moore was plugged into his prototype Marshall JTM-45 reissue head with one of the company’s newly designed Guv’nor distortion pedals out in front. More than 30 years later, this remains one of the most raw and expressive blues tracks, with Moore almost fighting his guitar at points, yet never failing to deliver the goods

19. Metallica | “Fade To Black”

GUITARIST: Kirk Hammett (1984)

Metallica’s first ballad features some of Kirk’s most epic playing.

Recorded at Flemming Rasmussen’s Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen in February and March 1984, Ride the Lightning, Metallica’s sophomore album, was more progressive and stylistically greater in scope than the all-out thrash assault of their debut, Kill ’Em All. That change is evident on “Fade to Black,” which features acoustic guitars and a nonstandard structure more akin to the “Stairway to Heaven” school of songcraft. But it is the song’s timeless melodic solo that most vividly signals a stylistic shift in guitarist Kirk Hammett’s playing. And the signature element he employs for the last solo is arpeggios.

“I have been playing that song for so long now,” Kirk tells our sister publication Total Guitar. “For the very last solo, I know how I want to start it, but then I am in an area where I can improvise for 16, 18 or 24 bars, and then [drummer] Lars [Ulrich] will hit a certain fill, which means that it’s up and it’s time for the arpeggio part. And then I just slide right into those arpeggios.” And they are arpeggios played on two strings, Hammett specifies. “When guitar players first started incorporating arpeggios into their playing, before the whole Yngwie sweep-picking thing, arpeggios were played on two strings – not three or four strings,” he explains. “And that was what the vogue was at the time in the 1980s, so I have been playing those for a long time. I use my middle finger just to anchor my position on the neck.”

That’s a great tip from the man who plays the solos. But how should you tackle them yourself? First, there are two essential scales you’ll need to know: the B natural minor scale and the B Phrygian mode, both shown below. These cover you for the entire opening 30 bars, which, let’s face it, is a lot of music, so this is a good reason to learn a couple of shapes if ever there was one.

To make it simpler, most of your time is spent in the natural minor scale. Not until around bar 20 will you find yourself briefly landing on the C note, which appears in the Phrygian mode. The bottom line is that Hammett improvises this part of the solo live – and these are the shapes he uses.

Up next are those two-string arpeggio shapes, and they’re 16th notes – all of them! At 142 bpm, it’s pretty fast, but Hammett doesn’t pick every note, opting to use pull-offs to make those rapid licks easier. It’s definitely something to experiment with and if you’re still struggling, you could try adding in an occasional hammer‑on, too.

18. Steely Dan | “Kid Charlemagne”

GUITARIST: Larry Carlton (1976)

Messin’ with the “Kid.”

Steely Dan’s catalog is filled with remarkable guitar solos, but Larry Carlton’s brilliant work on The Royal Scam’s “Kid Charlemagne” remains the most celebrated. Carlton strings together a series of tasty phrases that follow the underlying chord changes with a blend of inside and outside playing that is technically mind bending and emotionally satisfying.

“I was pretty familiar with the tune, so I just improvised,” he tells Guitar Player. “People think I’m kidding when I say that, like I had worked the solo out beforehand, but I didn’t. It was straight improv, and it worked.” Very well, in fact. Perhaps more has been written about his solo than of the song itself.

Despite the acclaim, Carlton was, and remains, nonplussed. “When the record came out, there was a wonderful review of the tune in Billboard and they raved about the solo,” he says. “I put the record on and listened to it with my wife, and at the end of it I said, ‘I don’t know. It just sounds like me.’”

17. Cream | “Crossroads”

GUITARIST: Eric Clapton (1968)

The finest rock and roll cover of an acoustic blues song.

It started as a blues tune called “Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson and became one of the finest examples of natural ability, soulfulness and showmanship from a virtuosic 22-year-old guitarist named Eric Clapton. His reimagining of the song as “Crossroads” further cemented a legacy that by then had earned him the nickname God.

Famously recorded at San Francisco’s Fillmore West venue for supergroup Cream’s Wheels of Fire album, Clapton’s arrangement retains the soul and spirit of Johnson’s original but updates it for a contemporary audience raring to cut loose and be entertained by dazzlingly quick, passionate musicianship.

Remarkably, Clapton is no fan of the performance: He complains that the band lost the “one” in the first verse of his second solo break, thereby throwing off his phrasing. That’s perfectionism for you. For everyone else, this four-minute track remains a source of fascination more than 50 years on.

16. Eric Johnson | “Cliffs Of Dover”

GUITARIST: Eric Johnson (1990)

Heavenly tones from the Texan great.

This instrumental won Eric Johnson a Grammy for its exquisitely tasteful guitar playing and jaw-dropping tones. For the recordings, the Texan musician mainly stuck with his early ’60s ES-335, though he chose to use his 1964 “Virginia” Strat for the opening lead and parts of the main solo. The guitars were fed into a 100-watt Marshall Super Lead, with an Echoplex and BK Butler Tube Driver to help achieve those smooth, violin-like tones and warm sustain.

“I first heard him in 1986 on Live at Austin City Limits,” Joe Bonamassa told us in 2015. “It was ‘Cliffs of Dover,’ and it was just terrifyingly good guitar playing. I wasn’t even sure if it was real! Then I saw him live, and his tones were the best I’d ever heard. I wondered how this guy was getting all of these sounds out of his Strat. I’d never seen anybody have such a forward-thinking rig like that.”

15. Prince | “Purple Rain”

GUITARIST: Prince (1984)

The Purple One’s defining guitar moment.

The epic outro to “Purple Rain” – which takes up nearly two thirds of the song itself – stands out as some of Prince’s finest work on the six-string, wailing away in G minor pentatonic and occasionally including some more modal notes, like the minor 6th. There’s also that repeating motif that dances around the 2nd and minor 3rd intervals.

It’s simple and effective, setting things up for the vocal melody that comes in toward the end. It’s not a busy solo by any means. Rather, the Purple One chose to leave a lot of space in between the lines he played and focus on big hooks instead of monster licks.

Prince would extend the solo for up to 15 minutes in live performance. While there are many great live renditions of this track, his half-time performance for 2007’s Super Bowl in Miami is the stuff of legend. Shredding alone onstage in the middle of a storm, Prince seemed to be living the moment for which this song was written.

14. Deep Purple | “Highway Star”

GUITARIST: Ritchie Blackmore (1972)

Race with devil on English highway.

“I wrote that out note for note about a week before we recorded it,” Ritchie Blackmore said of his remarkable and most definitely memorable solo to “Highway Star.” “And that is one of the only times I have ever done that. I wanted it to sound like someone driving in a fast car, for it to be one of those songs you would listen to while speeding. And I wanted a very definite Bach sound, which is why I wrote it out – and why I played those very rigid arpeggios across that very familiar Bach progression – D minor, G minor, C major, A major. I believe that I was the first person to do that so obviously on the guitar, and I believe that that’s why it stood out and why people have enjoyed it so much.

“Over the years, I’ve always played that solo note for note, but it just got faster and faster onstage because we would drink more and more whisky. [Keyboardist] Jon [Lord] would have to play his already difficult part faster and faster, and he would get very annoyed about it.”

13. Guns N’ Roses | “Sweet Child O’ Mine”

GUITARIST: Slash (1988)

A game of two halves.

Slash’s solo on this Guns N’ Roses breakthrough single is rock guitar at its finest. The first half is laid-back and modal, built around the Eb minor scale with a few major 7ths thrown in for a harmonic-minor flavor. The second half is much more aggressive and bluesy, and sticks mainly to position one of the pentatonic scale an octave up the neck in the same key. The bends feel that much wider and the vibrato more pronounced.

Slash plays the first section on the neck pickup for thickness and warmth before switching over to the bridge for more bite, with his Cry Baby engaged. Perhaps most impressive is his off-the-cuff sense of feel and how he strings it all together, which is the mark of any great guitar solo. Remarkably, although Slash’s riff was responsible for the song’s creation, he wasn’t fond of the song originally. “We were a pretty hard driving band, and that was sort of an uptempo ballady type of a thing,” he said. “So it’s grown on me over the years.”

12. Ozzy Osbourne | “Crazy Train”

GUITARIST: Randy Rhoads (1980)

Fretboard fireworks galore on Ozzy’s Blizzard of Ozz comeback.

The Double-O has often cited Randy Rhoads as the man who saved his career – and when you hear the solo on “Crazy Train,” you understand why. Although Rhoads’ classical- and modal-based approach was far from Tony Iommi’s blues leanings, he was, like Ozzy’s old bandmate, a true inventor.

There’s a section toward the end of this solo that actually sounds like a train squealing off the tracks, thanks to the use of a chromatically ascending trill that then descends in key. Rhoads concludes the solo with a fast-picked F# minor pentatonic phrase before a rapid Aeolian legato run ending with a big bend on the 19th fret.

The shredder performed the solo with his customized Jackson guitar through a Marshall and a couple of 4x12s while sitting in the control room. “We’d plug the guitar directly into the console,” recalls Blizzard of Ozz engineer Max Norman. “We’d preamp it in the console and send it down to the amp from there. That way we could control the amount of gain that hit the amp.”

11. Michael Jackson | “Beat It”

GUITARIST: Eddie Van Halen (1982)

Breathtaking results from an unlikely pairing.

Asked to contribute guitar to Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, Pete Townshend declined but offered a suggestion: How about Eddie Van Halen? Jackson and producer Quincy Jones thought that was a great idea, and got Ed onboard to play the solo to “Beat It.” But after hearing the part where he was asked to solo, the guitarist was unhappy with the chord changes and had the engineer edit the tape to create a new pattern that better suited what he had in mind.

Ed knew Jackson might be surprised and possibly unhappy with his executive decision. “So I warned him before he listened,” he told CNN in 2012. “I said, ‘Look, I changed the middle section of your song.’ Now in my mind, he’s either going to have his bodyguards kick me out for butchering his song, or he’s going to like it. And so he gave it a listen, and he turned to me and went, ‘Wow, thank you so much for having the passion to not just come in and blaze a solo but to actually care about the song and make it better.’” And he did it for free.

10. The Beatles | “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

GUITARIST: Eric Clapton (1968)

An uncredited Slowhand makes a rare guest appearance with the Fab Four.

By 1968, George Harrison was penning compositions that rivaled those of his bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was every bit as good as anything his musical partners wrote, but no one could get up the enthusiasm for it, so Harrison invited his pal Eric Clapton to play on the session, knowing it would put the Beatles on good behavior.

Using Harrison’s 1957 “Lucy” Gibson Les Paul through a Fender Deluxe amp, Clapton doesn’t so much mimic the haunting, aching main melody as he creates a harrowing song within a song. His descending bends and release notes, and that inimitable vibrato, are on full display and are appropriately tear-jerking, weaving a dramatic narrative that builds to a shattering climax.

9. Chicago | “25 OR 6 TO 4”

GUITARIST: Terry Kath (1969)

Wah-drenched ecstasy.

This magazine once described Terry Kath’s “25 or 6 to 4” solo as “Wes Montgomery meets Jimi Hendrix,” and it’s a fair point, as Kath was influenced first by jazz and, later, hard rock. As a founding member of the jazz-rock band Chicago, he held down guitar duties for the group until his tragic death from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1978.

Though his superb playing graced many tracks – notably “Introduction” and “Free Form Guitar,” both from the group’s 1969 debut, The Chicago Transit Authority – there’s no denying the power of his soloing on the group’s early hit “25 or 6 to 4.” Kath uses his wah generously to add emotion to his lines, giving them at times a frenetic despair.

Kath most likely played his Gibson SG Standard, as pictured on Chicago Transit Authority’s inner sleeve, using his favored string set, as revealed to GP: the high E string from a tenor set and a standard set for the rest, moved down one string (i.e. high E for the B string, B for the G string, and so on).

8. Lynyrd Skynyrd | “Free Bird”

GUITARIST: Allen Collins (1974)

The Bird is the word.

As it happens, the four-minute-and-24- second guitar solo that closes “Free Bird” was originally added to give singer Ronnie Van Zant a chance to rest his vocal cords during Lynyrd Skynyrd’s relentless performance schedule. At 143 bars long, the solo is far and away the most epic offering here (in fact, it’s 286 bars of recorded music because the whole thing is doubled).

The tune appeared on the group’s eponymous debut album in 1973, and guitarist Allen Collins delivered the lot on his 1964 Gibson Explorer. As Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gary Rossington once told Guitar World, “The whole long jam was Allen Collins himself. He was bad. He was super bad! He was bad-to-the-bone bad. When we put the solo together, we liked the sound of the two guitars, and I could’ve gone out and played it with him. But the way he was doin’ it, he was just so hot! He just did it once and did it again, and it was done.”

7. Dire Straits | “Sultans Of Swing”

GUITARIST: Mark Knopfler

An understated guitar hero fingerpicks his way to glory.

Right when the world was crowning Eddie Van Halen the new King of Guitar, along came the rather unassuming Mark Knopfler – schooled in rockabilly, blues and jazz – who demonstrated that you didn’t need walls of distortion to turn heads.

Knopfler composed this pub-rock classic on a National steel guitar but thought it sounded “dull” – that is, until he picked up a Stratocaster, at which point the song “came alive.” Using nary a hint of grit on a Fender Twin, he fingerpicks not one but two standout solos.

The first features a lyrical section of elegant, Chet Atkins-style single-note and chordal bends that sigh and swoon with dreamy romanticism. In itself, that would be enough, but the outro solo is the real attention-grabber, on which Knopfler builds to a dazzling set of spitfire 16th-note arpeggios – cleanly played, precise and rousing every time you hear it.

6. The Jimi Hendrix Experience | “All Along The Watchtower”

GUITARIST: Jimi Hendrix (1968)

The greatest solo in a cover version.

This song tops any list of covers that are better than the original. Guitarists invariably refer to it as a Hendrix cover rather than a Bob Dylan original, proof of how much Hendrix made it his own. Jimi’s rhythm playing is astounding, both in the intro and in the deft chord/ melody work of the verses, and of course, there’s the small matter of four guitar solos to consider. The man many refer to as the best of all time makes the most of his Strat and Marshall rig here, but it’s his offering at the 2:20 mark that we’re interested in. Following an opening run of octaves, he gets into his stride with a typically blues-based minor pentatonic approach in C#.

At 2:32, the main solo explodes into a trademark combination of rhythm and lead, plus funky scratching on muted strings. It’s worth playing along with the scratches, trying to keep a loose wrist and consistent down-up strumming. Those few beats alone will teach you a lot about Jimi’s groove and feel.

To get the sound, select a bridge-position single-coil pickup, dial in delay at around 350ms, add compression for sustain and opt for a Vox wah pedal or something similar. You’ll hear the wind begin to howl.

5. Eagles | “Hotel California”

GUITARISTS: Don Felder & Joe Walsh (1977)

Those iconic twin-guitar harmony lines took the Eagles to new heights.

The title track from the Eagles’ fifth album, and without doubt the song the band will be most remembered for, “Hotel California” frequently tops greatest guitar solo polls. The solo begins at 4:20, forming an extended coda, over which guitarists Don Felder and Joe Walsh trade licks before joining together to play those iconic harmonized licks at 5:39.

As it turns out, those harmony lines work in a relatively simple fashion. Felder and Walsh play an arpeggio of every chord, and the harmony is created by one of the guitars always playing one note lower down in the chord. For example, the notes of the Bm chord are B, D and F#, so, if the higher guitar plays an F#, the lower guitar will play a D, and so on.

This nugget of information can take you a long way to mastering those descending arpeggios. We won’t go as far as to say you could easily work it out by ear, but if you know the chords to the song, it’s possible to jam along. And you can’t say that about many of the solos on this list!

4. Queen | “Bohemian Rhapsody”

GUITARIST: Brian May (1975)

It might just be the biggest rock song of all time.

Following Freddie Mercury’s 1991 death and a cameo moment in 1992’s Wayne’s World, “Bohemian Rhapsody” became a trigger point for a worldwide outpouring of affection and respect for Queen. Their renewed popularity would continue into the new millennium as Ben Elton’s We Will Rock You musical and the band’s discovery of a different way to exist behind frontman Adam Lambert brought their music to a new generation.

And “Bohemian Rhapsody”? Unsurprisingly, it’s Queen’s best-known song, and its brief nine-bar solo is a short and sweet musical interlude, bridging the verses to lead into what’s become known as the song’s “operatic section.” Those two words alone should warn you that this song shouldn’t work. There’s no chorus and, aside from two verses, no repetition. But of course it does work, and Brian May’s solo is the perfect melodic break.

His phrasing is loose and natural, moving across the backbeat rather than sticking to a rigidly timed grid. The fastest licks are expressive bursts, rather than repetitive noodling, and his articulate pre-bend and vibrato technique demonstrates his beautiful touch. Somehow, within the confines of the complex structure of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” this solo is made to order.

3. Led Zeppelin | “Stairway To Heaven”

GUITARIST: Jimmy Page (1971)

Heaven-sent soloing.

From the moment Jimmy Page plays the opening run on his ’59 Fender Telecaster, right through to the flurry of notes and the wailing bend that completes it, this is guitar-solo perfection – a masterpiece of composition. Rather than wander aimlessly, Page creates a song within a song.

The opening phrases set the scene, as he adds notes to the pentatonic scale to follow the song’s final chord progression. A rapid mid-solo repeating lick raises the bar before a game of question-and-answer with a haunting overdubbed guitar leads into that last flurry and bend. As we say, it’s all about the composition: licks that track the chord changes, the contour of the melody and the pacing of the widdly bits all take the listener on a journey.

Three takes were recorded (the other two allegedly still survive, presumably locked in a Led Zeppelin vault somewhere), all of them improvised, although Page has reportedly said that he had worked out the opening line. But while we’re all certainly curious to hear those solos, let’s face it: They’re not going to be any better than the one we’ve come to know and love all these years.

2. Van Halen | “Eruption”

GUITARIST: Eddie Van Halen (1978)

Eddie’s iconic solo that shook the world.

With its mix of fast legato hammer‑ons and pull-offs, pinched harmonics, whammy-bar dives and two-hand tapping, Eddie Van Halen’s mind-blowing instrumental guitar solo inspired a generation of guitar heroes. While the tapping gets the attention, his tone, blistering legato and creative note choices are all equally important. Amid all that virtuosity, Eddie still played with joyous rock and roll abandon.

Remarkably, Ed was never completely happy with the released recording. “I didn’t even play it right,” he told Guitar World. “There’s a mistake at the top end of it. Whenever I hear it, I always think, Man, I could’ve played it better.”

His admission aside, the track is a technical opus. The first eight bars are a bluesy affair, whose virtuoso legato licks perhaps recall the mojo of Jimmy Page’s breakdown solo in Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” It’s a theme Eddie develops over the following eight bars, taking notes from the major and minor pentatonic scales to add chromatics.

His tapping finale is probably one of the least understood solo sections in rock history. Eddie’s taps are not always on the beat, which makes for tricky timing changes as he switches from tapping the first and fourth sextuplet notes to the third and sixth notes. From start to end, “Eruption” is a masterpiece that would take most guitarists a lifetime to perfect.

1. Pink Floyd | “Comfortably Numb”

GUITARIST: David Gilmour (1979)

Gilmour’s greatness comes through in waves.

In a 1992 interview with MTV’s Ray Cokes, Gilmour was asked what he thinks of Keith Richards’ theory that songs, lyrics and guitar solos are “just out there in the air and you sort of grab them.” Gilmour agreed. “I think he’s right. They sort of appear as if they are out there in the air. But I don’t know how they get there.” But the best ones he said, just happen. “The best ones do, but often you work very hard and struggle over them.”

Gilmour's two "Comfortably Numb" solos are certainly among his best, and it’s easy to understand why our readers voted his efforts to be the number-one pick in our poll. But the real question is, which of those two solos qualifies for inclusion? Whichever way you go — and granted, most fans prefer the first solo to the second — there's certainly plenty to justify the song's position at the top.

The tone is legendary. Gilmour’s signal chain consisted of his iconic black Strat, then featuring a DiMarzio FS-1 bridge pickup, into a HiWatt DR103, with the essential EHX Ram’s Head Big Muff pedal. The FS-1’s fatness and the Big Muff’s smoothness leave no hint of the harsh treble that can plague Strats. With some extra help from an MXR Dyna Comp, Gilmour had so much sustain that he could hold notes as long as he wanted. As in his live rig, he combined a WEM 4x12 cab with a Yamaha rotary speaker lower in the mix, to add subtle modulation. The epic delay was added in the mix.

The first solo, in D major, uses the Strat’s neck and bridge pickups together, permitted by a custom switching arrangement. His phrasing here is the more unconventional of the two, with arpeggios and sliding passages. Gilmour’s use of the bar for vibrato – aided by its shortened tremolo arm – again distinguishes him from typical bluesers, inspiring many a fusion player in the process. He rakes into the beginning of many of the phrases, similar to Brian May, extracting all the excitement he can from every note.

By comparison, the outro solo’s licks are more standard, with phrases similar to Hendrix’s. The passages at 4:57 and 5:12 could be from “All Along the Watchtower” or “Foxey Lady,” but in this epic track few listeners would make the connection. It sounds both masterful and improvised at the same time. Gilmour has explained he created this impression by recording five or six takes and compiling the finished solo from the best bits of each. The result is stunningly well written, with a combination of repetition and development that keeps the excitement building for two minutes. The Hendrix-style blues lick returns at 5:27, longer and more intricate than before. The aggressive double-stops first appear at 5:15, and by 5:35 he has turned that idea into a motif.

For the climax, Gilmour shoots up an octave just when it seems he’s wrung every inch of expression from his maple neck. He descends back down the neck, incorporating one of his spectacular three-fret bends on the way, and finishes with another take on that double stop motif. It has all the excitement of an improvised performance, and all the structure of a careful composition.

Both solos share brilliant rhythmic awareness. Gilmour uses triplets, sextuplets, 16th and 32nd notes freely, within the same phrase. And check out the effect at 5:10 when he plays a lick in 16th notes and then immediately repeats and expands in sextuplets. A good solo can have great tone, rhythms, melody or expression, but only a work of rare brilliance features them all to this degree.

Music therapy charity Nordoff and Robbins has partnered with Mark Knopfler and is giving away a signed and extremely limited Boswell 0-14MK/TR-LTD acoustic guitar.

The guitar, a small body, all-mahogany build, is one of only two dozen of its kind built by the American luthier. Knopfler’s own model features heavily on his new album, One Deep River, having effortlessly won several gear shootouts.

“I always try a number of acoustics, and on this particular album the acoustic that burst through was actually the latest one, this Boswell 0-14,” the Dire Straits guitarist told Guitar Player earlier this year.

“[It’s] a little 14-fret parlor guitar made out of mahogany by Arthur Boswell, who used to work as Rudy Pensa’s repairman in New York City. He graduated from being a repairman to being a builder and set up a workshop in Bend, Oregon.

“Rudy said to me, ‘Marcus, I have this guitar. You have to have one.’ So this little mahogany arrived, and of course, I put it to work on the album and it won the audition for a whole pile of songs – at least four or five straightaway.”

The instrument charmed its way onto the tracks Ahead of the Game, Tunnel 13, Sweeter Than the Rain, Before My Train Comes, and This One’s Not Going to End Well. Knopfler adds that “there were more” too.

Knopfler was first introduced to Butch Boswell's guitars late in 2020 by his friend and fellow luthier, Rudy Pensa. Knopfler was quickly taken by an all-mahogany “0” sized guitar gifted to him, and has since added an OM model to his vast collection of studio guitars.

That led to discussions about a signature model, which combined all the things Knopfler loved about his two Boswell models.

The 0-14 guitar, the result of their collaboration, is made from Honduran mahogany, with a Brazilian Rosewood, 20-fret fingerboard. It also features Adirondack spruce top bracing and old-growth Sitka spruce with a ladder-style pattern.

Its specs are rounded out by a drop-in intonated bone saddle with Ivoroid bridge pins, and Waverly, polished nickel tuners.

This particular charity guitar features a bridge inlay at the 12th fret, which nods to the One Deep River cover.

Intriguingly, the partnership came at the right time, as the guitarist has begun to phase out the pick from his playing style.

The short-run of guitars has long since sold out, and Knopfler says his “travels with me everywhere now.”

Each guitar was numbered, with the MK0 build specially reserved for the charity giveaway.

The money raised, via raffle tickets at £5 each or three for £10, will help the UK-based charity fund vital music therapy services, which take place in schools, hospitals, and care homes across the UK.

Tickets to the prize draw can be bought here.

Head to Nordoff and Robbins to learn more about its work.

Talking with Mark Knopfler about guitars – what else? – is a bit like speaking with an unrepentant kid and a hardened member of GAA: Guitar Aficionados Anonymous.

“I still stop and look in a guitar shop window when I pass one on the street. I can’t walk past it,” Knopfler confesses via Zoom from his home in London. “And all the clichés – nose up against the glass, that whole thing. I suppose there were a lot of years where, instead of music being music and songs being a dream – a kid’s dream – it became work. It becomes your life. And I’m not alone there.

“So I have to try hard to keep it ‘teenage’ – to stay the kid about it. It’s an endlessly fascinating thing to be part of. And it goes on. History goes on.”

And this year Knopfler, now 74 and more than 45 years onward from his first album with Dire Straits, is adding a few chapters to his history.

There was his January guitar auction, a somewhat shocking sale of 123 instruments through Christie’s that netted more than $11 million, including $100,000-plus for 28 of them, and a record $876,000 for a 1959 Vintage Gibson Les Paul Standard with a sunburst finish.

That was followed by a new version of his 1983 film composition Going Home: Theme of the Local Hero, which Knopfler and longtime wingman Guy Fletcher turned into a benefit single for Teenager Cancer Trust in the U.K. and Teen Cancer America, using a who’s-who roster of guitar-playing mates and other all-stars, including what is thought to be the final recording by the late Jeff Beck.

But the star attraction is One Deep River, Knopfler’s 10th solo album and first in six years. It’s the product of a prolific time. The 12-song core set is complemented by four bonus tracks on the vinyl LP and a different five cuts on the CD. The sessions spawned another EP of four songs, unified thematically by lyrics about British showground boxing culture of yore.

“Maybe it’s pandemic-based,” says Knopfler, who on top of everything else also launched a syndicated TV show, Johnson and Knopfler’s Music Legends, with AC/DC frontman and fellow northern Englishman Brian Johnson. “Throughout COVID, I was just listening to songs all the time,” he explains. “There was a lot to work with, once we could get back to working.”

He already had quite a history to add to, of course. In addition to Dire Straits’ somewhat limited output (just six studio albums in their nearly 19 years together), Knopfler has cooked up those solo albums – starting with Golden Heart after Straits broke up – and nine film scores, including music for the movies Local Hero, Cal, and Comfort and Joy, all three of which predate Dire Straits’ 1985 breakthrough, Brothers in Arms.

He’s also released albums with the all-star Notting Hillbillies (Missing... Presumed Having a Good Time), his hero Chet Atkins (Neck and Neck), and a pair with Emmylou Harris (All the Roadrunning and Real Live Roadrunning).

Along the way, Knopfler modestly claims, his guitar virtuosity has taken a backseat to his songwriting talents.

“I see myself much more as a songwriter these days,” explains the man who’s turned the “twiddly bits” from the closing solo of Sultans of Swing into one of rock’s most iconic riffs. “I just became a songwriter, somehow, and a half-baked guitar player. I had to come to see myself as a guitar player in the first place, and music has a way of reminding you that you’re nowhere. And that hasn’t changed.”

The Knopfler-philes among us may be rolling our eyes. But rest assured, he’s just getting started.

“If anything, my grip on the guitar has gotten even worse,” he continues. “The songwriting – it takes you away from concentrating on playing, and it accentuates the simplicity of a lot of my stuff that I want out of the guitar. I’ve almost become a sort of a half-player in the sense that I only tend to play half the notes that are there that I could play, and my fingering is all wrong. I don’t hold the neck properly; I hold the neck like a plumber holds a hammer, not in a proper, artistic way.

“I think a guitar teacher would say, ‘You’re doing it bloody wrong! It’s all bloody wrong – but it’s too far gone to change it now, so you might as well just do it that way.’ I’m kind of one step ahead of the cowboy chords, perhaps. But not much.”

So it’s kind of like my golf swing?, I suggest. “Well, that’s it!” Knopfler says with a laugh. “But it gets you around the course, doesn’t it?”

What Knopfler has most certainly become is an ardent, although not exclusive, fingerpicker, a skill he developed early on that has become his preferred playing style.

“I started using more and more fingerpicking and less and less plectruming,” he acknowledges. “I think lack of use, plus three bouts of COVID, probably phased out the plectrum for me. I just kept losing them and would be fingerpicking more – not necessarily fingerpicking better, just more. And it proved to be just a bit more comfortable for me.”

Nevertheless, Knopfler doesn’t want his picks to feel like they’ve been abandoned like undesired puppies.

“I want to bow to the plectrum and say it’s a superior thing,” he explains. “It’s louder. It’s faster. It’s got a better signal. It’s the best amplifier there is. I didn’t give it up until recently. I was capable of playing things with a plectrum quite a lot, and I would do all the rhythm parts with one all the time.

“Occasionally I would do a sort of Hank imitation,” he adds, referencing his childhood hero, Hank Marvin of The Shadows. “If I wanted a part where I would need to have a plectrum and play a note, I’d use the whammy bar on the note rather than the vibrato coming from my left hand.”

It should be noted here that Knopfler is actually left-handed but was instructed to play guitar right-handed by his sister, who adjusted the tennis racket he would “play” as a youth. “I had to learn to keep that left hand still on the note and let the whammy bar or the tremolo arm give me the vibrato,” he explains. “And, thankfully, that was something I could feel okay with.

“Hank does that beautifully,” he adds, “but I’m sure he could play the guitar any way that he wanted to. I’m sure he could play flamenco if he wanted to. He’s a really, really good guitar player. So occasionally if I want to have that effect, I can do it. I think there’s a little bit on One Deep River here and there. Maybe Tunnel 13 has a little of that on the Strat, back there somewhere.”

Knopfler recorded One Deep River with a familiar crew, most of whom were part of 2018’s Down the Road Wherever and some albums that go back even further. Producer Guy Fletcher is joined by Jim Cox on keyboards, Richard Bennett on guitar, Glenn Worf on bass, Ian Thomas on drums, Danny Cummings on percussion, Mike McGoldrick on whistles and pipes, and John McCusker on fiddle.

In addition, celebrated pedal and lap-steel player Greg Leisz (his lengthy résumé includes work with Eric Clapton, Jackson Browne, Beck, and John Mayer) is onboard, along with sisters Emma and Tamsin Topolski, who provide the album’s backing vocals.

“I’ve been wanting to play with Greg for a long time,” Knopfler says, “and he fitted in as though he’d been there for 25 years. He got on with all of us just beautifully and behaved as though he was totally a member of the band. He just assumed it and loved it and was part of it, and it was as if everything had been made for him.”

And even though the ensemble hadn’t been able to convene for a while due to the pandemic, once everyone returned to the studio, Knopfler – who does most of his writing away from that environment – says it was just like riding the proverbial bicycle.

“Everybody just played so great, and I think the band has developed a little bit more,” he says. “Playing music together for as long as we have, we now have a better vibe. Danny on percussion works great with Ian on drums, and that improves both of them. When they play together, it just helps the feel, big time. There’s a lot of the intangible, little things, but that’s just part of the joy of the whole thing.”

In addition, Knopfler says, the troupe’s recording methodology has become a kind of shorthand for the musicians.

“I just sing the song to the band with an acoustic guitar, and while I’m singing it the first time, Glenn, who’s one of the resident geniuses, will just write a chart. He might ask me to clarify a few things at the end of it, but pretty quickly everybody who uses a chart has one, and we’re in business.”

And when that happens, Knopfler, explains, “I could have a song before I know where I am, because this group of people play with each other so well. It’s uncanny sometimes: You’d be amazed at how many times our first take has those things that you just don’t want to do without.”

Knopfler gives full props to Fletcher, who joined Dire Straits in 1984, for “keeping tabs on what we’re doing” and being another hand on the wheel. But he acknowledges, too, that the ease and speed of the creativity has advantages.

“I did get the opportunity to not be over-familiar with the stuff,” Knopfler says. “We could always move to something else, and everything felt right and nothing felt forced. Everything felt relaxed. If the band wants to play anything ferociously, it can. We just follow whatever way it’s starting to go and feels right. There’s nothing I wanted to inject into it to make things happen.

“It’s an otherworldly kind of band. You can just let the song happen and possibly take credit for it at the same time – which,” he adds slyly, “is a pretty clever trick, if you can do it.”

Part of the Knopfler alchemy, meanwhile, is the casting of specific guitars to particular songs, an act he approaches as carefully as a film director hiring actors. “You’re looking for characters for the songs,” he explains. “You’re looking for a voice for the song. They all have different voices.”

Suffice to say he’s come a long way from the £50 Hofner Super Solid purchased for him when he was an adolescent by his father, an architect and chess aficionado who fled his native Hungary after the Nazi occupation in 1939.

He remembers just one formal lesson, in fingerpicking, from Joe Davidson, the boyfriend of a friend’s older sister. But Knopfler became a connoisseur well before he could afford to become a collector, noting what his favorite players used and making a mental wish list for future purchases.

“Thankfully, success meant that I could go and buy a couple of them. That wasn’t for a long time,” he says, “but you learn as you go along and branch off here and there. People bring you instruments and introduce you to them, and you hear other things or see them in a store and try them out. It’s a long education...that’s still going, really.”

Get him started, and Knopfler will wax rhapsodic about guitars he’s known and loved.

“They’re characters,” he says, returning to the theme, “and there will be a song that answers for them. When you’re onstage you might use something different, but when you record, that’s when you find the right guitar to play for every song you have.”

When it came to making One Deep River, he found an opportunity to give some of them one final dive into the mix before being put up in Christie’s' January auction. Like any six-string acolyte, he speaks of them reverently, as if describing children, and it’s best to just sit back and surrender to his discourse.

“I always try a number of acoustics, and on this particular album the acoustic that burst through was actually the latest one, this Boswell 0-14, a little 14-fret parlor guitar made out of mahogany by Arthur Boswell, who used to work as Rudy Pensa’s repairman in New York City. He graduated from being a repairman to being a builder and set up a workshop in Bend, Oregon.

“Rudy said to me, ‘Marcus, I have this guitar. You have to have one.’ So this little mahogany arrived, and of course I put it to work on the album and it won the audition for a whole pile of songs – at least four or five straightaway. And it’s on more songs on the album itself. It’s on Ahead of the Game, it’s on Tunnel 13, it’s on Sweeter Than the Rain, Before My Train Comes, This One’s Not Going to End Well… That’s half a dozen songs, straightaway, and there were more.

“I also want to mention a beautiful acoustic guitar called a Pete Turner Marrakesh, which is a resonator guitar that Glenn put in front of me. I don’t know how it arrived, but it’s an absolutely beautiful guitar where there’s a lot of thought and work gone into the sound of the body. It’s not just any old body attached to a resonator; there’s a lot of thought in the materials, and the woods are obviously tremendous, and even the resonator has got some serious work on it. I love the guitar.

“[Turner] is very quiet and doesn’t push himself – he hasn’t asked for an advert or anything like that. Usually the great guitar makers, like the Boswells and Turners, don’t push hard. They probably don’t have to; there’s tremendous integrity. So look it up, guys. It comes strongly recommended – by me.

“For the electrics, in a couple cases on the album it’s been a Duesenberg. And actually, Fender made a beautiful replica of the ’54 Stratocaster. I have a ’54 Stratocaster anyway, which also got onto the album, but a couple of times I used the 50th anniversary model, which is really a usable, beautiful guitar and they really took a lot of care making it. It has literally got the porcelain pickups, just like the old ’54s, so you can see they really took care with them.

“There’s one that I play quite a lot which has got a serial number of zero, and that is a great, great Strat. And there’s another one that I’ve had fitted with Callahan pickups, and I used that on a few songs.

“It’s the same thing with the replica Les Pauls they made from my ’58. I think they may have made 58 of them. They all passed through my hands, and they were fantastic guitars. They’ve even got the scratches from my belt on the back of the bodies. I’m spoiled for choice on Les Pauls, which strikes me as quite ironic, because I had to wait so long before I could get my hands on a good Les Paul.

“There’s also a Gretsch 6120 that’s used on a couple of songs. I’ve found from working with Richard Bennett over the years that the DynaSonic pickups ended in ’57, so for me that’s when the 6120 ended. [laughs] Now Chet says he liked the Filter’Trons and he never did like the DynaSonics. Well, I’m the opposite.

“I really like the DynaSonics, because of the sound. The Shadows actually used a 6120 – a lot of people don’t know that – but they got a great sound with an early 6120 with the DynaSonic pickups, and you can’t tell the difference between that and the Stratocaster. Everybody thought it would be a Strat, and they probably still do today. But in fact a 6120 got on quite a few early Shads tracks.

“My almost favorite electric guitar turns out to have been, of all things, a blond [Gibson] 330, which [American singer-songwriter and guitarist] Tony Joe White gave to me when we became good friends.

“I’d given Tony an acoustic guitar made by my old friend Steve Phillips. We were playing one day at Tony’s and he just said, ‘Hey, you can have that guitar. It’s under the bed. Take it out and take a look and see if you want to play it.’ That was the guitar he used on everything: Rainy Night in Georgia, Groupie Girl, Polk Salad Annie... I took it out and it was covered with dust, and the fingerboard had dips and crevices from Tony’s sweaty gigs. But Tony hadn’t played the 330 for years, so I took it to Nashville and had a beautiful new fingerboard put on it and I’ve used it on every record.

“And then, obviously, there are the Pensas.”

Knopfler was first turned on to Rudy Pensa’s namesake brand in 2012 via the 2011 custom Blue Ice Metallic MK-D that remains part of his arsenal. He’s added other models since then.

“I’d actually dig out a couple of the Pensas – the old black one to do the screaming, prehistoric sounds. I would use the ’58 Les Paul for that too.

“I’m also lucky enough to own a D’Angelico Excel from the ’30s, which has such a distinctive and beautiful sound. I’m hoping that my Monteleone Isabella” – the custom 2008 model that remains in his collection – “might one day sound like that. You can play anything on that Excel.

“If I’m playing cowboy chords, they sound great, and it’s just because of the guitar, not the player. You can fingerpick it and it just sounds magnificent. I think those Excels from about ’36 or ’37, are just fantastic – as good a guitar as you’re ever gonna find. They’re just ridiculously good.

“You know,” he adds, “Chet told me, ‘A guitar’s your friend for life. It’ll be your best friend.’ And they are. They’re wonderful companions.”

After sitting through a soliloquy like that, you of course have to wonder how the hell Knopfler was ever willing to part with any of his guitars, much less more than 10 dozen via auction.

“I must admit, there were a couple of things that made me gulp a little bit and wish that I was taking them home with me,” he acknowledges. “But at the same time, I’m happy. You can’t just have them gathering dust. It was nice to unload them. It felt good to get them moving and to go on to find other homes and make new friends. And I realized, of course, I’d become a collector, which I never thought of myself as being.”

One instrument that will likely remain with Knopfler for the rest of his days is his 1961 Stratocaster – his first Strat – with which he created Sultans of Swing in 1977, and which has been around his shoulder ever since.

“Yeah, I still have that,” he notes. What would it take to separate him from it? “I’d say a pretty strong guy – or a pretty tough-minded gang of guys. It won’t go easy.”

Knopfler describes this year's Coming Home (Theme From Local Hero) charity remake as beautifully chaotic, an embarrassment of riches dumped at his feet – and particularly those of Fletcher, who produced the track.

“It’s a circular moment for me,” he explains, because actually Dire Straits paid for the first Teen Cancer ward at Middlesex Trust about 30 years ago, maybe more. It went from there to University College, where it still is.

“The other day I was up in Newcastle and we launched the song there at the stadium where the Wolverhampton Wanderers play. Then I visited the ward in Newcastle where the kids were, and what a fantastic place! Guitars on the walls. It’s a proper place for youngsters, and such a happy vibe. A young girl in there told me that she was carried into that ward as a baby – she’s a teenager now –and at one point she spent six months in that room, and she walked out. I thought that’s the best thing I’ve heard for ages. It was such a great thing to be there and be told that story.”

The new Going Home has become its own kind of legend. More than 60 musicians contributed to the track, both at British Grove Studios and remotely, and you’d be hard-pressed to figure out who’s missing from a roster that includes Eric Clapton, James Burton, Ry Cooder, Steve Cropper, Duane Eddy, Buddy Guy, Peter Frampton, Tony Iommi, Joan Jett, Alex Lifeson, Phil Manzanera, Steve Lukather, David Gilmour, Brian May, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani… you get the picture. Sting, Sheryl Crow and the Knopfler band’s Worf play bass, with Ringo Starr and his son Zak Starkey on drums and the Who’s Roger Daltrey playing harmonica.

“They just kept coming,” Knopfler says with a chuckle. “It started, quite appropriately enough, with Pete Townshend, because we’ve known Roger [Daltrey]’s association with the charity for so long, and Pete’s as well. It has a lot of input from The Who. So Pete came through the door first at my place, armed with a guitar and an amp, and we plugged it in and Pete played a chord. And we were happening, because when Pete plays a chord, it stays played.

“And then I think Eric Clapton came through the doors the next day, and Jeff Beck had recorded something at his place which was so beautiful. Then David Gilmour came over, and everyone was playing great, and I was really knocked out. I thought, ‘This is fantastic!’ And then all the stuff was coming on from America: Joe Bonamassa, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai... Different people, fantastic guitar playing, coming in from all sides. I came in one day and Bruce Springsteen was all over it.”

Knopfler says the happy glut was the result of organizers who “just didn’t stop. I remember saying to Guy, ‘How are we gonna deal with all this? This is going to be 30 miles long!’”

Knopfler gives full credit to Fletcher for herding everything into a cohesive presentation. “Poor old Guy had to use all his editing skills to get it sorted, but somehow he did it.”

Beck’s part was special for all concerned, of course, because it’s been largely confirmed that it’s the last thing he recorded before his death on January 10, 2023.

“Jeff was just something other, y’know?” Knopfler says. “In fact, we’d just begun some talks, through management, about doing an album together. I’m really sorry we didn’t get to work together.”

Knopfler has received four Grammy Awards during his career, as well as an Ivor Novello Award, a Steiger Award in Germany, and an Edison Award from the Netherlands. He’s also an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) at home. He did, however, sit out Dire Straits’ 2018 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which left his longtime partner, bassist John Illsley, in the awkward position of both delivering the induction speech and accepting the honor that night – an infamous Rock Hall first.

Knopfler, who never publicly acknowledged the Hall of Fame honor or said he wouldn’t be attending, says he regrets not being there. “Yeah, I guess so,” he admits. In particular, he gets the importance his presence would have meant to his, and the group’s, many fans. “I was a rock and roll teenager, and I spent my whole young life going to see bands. For a lot of years I went to a gig at least every week without fail, so it is a big part of my life.”

Not in the equation anymore, however, is touring. Knopfler and company last hit the road in 2019 to promote Down the Road Wherever, but even with the wealth of new material from One Deep River and its various configurations, he’s not feeling the pull to do it again.

“Touring is for kids,” he says. “It’s for younger people, and stronger people. I’m old enough and I’ve done enough traveling. It’s not fair to the people around me. It’s a great thing to be with family, and the great thing is I can still write songs, and that’s my thing, really, now. I think I’m best off writing the odd ditty, if I can. If I get to make a decent record of it, that’s the objective realized.

“And it’s harder than you think to bring it off. As a writer, I’d like to try and go on working at being successful – not commercially. I’m not bothered about that. Just being a decent writer, that’s all I want. All I’m hoping for is to get a good song written and get it recorded and see if I can make a good record out of it. After all this time, that’s the most important thing.”

Sultans that swing: 3 of Mark’s very finest

1. 2016 Gibson Custom Shop Mark Knopfler ’58 Les Paul Standard prototype

This is the first prototype of the guitar based on Knopfler’s original 1958 ’Burst, which remains in his keeping. It was used to record Janine on One Deep River and to perform Money for Nothing and Going Home on tour in 2019.

2. 2004 Fender Strat

A 1954-spec model made to commemorate the Stratocaster’s then 50th anniversary, this guitar has toured with Knopfler’s sideman Richard Bennett, who played it from 2005 to 2019. Knopfler used this on the tracks Tunnel 13 and Before My Train Comes on the new album, and Bennett played it on This One’s Not Going.

3. Duesenberg Gran Royale

Knopfler’s Duesenberg Gran Royale was delivered to him at a 2019 concert in Berlin at the Mercedes-Benz Arena and was used on One Deep River.

• Mark Knopfler's One Deep River is out now via EMI.

In the first part of this lesson, we set our picks down to learn new fingerstyle skills we can add to our arsenal of electric guitar techniques. We covered the basics, then left off by introducing harp harmonics. In this follow-up, we’ll integrate them into our fingerstyle playing in some fun ways. 

Once again, New York City fingerstylist Gilber Gilmore is back with more videos that demonstrate each of our musical examples, all which you can find below.

Jazz guitar legend Lenny Breau was the first to incorporate harp harmonics in a most unique way, by creating melodies that alternate them with standard fretted pitches.

Inspired by Breau, Ex. 7a does just that, and while bar 1 has some standard fingerpicking, it’s the second bar where things get interesting. The key here is to silently form the Dm11 chord shape that’s spelled out in the bar before you play beat 1. (Notice how the final open A note in bar 1 buys you valuable time to move up to the 5th position.) 

To do this, barre the highest five strings at the 5th fret with your index finger, adding F on the 2nd string’s 6th fret with your middle finger. Holding this shape throughout the bar will allow the notes to ring over one another, which is what we’re going for here. 

To begin bar 2, perform the first harp harmonic by picking the 5th string while lightly touching directly over the 17th fret, as indicated in parentheses, then use your ring finger to pick the aforementioned F on the 2nd string. The effect produced is a shimmering scalar passage, which would be pretty much impossible to create on guitar without the use of harmonics.

This sort of musical idea would be right at home in a rock setting, possibly as a pensive intro or a cool breakdown section. (Employ a delay effect to create even more ethereal sounds.)

Ex. 7b offers a nifty variation in which you will simultaneously play a harp harmonic and a fretted note on nonadjacent strings. You’ll need to coordinate your pick-hand techniques to simultaneously pluck the harp harmonic with your thumb on the lower string while picking the fretted note on the higher string with your ring finger. Experimenting with different chord shapes and picking patterns is a fun way to discover some interesting musical ideas of your own.

Next, let’s tie the use of harmonics even closer to fingerstyle rock guitar by imagining how Eddie Van Halen might have used harp harmonics. (He actually preferred a different technique, which we’ll explore next.) 

Ex. 8 is reminiscent of EVH’s Van Halen II–era playing, and mixes some open A5 riffing with a couple of neatly placed harp harmonics to spice things up at the end.

Let’s stay in solid Van Halen territory a little while longer and explore a technique EVH was quite fond of: tapped harmonics. 

While this involves the same basic principle of locating harmonics 12 frets above the fretted note, here you won’t be using your pick-hand thumb at all; simply use your index finger (or middle, as Gilmore does in one of our videos) to lightly tap the string directly over the fret indicated in parentheses, using a quick bouncing motion. 

EVH utilized this technique in a variety of settings, whether he was creating otherworldly licks for his solos or unforgettable chord-based hooks for songs like Dance the Night Away and Women in Love. 

Ex. 9 uses tapped harmonics a bit more sparingly than those songs. We’ll incorporate just a taste of it into our fingerstyle playing, while still echoing EVH’s inimitable style. The tablature indicates to tap only one string at a time, but here’s a bit of a guitar “hack”: Fret the F5 chord spelled out in the first two beats of bar 1, and notice that the 3rd string isn’t played. 

Let your fret-hand ring finger, playing the F on the 4th string, also dampen the 3rd string by lightly touching it. Having that dampened string allows you to be freer with how you tap, because you won’t need to be so careful about solely tapping the string indicated and avoiding unwanted sounds from occurring. For example, when you tap the 4th-string F harmonic on the upbeat of beat 3, you can also tap the 3rd string, as it simply won’t sound a note. 

Now let’s move away from harmonics and present ourselves with a new conundrum: What if, while playing fingerstyle, you suddenly wanted to play a passage that your sixth sense tells you would sound better played with the sharper attack of a pick? 

In fact, guitarists like Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham have already tackled this seemingly thorny issue for us. In The Chain, for example, he creates a repetitive droning riff by striking the strings with his pick-hand fingernails, producing a similar percussive bite to what one would expect when using a pick. 

Ex. 10 is informed by Buckingham’s playing during the song’s uptempo outro. To execute this phrase, simply strike the strings with your fingernails in a repeating downward motion. 

Since it’s more of a broad movement, our new hack can again be used to deaden adjacent strings. Fretting the 2nd string with your middle finger throughout the phrase will allow you to then use your index finger behind it to deaden the 3rd and 4th strings, so as to avoid them accidentally sounding unwanted notes. 

As before, deadening those strings allows you to strum more freely with tapping, instead of having to concentrate on striking only the strings indicated, and this can in turn add some welcome grit.

Let’s close out our fingerstyle adventure by tackling some different, interesting grooves and techniques. The remaining musical examples are from Gilmore’s impressive cache of ideas.

One of the great things about fingerstyle playing is that you can play both melody and accompaniment simultaneously. 

Ex. 11 introduces this concept with a bluesy melody (up-stemmed) over a static bass line (down-stemmed). You’ll need to do some palm muting here, but only for the bass notes. To accomplish this, rest your pick hand on your guitar’s bridge as you normally would to create palm muting with a pick, but lift the hand partially so it touches only the lower strings, leaving the melody notes unmuted. 

You can simply pick the entire melody with your index finger, as Gilmore does, or use your middle if you prefer. Lastly, if you’ve already played the Mark Knopfler–inspired Ex. 5 from part 1, you’ll have no trouble negotiating the final bar, which involves picking bass notes while simultaneously performing melodic hammer-ons and pull-offs. 

You might remember how in the previous lesson we looked at a percussive thumb slap technique (from Ex. 3b). Ex. 12 applies this technique with a different kind of groove.

Start by ignoring everything except the bass line, which is much sparser than our previous example, here creating a pattern much like what a drummer would play on a bass drum. Skipping the pickup notes, simply sound a low E on beats 1 and 3, adding an additional note on beat 2’s eighth-note upbeat to help propel things along. (Omit the thumb slaps on beats 2 and 4 for now, substituting a rest.) Then simply repeat the same pattern for the second bar.

Now that we’ve got the bass line going, let’s complete our “rhythm section” by adding percussive slaps to simulate the classic backbeat a drummer would create by hitting the snare drum on 2 and 4. 

First, let’s add the thumb slap on beat 2, hitting the top of the 6th string so as to set yourself up to pluck it on beat 2’s upbeat. Now, along with your thumb, simultaneously slap the higher strings with your fingernails to create even more of a percussive thwap, as Gilmore demonstrates in our video for this example. Once you’re grooving, wrap things up by adding the initial bluesy lick and the low double-stops.

Ex. 13 employs the same techniques, but this time with a funkier rhythm. Again, let’s begin by simply playing the down-stemmed notes, all on the 5th string. But here, we’ll include the thumb slaps right off the bat. 

Start out slowly and, as in the previous example, hitting the top of the deadened 5th string will set you up for the subsequent pluck. When you’re feeling the groove, add in the up-stemmed notes and try increasing the tempo. Play it as slowly as you need to at first so that you can acquire the necessary coordination and make it through without any mistakes, then take the tempo up a notch. 

Let’s bring in a bit of country flavor with a technique commonly known as “chicken pickin’.” It’s most often executed using hybrid picking, but for our purposes, we can summon the same pluckiness without using a pick. Now let’s bring things home with a fun double-stops lick, presented in Ex. 14. 

Note that, here, the deadened notes aren’t slapped; they refer to notes plucked normally, all with the thumb, which are deadened with your fret hand. Alternating with the double-stops, these muted notes rhythmically propel the lick forward while adding a subtle funkiness. Check out Michael Lee Firkins’ 1990 shred classic Laughing Stacks for a taste of how he seamlessly blends metal and country, albeit with a pick.

Maybe the best part of having explored these new fingerstyle techniques is that now, whenever you switch back to your pick, it’ll be even more fun to have its signature attack back. Music, at its core, is about contrasting sounds and textures, so being able to vary your approach will always serve you well.  

Jeff Jacobson is a guitarist, songwriter and veteran music transcriber, with hundreds of published credits. For information on virtual guitar lessons and custom transcriptions, feel free to reach out to Jeff on Instagram @jjmusicmentor or visit jeffjacobson.net.

All examples © copyright 2023 Gilber Gilmore. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

One of 2024's biggest guitar-related stories to date is undoubtedly Mark Knopfler's high-profile re-recording of Going Home (Theme From Local Hero). 

To raise funds for Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America, Knopfler re-recorded the classic song with arguably the most formidable lineup of guitar heroes ever assembled. 

Listing all of the players involved would take all day – Slash, Eric Clapton, David Gilmour, Sheryl Crow, Tony Iommi, and Brian May are just a few of the names, to give you an idea – but perhaps the most notable of all was the late Jeff Beck, whose memorable contribution is widely acknowledged to be his final ever recording.  

In a newly-published interview with Guitar Player, Knopfler saluted the late electric guitar king's “beautiful” playing on the tune, before revealing that he also had tentative plans to make an album with Beck, who died in January 2023. 

“Jeff was just something other, y’know?” the Dire Straits man told GP. “In fact, we’d just begun some talks, through management, about doing an album together. I’m really sorry we didn’t get to work together.”

As if the encyclopedic list of guitar heroes on the 2024 version of Going Home wasn't enough, the track also features the Who’s Roger Daltrey on harmonica, and both Ringo Starr and his son Zak Starkey on drums. 

It was Daltrey's longtime involvement with, and patronage of, the Teenage Cancer Trust, that led Knopfler to Pete Townshend, who was the first guitarist to contribute to the song. 

“It started, quite appropriately enough, with Pete Townshend, because we’ve known Roger’s association with the charity for so long, and Pete’s as well,” Knopfler explained to GP. “So, Pete came through the door first at my place, armed with a guitar and an amp, and we plugged it in and Pete played a chord. And we were happening, because when Pete plays a chord, it stays played.”

To read the full Guitar Player interview with Knopfler, pick up the latest issue of the mag at Magazines Direct.

Generally, when we rock guitarists ponder adding a new technique to our arsenal, we find ourselves gravitating toward tackling a new and challenging way to negotiate the fretboard, or woodshedding a new picking technique. By the same token, when we have a hankering for new textures, we’ll often head over to YouTube to enter a rabbit hole of pedal demos. 

There’s nothing wrong with exploring any of those options, but there’s a whole different palette of techniques and textures literally at your fingertips that you may have yet to explore. All you need to do is lay down your pick and visit the surprisingly ready-to-rock world of fingerstyle guitar. 

But wait, you’re probably thinking, isn’t fingerstyle for acoustic guitarists? Yes, acoustic players most often find their way to fingerstyle at some point. But many rock guitarists – such as Eddie Van Halen, Tim Henson, George Lynch, Lari Basilio, and Mateus Asato – incorporate fingerstyle into their playing when desired. Others, like Mark Knopfler, Albert Collins, Lindsey Buckingham, Matteo Mancuso, and Richie Kotzen, do so exclusively.

You may also be thinking, ‘I already use hybrid picking from time to time, so I’ll sit this one out.’ And sure, hybrid picking – simultaneously or alternately playing notes with both pick and fingers – is a useful technique, with the benefit of leaving the pick readily available to use on its own. 

One method is no better than the other, but I’ve learned that the more approaches you have in your bag of tricks, the more you’ll naturally find ways to incorporate them into your playing, leading you to discover new and exciting musical ideas. 

So think of this lesson not as one designed to help you become a full-time fingerstylist, but rather one that opens the door to new techniques that will complement those you already have access to with your pick. Nothing can replace the pick’s sharpness of attack, not to mention the availability of pick (or “pinch”) harmonics and pick scrapes – all of which are fun quirks of the guitar few would choose to live without.

Let’s dip our toes into the fingerstyle waters with some examples based on familiar songs. There’s a lot to present here, so I’ve split this lesson into two parts. First, some housekeeping. As you’ll see in the musical examples presented here, in the same way that fret-hand fingers are indicated with numbers, pick-hand fingers are traditionally assigned a letter based on the Spanish words for the various digits:

p (thumb), i (index), m (middle), a (ring)

The letter c indicates the pinkie, but it’s not often used, so we’ll steer clear of it for our lessons, though it’s interesting to note that jazz guitar legend Joe Pass, who was predominantly a fingerstylist, would occasionally employ his pinkie to sound five-note chord voicings.

Now let’s get to the good stuff, beginning with one of the simplest fingerstyle techniques: playing a group of notes simultaneously, as if you’re banging out a chord on the piano. 

In the classic AC/DC song For Those About to Rock (We Salute You), rock icon Angus Young uses hybrid picking to perform a nifty unaccompanied intro, and we’ll take the same approach but apply it sans pick. (We’ll explore a benefit to freeing up your thumb a bit later.) 

Ex. 1 is based on Young’s earworm of an intro, and the key to making it sound just right is to play each eighth-note chord staccato, or short. To explain, first try playing this phrase with a pick. Note that you can successfully play the fretted notes staccato by lifting up your fretting fingers, but the pesky open B string just keeps ringing. 

Next, let’s try it fingerstyle, shortening the notes by allowing your picking fingers to quickly rest on the strings before re-plucking them (no need to lift your fingers off the fretboard this time). More than being an effective way to mute the strings, this technique delivers a unique and particularly snappy attack. And it works equally well even if no open strings are involved. 

Next, let’s focus on developing our picking fingers so that they can function independent of the thumb. 

The interval of a perfect 4th (two and one half steps) is integral to playing rock guitar – think of Ritchie Blackmore’s classic riff to Smoke on the Water. Ex. 2 takes a similar tack and is based on Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher opening riff. Let your thumb sit this one out, using your index and middle fingers to pluck each dyad, or two-note chord, with the motion coming solely from your fingers.

Fingerstyle guitar music is often notated using opposite stemming, as this allows two independent melodic or harmonic voices to be clearly shown and visualized for the reader. Up-stemmed notes are generally played with the fingers, and down-stemmed notes are most often played with the thumb. 

Ex. 3a presents our first taste of opposite stemming, and while it sounds a bit more like an exercise than the previous examples, it’s simply a means to an end, as you’ll see in Ex. 3b. A helpful way to begin tackling Ex. 3a is to simply play only the downstemmed notes, using your thumb to play the open A string in a mostly quarter-note rhythm. 

Once you start feeling comfortable doing that, begin incorporating the up-stemmed notes on the upbeats with your index and middle fingers. The key here is to let the voices ring over each other, as indicated by the notated rhythms. Played with a swing, or shuffle, feel, it’s reminiscent of ZZ Top’s La Grange, but it’s somehow lacking the charm. 

Ex. 3b is where the magic starts to happen. Ostensibly the same musical idea as Ex. 3a, this phrase introduces muted notes, accomplished here by lifting your fret-hand fingers so that they lightly rest on the strings, effectively deadening them. Another helpful way to approach new fingerstyle concepts is to take your fretting hand out of the equation by sounding only muted notes, as indicated in bar 1. 

First, let’s use the same technique as we did in Ex. 3a, plucking all of the deadened notes. Now, let’s take things up a notch: Instead of plucking with your thumb, lightly slap the lower strings with the outer portion of your thumb. After doing so, pluck the higher strings by rotating your wrist instead of flexing your fingers. 

Now we’re on to something! Once you start to feel yourself grooving, begin to incorporate the fretted notes, as indicated in the final three bars. But note that while the down-stemmed muted notes are slapped, the standard open A notes are plucked, as in Ex. 3a. 

This slapping technique is one of the new textures you’ll discover by playing without a pick. Note how the mix of techniques creates a means to becoming musically expressive in new and different ways, which is our ultimate goal here.

Next, let’s demonstrate this in a different way, using a phrase that sounds as if it’s a mash-up of Extreme’s Get the Funk Out and James Gang’s Funk #49. 

Ex. 4a simply indicates the notes to be played, meaning it hasn’t yet been “funkified.” Once you’ve got the riff under your fingers, check out Ex. 4b, which adds the necessary funkification, by again incorporating muted strings using the slap-and-rotate technique from Ex. 3b. 

Now, let’s move on to a phrase that is challenging in a completely different way. Reminiscent of Mark Knopfler’s classic opening riff to Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing, Ex. 5 incorporates hammer-ons and pull-offs. But the main challenge here is to simultaneously play the thumbed down-stemmed notes with the hammered or pulled notes. We’ll be using the traditional plucking method from Ex. 3a. 

Let’s start by simply playing, at a slow tempo, the initial pickup note, followed by the first dyad of bar 1. Tricky, right? This is just one of the hallmarks of Knopfler’s playing, and it might take a bit of getting used to, so begin slowly and please be patient. If it seems difficult, just know you’re on the right track. 

And now for something completely different! A harp harmonic is sounded by fingerpicking a fretted note while simultaneously touching the string very lightly with the tip of your pick-hand index finger 12 frets higher. The result is a harmonic one octave above the fretted pitch, which is not heard. (This is comparable to the way you don’t hear the open string when performing a natural harmonic.) 

Players like Steve Morse will accomplish this by holding the pick between the middle finger and thumb. But playing fingerstyle can make these harmonics even more accessible, by allowing you to pluck downward with your thumb – or upward with your middle finger. (Note that using the thumb is more traditional, and you’ll need to execute them this way to tackle the examples in the upcoming second part of this lesson.) 

Ex. 6 is a Celtic-flavored melody inspired by Morse’s elegant instrumental Highland Wedding, featured on his album High Tension Wires. Next to the initial tab number indicating the fretted pitch you’ll find another number in parentheses, which indicates the fret above which you are to lightly touch the string. 

Just as you would with natural harmonics produced with open strings, be sure to touch the string directly over the fret to correctly target the harp harmonic. Also, be sure to dial in a considerable amount of overdrive and, if available, a compressor, both of which will make the harmonics more audible.

Fingerstyle players such as country icon Chet Atkins, who invented harp harmonics, and jazz legend Lenny Breau incorporated the technique into their playing in surprising ways, as we’ll see in part two. So spend some time in the woodshed, as it will be well worth it for our final installment! 

Jeff Jacobson is a guitarist, songwriter and veteran music transcriber, with hundreds of published credits. For information on virtual guitar lessons and custom transcriptions, feel free to reach out to Jeff on Instagram @jjmusicmentor or visit his website.

All examples © copyright 2023 Gilber Gilmore. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

It’s virtually impossible to pare decades of rock and roll down to a top-ten list. There are, however, some guitar solos every player needs to know about.

Here are some of the greatest ever committed to record...

10. "Statesboro Blues" by The Allman Brothers Band from 'At Fillmore East' (1971)

Guitarist: Duane Allman

Although the end of "Layla" may be more memorable to most folks, Allman’s Statesboro slide show verifies his title as the undisputed king of bottleneck guitar. 

Slick as oil but with the ability to stop on a dime, Allman not only redefined how slide guitar was played but also created a recycling market for empty Coricidin bottles.

9. "Sweet Child O' Mine" by Guns N' Roses from 'Appetite for Destruction' (1987)

Guitarist: Slash

While Axl swayed and sashayed like Steve Wonder around his mic stand, Slash laid back with his Les Paul, patiently waiting for his turn in the spotlight. 

Then, with his blistering ascent up the E harmonic minor scale – which kicks the second solo of this tune into high gear – the top-hatted genius single-handedly breathed new life into wah-pedal sales.

8. "Crossroads" by Cream from 'Wheels of Fire' (1968)

Guitarist: Eric Clapton

Slowhand? Not on this track. Clapton pulls out every blues-rock move in his lick-tionary for this roadhouse romper. 

The true voodoo of this solo lies at the crossroads where major and minor pentatonic tonalities meet, mingle and blast off from E.C.’s fretboard. 

Ol’ Scratch surely smiled when he heard this one.

7. "Crazy Train" by Ozzy Osbourne from 'Blizzard of Ozz' (1980)

Guitarist: Randy Rhoads

You almost wonder if Ozzy named this tune after hearing Rhoads’ white-knuckled rock and roll ride up and down the F# minor scale. 

What more could you want in a metal guitar solo? Tapping, rakes, bends, trills ascending legato runs... 

Rhoads set Eighties guitarists on the rails of neoclassical rock with this one. All aboard!

6. "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin from 'Led Zeppelin IV' (1971)

Guitarist: Jimmy Page

Jimmy Page's "Stairway” solo is nothing short of divine. 

His resolution to the natural F note in the opening minor pentatonic lick of the solo couldn’t have been more perfect if the Almighty himself had chosen the note.

5. "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits from 'Dire Straits' (1978)

Guitarist: Mark Knopfler

Sultan says, “Spend less time making your harem moan and more time making your guitar cry and sing!” 

For those of you who’ve learned the outro solo the lazy way – playing eighth-note triplets for the daunting Dm, Bb and C arpeggios – get your fingers back to the wood shed. 

Those are 16th notes that the “Sultan of Strat” rips off.

4. "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd from 'Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd' (1973) 

Guitarist: Gary Rossington and Allen Collins

To paraphrase Adrian Belew in King Crimson’s "Indiscipline," "I repeat my licks, I repeat my licks, I repeat my licks…” 

This could go on forever – kinda like the outro solo to "Free Bird," in which guitarists Rossington and Collins double each other for most of this pull-off parade. 

It’s impressive not because of the degree of difficulty of the licks but because of the sheer volume they need to recall – 27, including variations!

3. "Eruption" by Van Halen from 'Van Halen' (1978) 

The Holy Grail for all aspiring rock guitarists. Learn Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" and you’ve earned some serious bragging rights. 

But if you really want props, you’ve got to tame the whole volcano, not just the tremolo picking and tapping sections.

2. "All Along the Watchtower" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience from 'Electric Ladyland' (1968)

Jimi Hendrix offers plenty of reason to get excited in his "Watchtower" solo. 

Besides his masterful manipulation of the C# minor pentatonic scale, Hendrix’s wah-drenched octave climb and the double-stops in the latter half bear out his gift for melodic embellishment. 

It’s enough to make any cat growl.

1. "Little Wing" by Stevie Ray Vaughan from 'The Sky Is Crying' (1991)

With little bits of Jimi, Wes and Mayfield, and a whole lotta soul, SRV exhibits exceptional dynamic prowess throughout, making this reverent Hendrix cover his own. 

A seemingly lost art among modern-day guitarists, Vaughan’s R&B-style chord melody is like priceless art. It should be both admired and studied.

The following appeared in the September 2019 issue of Guitar Player.

“The landscape of guitar playing covers a massive geography for me,” Mark Knopfler says. “It goes all the way from Scotland into England and through the Delta, with important stops in a bunch of other places along the way. I like to think I’m bringing all those influences to bear every time I play. But when it comes to guitar – and, really, music in general – you truly only get to be a tiny part of it. It’s something that’s much, much bigger than you are.”

Humble words from a guy who has done it all: recorded massive hit records, written critically acclaimed soundtrack work and collaborated with heroes and contemporaries alike. Through it all, he has done something even rarer still: He’s secured a place on the Two-Note List – the unofficial roster of guitar players so identifiable and unique, most guitarists can pick them out after hearing them play just two notes. We all know who those players are, and Knopfler is one of them.

When Guitar Player spoke to the Dire Straits legend back in 2019, he was about to undertake a massive world tour in support of his latest solo album, 2018’s Down the Road Wherever (British Grove Records). At the time, Knopfler was looking forward to bringing his music to U.S. fans. “My songs are made to be performed live,” he told us. “I love the whole process of writing them alone and then recording them with the band, but ultimately the best part is playing them to an audience live. I enjoy the whole circus, traveling from town to town and interacting with this group of players is a total pleasure.”

And, of course, seeing Knopfler live onstage is the best way to experience his singular tone. It was “Sultans of Swing,” the first single from Dire Straits’ 1978 debut, that got it started. One of the Strattiest Strat tones of all time, Knopfler’s clean, bridge-and-middle pickup sound was created with a three-position switch on his ’61 Strat, with the selector crammed in a very Hendrix-approved, but anachronistic “in-between position.” (For the record, that bridge/middle sound on a Strat has been known since 1978 as either the "Knopfler Tone” or the “Sultans Tone.”)

The tune was plucked with his bare fingers, and it stood in stark contrast to the overdriven bombast of what was typical rock guitar at the time. As for its chords, fills and two burning solos, they showed the world that the young guitarist was the whole package: a deft rhythm player who could weave in funky answers to his vocal lines, and then peel off deep, memorable solos that combined bluesy pentatonics, liquid harmonic minor melodies and stunning arpeggiated figures, all the while singing profound lyrics that he wrote and never losing sense of the groove.

Welcome to the big leagues, Mark Knopfler! That didn’t take very long at all. 

From there, Knopfler wrote more of the aforementioned hits, defined an era of MTV and found himself on the same stages as the biggest bands in the world – because his band was one of the biggest bands in the world. At that point, Knopfler wasn’t just a player – he was a seasoned, all-star veteran, a guy that people looked up to, and a musician that music fans expected to, you know, do some stuff.

So what did he do? Over the next years, he produced records for two of his biggest heroes, namely Chet Atkins and Bob Dylan. He recorded soundtracks to films that would move and inspire generations of viewers. And he collaborated with artists like Emmylou Harris, Sonny Landreth, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, and many, many more. Along the way, he influenced scores of great guitarists in a bunch of different styles who didn’t sound like him but wished they could. He brought his awesome touch, tone, taste, and feel to the entire world, and he did it with all the dynamics, depth, and Knopfler-isciousness that he did as the young man who played guitar on a song called “Sultans of Swing.”

And he’s nowhere near done.

After dozens of albums and a boatload of awards, he keeps creating. Down the Road Wherever features 13 tracks of introspective writing fueled by his subtly powerful guitar stylings. Here, he speaks about the creation of the album, his take on distortion, and what it’s like to work with your heroes.

Your latest record opens with the tune “Trapper Man,” with a fingerpicked National that goes into a fairly heavy distorted electric guitar. Some people think those two tones couldn’t peacefully coexist in a song, but they do. You’ve always been good at sticking things in songs that “don’t belong” and making them work. Why do you think that is?

I suppose I’ve always done that, from an early age. You can think of “Brothers in Arms” as an accordion song, and I’m playing guitar across all of that stuff. When there’s Celtic music playing, I feel perfectly at home joining in on electric. And actually, the more power there is on the electric, the better it is for me, exactly because of that contrast you’re referring to.

I’m not really a fan of strict orthodoxy in anything. My bluegrass band would have bluegrass instruments, but then I’d play electric guitar, but I’d also be willing to play concrete mixer or machine tools. I don’t dig the folk police, or the tango police, or anyone who might turn around and say, “Well, that’s not the right lineup or instrumentation.” The bluegrass police might object to my concrete mixer, and I have no patience for that.

That’s been a hallmark of your career. Do you think it comes from the eclectic music that you’ve listened to in your life? Growing up, you had an equal love for blues, rock, rockabilly, country and more. Is that how you’ve struck down those barriers?

Yes, exactly, it is. I can remember playing in folk clubs, and there might be someone from the club who would say, “This is an English folk club. We don’t do American songs here.” And I thought that was absolute bullshit, because who knows if those songs were English or American anyway? Those songs have been across the Atlantic in both directions many times. Folk purists give me a pain.

Talk to me a little bit about “Just a Boy Away from Home,” from the new album. The tuning sounds like dropped C or open C.

It’s open C, and there’s quite a heavy set of strings on the guitar, which was an old ’60s Strat. I actually played that guitar on a bunch of songs in normal tuning on the Sailing to Philadelphia album [from 2000]. It just turned out to sound pretty nice with a slide on it, but then again a lot of guitars do. I think a lot of guitars are quite surprised to find themselves working out on slide.

You’re humble about your slide playing, but the fact is, you’re great at it. How do you play so beautifully in tune?

Oh, with difficulty.

How did you work your slide chops up?

Well, I started with the simple, straight-ahead stuff, like Elmore James. I think what happens is, when you go back that far, it adds a depth to your own playing. I also spent a lot of years playing country blues and acoustic blues on slide. Then I played with Sonny Landreth, and I love the way he plays. I’ve never actually asked Sonny to show me what he does, fretting behind the slide and all that. But then, a few years back, I just started doing it, and it sort of worked for me too.

Fingerpicking is a big part of it as well. It’s a combination of these little runs and moves, fretting behind the slide and picking with thumb and fingers.

What slides do you use?

I use Diamond slides. They can make them with pictures on the front of them, so I’ve got one with Chet Atkins and one with Elvis. One thing that’s interesting about them is that the hole is offset – it’s not in the center – so you can work with different thicknesses on the same slide.

Talk about the lead tone on “Back on the Dance Floor,” another great track from Down the Road Wherever. How was that tone created?

That would be probably the good old Les Paul-meets-Marshall. If it’s not that, it’s Les Paul meets Linda, which is a Komet that Ken Fischer made for me. Linda is very, very loud. A fantastic amp.

You’ve always been good at navigating loud, distorted sounds. You play very dynamically with massive tones that, depending on your touch, can seem almost clean and dirty at the same time. What do you look for in a dirty sound? How dirty is too dirty?

It’s a great question. I work on the dynamics in my sound, and it’s something I can’t do enough. Because once you overstep the gain, as opposed to the overall level, it squashes up too much and you lose all the dynamics.

That’s all that it is, really – a balancing act. Sometimes it’s played quietly, and sometimes it’s played more emphatically, and that’s part of the fun of it. You don’t need the faders on the board. It’s about getting a happening sound, and if you want to play a solo with that sound, you can if you lay into it.

Your solo on “Nobody Does That” has a really nice sense of composition, with a strong theme and variations on that theme. Was it composed or was that improvised?

That was a first take, the first time with the band. Then we edited sections together.

It’s an amazing band moment.

Everybody in the band is listening and reacting in real time. You can’t simply exist in your own bubble; that’s the kiss of death. You’ve got to be thinking about where you belong in the conversation, in that fabric.

All of these players are masters at being in the correct sonic range, not going into an area that’s being inhabited by someone else. And your first inclination to do something can be very, very valuable. That’s why first takes have often got that energy to them. They’ve got that relish, you know?

It’s definitely not what you’re most famous for, but you do occasionally play with a pick. You get a really beautiful sound on tunes like “Our Shangri-La.” What is your approach and what is your relationship with the plectrum?

I grew up loving Jimi Hendrix, and when I was playing Hendrix licks, it was quite fun for me to plug into a Bassman or a Marshall and play like that with a pick. But it sounded like somebody else, you know? I do love that sound, though. It doesn’t take very long before it all comes back to me.

Nowadays, if I have a song with those kinds of licks, I’ll probably do them with my fingers anyway. It’s just laziness really. I would always be losing picks. But I do love picks. I also love that sound where I’m playing a Strat or a Gretsch with a pick for the melody but using the whammy bar for the vibrato. You can’t get that sound any other way. That’s how I play all those lovely Hank Marvin Shadows tunes.

For a guy who is so closely associated with the Strat, you get some great Les Paul tones on this record. How do you set the controls?

One of the things that I like to do – and I did this on “Good On You Son” – is to use a Les Paul on the middle setting, but back off one of the levels just a bit, letting one pickup have predominance, and I might roll off the tone a little on one of them. The useful thing about a Les Paul is that you can make those little fine adjustments right on the guitar when you’re looking for the sound.

I’ve always got to remind myself to leave the guitar where it’s at if we’re going to go on a break. Quite often you pick up a guitar and just ram everything up all the way, and you’ll lose that sound. I have to remember not to touch the controls once I’ve found that special sound, that critical place where it’s doing what you want it to do. You’ll never get it back.

You’ve gotten to work with two of your biggest influences, Chet Atkins and Bob Dylan. Did you have moments where you thought, “If my 18-year-old self knew this day would come, he’d be pretty blown away”?

Absolutely. The thrill of being involved with music is about completing those little circuits that connect you to your past. That’s what it was all about. It’s still about that, and it’s endlessly fascinating.

Order Mark Knopfler’s latest solo album, Down the Road Wherever, here.

***The following originally appeared in the June 2011 issue of Guitar Player***

Certain guitar solos are infused with magic. They may or may or may not be technically challenging, flashy, or otherwise virtuoso, but they have that special something that sets them apart from what came before, and they typically alert guitarists everywhere that their world has forever changed. 

What’s more, those magic solos tend to inspire legions of guitarists to attempt to unlock their technical and tonal mysteries, and permeate the six-string community’s collective unconscious, re-emerging later as direct and indirect influences on individual players’ styles. Somewhat paradoxically, however, there is no consensus on which solos have achieved this iconic status.

When we began working on this story, we came up with a lengthy list of solos to include. Our first task was to set up some guidelines. We decided to limit the list to electric rock solos, along with blues and jazz-rock fusion solos that influenced rock. We also set a limit of one solo per artist.

At that point, there were still many more than 40 solos on the list, so we had to make some hard choices. To start, guitarists who were hugely influential overall, but couldn’t be tied to an ultra-influential solo – such as Tony Iommi and George Harrison – were cut. 

We then had to narrow down our selections to just one for each artist, which was difficult for someone like Eric Clapton, whose entries at that point included “Crossroads,” his cover of Freddie King’s “Hideaway” on the Blues Breakers album, and his historic wah workout on “White Room.” Once the smoke cleared, however, we had reached consensus. 

The solos are organized chronologically – including those that fall within the same year – because we thought it would be instructive to see how they relate to each other historically. 

We hope that you like we came up with and perhaps even discover an overlooked gem or two for yourself...

1. Elmore James “Dust My Broom” (1951)

Jimi Hendrix originally called himself Jimmy James and Maurice James in homage to Elmore, and every bluesman since the ‘50s – particularly slide players – owes something to the King of the Slide Guitar. 

Played in an open-D tuning (D, A, D, F#, A, D, low to high), probably on a Kay flattop or Harmony Sovereign with a D’Armond pickup, the slide hook on this tune, and the solo based on it, reappear countless times throughout blues and rock music.

2. Les Paul “How High the Moon” (1951)

The super-syncopated, slap-back soaked runs, chukka-chukka doublestops with bluesy bends, plucky cascading figures, and idiosyncratic ornamentations in Paul’s two solos helped propel this standard up the charts, and further established Paul as the most creative electric guitar player of his generation. 

It was recorded with his “old Epiphone” – a.k.a. “the Clunker” and “the Breadwinner” – with custom-wound hot pickups and other major modifications.

3. Scotty Moore “That’s Alright, Mama” (1954)

Armed with his Gibson ES-295 through a ‘52 Fender Deluxe, Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black, and their bud Elvis, had no idea what a firestorm they were about to create with this early single. 

Moore’s simple, to the- point style covered the drummer-less bases quite easily with a fat tone and swinging musicality, giving this rather hillbilly ensemble some dangerous sonic heft.

His break on “That’s Alright, Mama” inspired everyone from George Harrison to Keith Richards to Jimmy Page, as well as Danny Gatton, who never missed an opportunity to throw a Moore homage in the middle of one of his famed rockabilly rave ups. 

Moore’s barking double-stops and approximation of a tic-tac bass line on “Mama” are as hooky as it gets, making this solo one of the most important ever.

4. Eddie Cochran “Sittin’ in the Balcony” (1957)

Slinging a 1955 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins Hollow Body 'G'-branded guitar with a Gibson P-90 in the neck slot, Cochran, with his iconic presence and echo-drenched tones, hugely impacted early rockers – such as Lennon and McCartney, who bonded over Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” upon meeting in 1957 – and innumerable players thereafter, particularly Brian Setzer. 

The twangy solo on Cochran’s first hit, “Sittin’ In the Balcony,” crackles with the influence of his heroes Chet Atkins, Joe Maphis, and Johnny Smith.

5. Chuck Berry “Johnny B. Goode” (1958)

While some people might not consider this song’s intro a “solo,” it might be the most important rock guitar part ever recorded. 

The doublestops essentially usher in the post-Elvis rock era, and the tone and balls of this iconic part would echo in the playing of George Harrison, Keith Richards, Eddie Van Halen, and Angus Young... and that's just one tenth of one percent of the players who have copped these licks. 

Listen to it again. You’ll see.

6. Hank Marvin “Apache” (1960)

A primary influence on nearly every British guitarist of a certain age, Marvin created a dreamy, echo-y sound on this #1 U.K. hit that was achieved by playing his Stratocaster – the first in England – through a Meazzi Echomatic tape delay and a Vox AC30 tube amp. 

Marvin mostly used the bridge pickup, but picked near the neck, and palmed the vibrato arm to impart his trademark twang.

7. Freddie King “Hideaway” (1960)

Freddie (a.k.a. Freddy) King cobbled “Hideaway” out of parts lifted from tunes by Hound Dog Taylor, Jimmy McCracklin, Robert Lockwood Jr., and even Henry Mancini. 

Between the breaks where he recycled bits of “The Walk” and “Peter Gunn,” King played stinging solos that he plucked on a P-90 equipped Les Paul using a plastic thumbpick and metal fingerpick. 

Eric Clapton did his own version of the tune on John Mayall’s 1966 album, Blues Breakers, and the success of “Hideaway” made it a launch pad for a number of other King instrumentals that would further his notoriety as one of the top blues guitarists of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

8. James Burton “Hello Mary Lou” (1961)

Having turned pro as a teenager on the Louisiana Hayride, Burton was a seasoned vet by the time he became the lead player in Ricky Nelson’s band, which was featured regularly on the TV show The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. 

Burton was a great rock and roll player, as evidenced by his Chuck Berry-style solo on “Believe What I Say,” but he also inspired legions of pickers with his explosively twangy lead break on “Hello Mary Lou.” 

Burton’s playing on Merle Haggard’s early ‘60s hits like “Mama Tried” and “Swingin’ Doors,” inspired the late, great Roy Nichols, who said, “I learned a lot from Burton, and I copied some of his licks, but I couldn’t copy him to a ‘T’.”

9. Jeff Beck “Over Under Sideways Down” (1966)

Along with the Rolling Stones, no band inspired more hard-edged guitar-wielding maniacs than the Yardbirds. Beck’s playing on their classic garage rock anthem is, like much of his playing at this time, inspired by the groovy sounds of the sitar. 

Equal parts spacey modal madness and meth-infused pentatonic fury, it still ranks as some of Beck’s most inspired playing, and that says a lot. 

And not only was Beck’s otherworldly playing inspirational to a generation of guitarists, but his punky stage demeanor and nasty sonic streak (a ‘54 Fender Esquire into a Tone Bender fuzz and AC30), served notice to everyone that a new sheriff was in town, and he was kicking ass.

10. Albert King “Born Under a Bad Sign” (1967)

If Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix lift your licks lock, stock, and barrel, your influence has been spread very far and very wide. In fact, one can make the case that Albert King was the most influential King, just by virtue of the not-so-subtle tributes by his admirers. 

King Albert’s authoritative bends and economical phrasing are required study for anyone who wants to play blues-rock guitar. On this cut, the Velvet Bulldozer lives up to his nickname, making his Gibson Flying V moan, scream, and move mountains with sweeping bends and a stinging tone that delivers all of the nuances in his playing. 

It also proves that, even though SRV and Clapton could “do” Albert, they were never really even close. 

11. Eric Clapton “Crossroads” (1968)

This one is a giant among giants. Little did Slowhand know, after he walked off the Winterland stage in San Francisco, he had created a template setting the standard for expressive, lyrical, howling blues-rock guitar. 

Armed with a ‘64 Gibson ES-335 and a couple of non-master volume 100-watt Marshall stacks, Clapton’s first break is a textbook example of how to build a solo’s intensity, while the second manages to kick it up one more notch for maximum climax. 

Not a duff note in the bunch, impeccably phrased, and with a vibrato that’s as classy as they come, Clapton could have never played another note and he’d still be one of the most influential players ever. 

12. Jimi Hendrix “All Along the Watchtower” (1968)

One can only guess what sort of “light bulb” moment Jimi experienced when he first heard this tune from Bob Dylan’s 1967 album John Wesley Harding. Maybe it was the biblical references in the lyrics, or the great melody – or perhaps just the wide-open space for improvising afforded by the four-chord progression. 

Whatever it was, the version that appeared on Hendrix’ Electric Ladyland album gave rise to one of Jimi’s most memorable solo outings. Playing soulfully and inventively using a wah and fuzz, Hendrix reinvented “All Along the Watchtower” to such a degree that it’s sometimes easy to forget who actually wrote the tune!

13. Peter Green “Black Magic Woman” (1968)

B.B. King once said of Green, “He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.” After establishing himself as a masterful blues stylist in John Mayall’s band, Green quickly evolved both as a player and a songwriter with Fleetwood Mac. 

On his D minor tour-de-force “Black Magic Woman,” Green pulls off an incredibly captivating melody, and his beautiful phrasing and soulful bending on a Les Paul with “magnetically out of phase” pickups was pure gold. 

Carlos Santana made the song a huge hit on Abraxas, and Green was also influential on Irish blues rocker Gary Moore, who would own – and eventually sell – Green’s famous Gibson. 

14. Robert Fripp “21st Century Schizoid Man” (1969)

Fripp’s serpentine solo on this alarmingly virtuosic track combines a supersaturated sustained tone with atypical intervallic movement, non-bluesy bends and trills, and note choices and phrasing that had more in common with Coltrane than Clapton. 

Playing a three-pickup ‘59 Les Paul Custom through a Marshall stack and probably either a Burns Buzzaround or a Colorsound Tone Bender, he recorded the seminal progressive rock solo.

15. Jimmy Page “Heartbreaker” (1969)

Selecting the most influential Page solo led to a heated debate. 

But the squawking tone of a ‘58 Les Paul into a Marshall SLP 1969 Super Lead, maniacal cluster picking, wicked hammer-ons and pull-offs, and behind-the-nut G-string bending in the first solo on “Heartbreaker” – not to mention the smoking second solo – explain why everyone from Brian May to Steve Vai to Steve Morse have hailed it as a definitive guitar solo.

16. B.B. King “The Thrill is Gone” (1969)

With a tone sweeter and thicker than molasses, B.B. King graced this song with one of his most emotive blues solos of all time. King knew what the tune called for in context of the highly produced album Completely Well (his first with strings), and it wasn’t about showboating. 

Far from it, judging by the way he grooves so succulently behind the beat. Besides being a big hit for B.B., “The Thrill is Gone” showed guitarists the power of playing slow and cool. 

In an era when Johnny Winter was introducing blues-rock shredding, B.B. King’s huge vibrato and deep soul defined what “playing from the heart” was all about. 

17. Leslie West “Mississippi Queen” (1970)

Leslie West’s massive and massively influential tone on Climbing! – which included “Mississippi Queen” – was created by playing through a Sunn Coliseum P.A. head and four 4x12 speaker cabinets. 

“The head had four microphone inputs and a master volume control, huge transformers and gigantic KT88 tubes, and the cabinets were loaded with Eminence speakers, which never hurt your ears, even with the treble all the way up,” West told GP in 2010. 

He was playing Gibson Les Paul Juniors at the time, and used a single-cutaway 1956 Jr. with a single P-90, strung with La Bella Electric Guitar strings (with a .010 banjo string for the high E and the other strings moved down one to create a light-gauge set) on the track. 

The song reached #21 on the Billboard charts, assuring that West’s signature sound was heard across the country and around the world.

18. Duane Allman “Statesboro Blues” (1971)

By 1970 Duane Allman and Dickey Betts had forged one of the most iconic guitar sounds of all time with their harmonized melodies on songs like “Revival” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” 

But as far as slide players went, few at the time got more acclaim than Duane himself, after the 1971 release of The Allman Brothers Band at Fillmore East. Duane’s slick phrasing and fat, singing tone on the opening track of the double live album was inspired by hearing Taj Mahal’s rendition of the song with Jesse Ed Davis on slide. 

Sonny Landreth, who remembers seeing the Allman Brothers at the time, recalls: “That huge tone that Duane got when he played slide on a Les Paul through a Marshall was a real game changer. I don’t remember anyone else who had a sound like that back then.”

19. John McLaughlin “Meeting of the Spirits” (1971)

Although he had already done revolutionary work with Tony Williams’ Lifetime, Miles Davis, and as a solo artist, McLaughlin’s combination of molten Gibson-through-cranked-Marshall distortion, impossibly fast and complex yet ultra-precise picking, and unique phrasing on The Inner Mounting Flame shattered all existing concepts of “electric guitarist” and lit the fuse of fusion.

20. Ritchie Blackmore “Highway Star” (1972)

Actually a harmonized pair of solos, the tasty bends, rapid-fire triplets, and whammy manipulations on this Strat-into-a-Marshall-amp (via a reel-to-reel tape recorder preamp) solo make it one of Blackmore’s most memorable.

The Deep Purple guitarist’s influence on legions of rock and metal shedders from Morse to Malmsteen to Mustaine is undisputable.

21. Billy Gibbons “La Grange” (1973) 

Gibbons made his mark on this classic shuffle with two solos. 

The first, done on a ‘55 Strat, enters screaming with that classic rear pickup Fender bite, before Gibbons flips to the front pickup for a swinging double-stop workout and some liquid pentatonic runs delivered with his impeccable sense of time and swing. 

But it’s the track’s second solo that the guitarist is most famous for, and the one that every hard rock player would study, due to Gibbons’ insane pinch harmonics. With his “Pearly Gates” ‘59 Les Paul, the Reverend squawks, grunts, and chokes out so many pinch harmonics that it would be laughable if it wasn’t so damm bad ass. 

22. Brian May “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975) 

Brian May’s touch, tone, and orchestral instincts have proven impossible to imitate, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. 

His majestic lines on this classic are quintessential May, with precise picking, impeccable phrasing, and a bold, loud sound. 

The solo’s placement in the mix was influential, informing how bands such as Boston and Styx featured their solos. You’ve got to assume Dr. May’s harmonized lines at the end of the song got Tom Scholz’s attention as well.

23. Larry Carlton “Kid Charlemagne” (1976)

Carlton was already a session legend known for his smooth-as-silk lines that were reminiscent of Wes, Pass, and Trane when he cut this Steely track. 

But when Mr. 335 combined a rock dude’s tone with a jazzer’s harmonic sensibilities, he created the standard by which every jazz rocker would be judged. 

Ask Steve Lukather, Robben Ford, or Mike Stern what impact this solo had on them. 

Alright then.

24. Carlos Santana “Europa (Earth’s Cry, Heaven’s Smile)” (1976)

Santana masterfully caresses the tune’s main melody with his trademark singing sustain and thick tone, never quite giving up the goods until the outro solo where he lets it all hang out in an outpouring of soulful yet wicked playing. 

He displays a fluid, tactile control at all times, and his tone is more open-sounding and less compressed than in recent years. 

And when he kicks the wah on, look out – he ratchets up the intensity tenfold, just when you think it can’t go any higher. Simply put, “Europa” is a study in pace, melodicism, and space – as well as good, old fashion burning!

25. Al Di Meola “Race with Devil on Spanish Highway” (1977)

Sure, there were people who could play fast before Di Meola, but nobody had made it such a central part of their deal before Big Al came along. 

Di Meola’s picking ability coupled with his sick, self-described “mutola” technique raised the bar for audacious shred and players interested in pushing the limits of picking. 

Far from being a pattern-minded monotone shredder, Di Meola’s Latin influences and his compositional sense have always made his displays of virtuosity supremely musical. 

And for all of the shred haters, Di Meola proved that the emotional impact of many notes is just as valid as a few well-placed ones. 

26. Eddie Van Halen “Eruption” (1978)

What can you say about this cadenza from hell? Cut in 1978, this has to be one of the most influential pieces of guitar playing ever. 

EVH took a Strat with a humbucker, an MXR Phase 90, and a plexi Marshall, and then played some supercharged Clapton licks that boggled just about every 6-stringer’s mind in the world. 

It was Van Halen’s two-handed tapping that truly grabbed everyone’s attention, however, and made this the most recognizable solo of the next two decades. “Eruption” made an impact on millions of rock dudes and seemingly every kid who set foot inside a Guitar Center.

27. Allan Holdsworth “In the Dead of Night” (1978)

As Bill Bruford put it, this solo was, “94 seconds of liquid passion married to a blinding technical facility that was to go down in the annals of rock guitar history. 

"All the hallmarks of his brilliant playing were there in this solo: poise, pace, melody, the Slonimsky interval jumps, the whammy bar, and all over a killer groove.”

28. Mark Knopfler “Sultans of Swing” (1978) 

When Mark Knopfler released this fingerpicked two-pickup masterpiece, he showed guitarists that you don’t need distortion or a plectrum to rock. 

With a Strat on the bridge and middle pickups, a Fender Twin Reverb and a Roland JC-120, Knopfler played two deft, bouncy solos that referenced Chet Atkins with snappy popped notes, crying bends, and clever arpeggios. 

Along the way he influenced just about every clean tone for the next 20 years. When people talk about an “out of phase” Strat tone, they’re talking about this tune.

29. Michael Schenker “Rock Bottom” (1979)

The 1970s was a great time for live records, with classics from Frampton, Lizzy, and Ted Nugent, but one of the sweetest solos to grace a double LP came from UFO’s Michael Schenker. 

The extended break on this tune has everything great about Schenker: melody, dynamics, tone for days, and burning. 

This lead would fascinate rockers all over the world, including George Lynch, Vinnie Moore, Akira Takahashi, and Kirk Hammett.

30. David Gilmour “Comfortably Numb” (1979)

Few solos can match the vibe of Gilmour’s work on this iconic piece. 

Playing a ‘79 black Stratocaster with a ‘62 neck and DiMarzios through Hiwatts and Yamaha RA-200 rotating speaker cabinets, Gilmour transformed what are essentially blues licks into a signature statement that affected the molecules in myriad musical minds. 

This is arguably his crowning achievement as a soloist.

31. Angus Young “You Shook Me All Night Long” (1980)

It serves to reason that a song that is all about getting it on should have a solo that is sexy, right? 

Damn straight. 

Young’s turn on this global hit finds him harnessing his kinetic blues tendencies into a steamy, attitude-laden solo that is actually kind of funky. 

His tasteful major pentatonic flavorings as well as his gorgeous tone – thanks to a wound up old Marshall and a Gibson SG – are the icing on the cake of his impeccable groove, intonation, and phrasing.

32. Randy Rhoads “Crazy Train” (1980)

After Van Halen, it wasn’t easy for an L.A. rocker to make a mark, but Randall Rhoads did so in a big way on his debut with Ozzy. 

Rhoads took what he had gleaned from Mick Ronson, Gary Moore, and Bach, and synthesized it into this metal tour de force. 

He wasn’t the first guy to blend classical music and rock, but he was absolutely the gateway drug for players like Zakk Wylde and Tom Morello.

33. Stevie Ray Vaughan “Pride and Joy” (1983)

The second cut on SRV’s debut album, Texas Flood, “Pride and Joy” blasted onto the airwaves courtesy of a great melody, catchy lyrics, and a gamechanging solo in which Vaughan threw down a barrage of killer licks with a gargantuan tone from his Fender/Dumble rig. 

SRV’s deft songwriting and his Albert King/Hendrix-influenced style succeeded in making what was fundamentally a classic “tay-hass” shuffle into a huge AOR hit that every classic rocker is expected to cover in perpetuity. 

Bottom line is, after SRV came along, anyone who thought they could play blues with fire and passion got a schoolin’ the size of Texas.

34. Yngwie Malmsteen “Black Star” (1984)

Mike Varney’s rep as a finder of great guitarists was already solid when he wrote about a kid from Sweden with a funny name in 1983. 

Many players’ first exposure to Malmsteen was on this shred fest. With his blinding speed, dazzling classical arpeggios, gorgeous Strat-into-Marshall tone, and larger than life vibrato, he didn’t raise the bar for rock technique – he obliterated it. 

Yngwie changed the game forever with this one, just ask any rocker who has swept an arpeggio since then.

35. George Lynch “The Hunter” (1985)

Dokken's George Lynch has inspired countless rock and metal players for nearly 30 years with his perfect blend of structured melodicism and off-the-rails fury – all in the space of a 16-bar solo. 

This solo is a perfect example, as he eases into it with memorable, understated melodic motifs that are helped along with some thick-ass tone and sick vibrato. 

Halfway through, however, Lynch begins to turn up the jets. Alternate picking, sweep picking, and legato playing become one within a single winding phrase, giving him a sound and style that are difficult to ape. 

However, Lynch did show the way for shred-obsessed guitarists on how to structure a meaningful statement in the middle of a tune and leave an everlasting mark. In fact, his solos are the only thing that don’t sound dated about Dokken.

36. Kirk Hammett “Master of Puppets” (1986)

Kirk Hammett’s influences include his teacher Joe Satriani, Michael Schenker, and Thin Lizzy. And nowhere are those influences more prominent than on this tune. 

Hammett’s whammy bar work and speed picking would inspire countless kids to notch their mids, cram their theory, and play blazing solos over chugging grooves.

37. Joe Satriani “Always with Me, Always with You” (1987)

Satriani is obviously known as a master technician, but it’s his melodic side that has left the biggest imprint on guitardom. 

This sweet ballad showcases Satch’s singing tone, skillful ornamentation, and ability to blend the tasty with the jaw dropping. 

The reach of this solo is apparent in hundreds of instrumental guitar records, country ballads, movie soundtracks, and car commercials.

38. Kurt Cobain “Come As You Are” (1991)

Although he took about as many solos and Johnny Ramone, the late Nirvana guitar anti-hero played a memorable one in this song from 1991. 

Presumably using a Boss DS-1 for dirt and an Electro-Harmonix Small Clone chorus for the warbly modulation, Cobain simply quoted the vocal melody in a snotty, vibey way, and the kids went crazy. 

Suddenly, young players – many with a sanctimonious disdain for ‘80s-style wanking – were taking a break from strumming through songs and trying their hands at playing single-note lines.

39. Zakk Wylde “No More Tears” (1991)

Logic dictates that Zakk Wylde was doomed to failure when he got the gig with Ozzy. 

A blond kid with a Les Paul? Really? 

But then people got a taste of his huge tone, squealing harmonics, and rapid-fire pentatonics and a new star was born. 

On this tune Zakk channeled Rhoads, Billy Gibbons, and Frank Marino into a solo that was emblematic of the new generation of metalheads.

40. Dimebag Darrell “The Great Southern Trendkill” (1996)

The post-Van Halen, post-Randy Rhoads world was in dire need of a champion when Darrell Abbott came on the scene. 

He took the styles of those guys, mixed in some Ace Frehley, some Lynyrd Skynyrd, and a heapin’ helpin’ of moonshine and created the ass-kicking solo here. 

Dime made it cool to love Holdsworth, EVH, and Billy Gibbons all in the same song.

If you came of guitar-playing age in the 1960s and couldn’t afford a Gibson or Fender, chances are one of the offerings from the Japanese company Teisco captured your attention – and your budget.

In fact, if you came of guitar-playing age in the ’70s, there’s a strong possibility that you started on a used Teisco, a guitar that would have been cheap enough for your parents to write off if your interest in guitar failed to take hold.

Despite their budget prices, many of Teisco’s offerings were entirely playable and sounded cool, too.

Take the circa-1966 Teisco Del Ray ET-460 featured here. It had enough body points, pickups and switches to excite any starry-eyed adolescent. It’s also among Teisco’s guitars that have attracted something of a cult following in recent years, and for good reason, as we shall see.

Teisco’s origins date back to 1946, when renowned Spanish and Hawaiian guitarist Atswo Kaneko and engineer Doryu Matsuda formed Aoi Onpa Kenkyujo in Tokyo in 1946.

The company name transitioned to Nippon Onpa Kogyo Co. Ltd. before changing to Teisco String Instrument Corporation in 1961.

The Teisco name itself had appeared on instruments since 1948, and on the rudimentary solid-body guitars the company was manufacturing as early as 1954.

Teisco made in-roads in the North American market starting in 1961.

Although some of these guitars appear to have been issued with the brand’s name, it seems that most initial offerings were rebranded as Kent, Kingston, Norma, Encore, Duke and occasionally Kay and Silvertone.

Teisco’s big breakthrough came when it secured major distribution in North America via Weiss Musical Instruments in Chicago.

WMI renamed the brand Teisco Del Rey – “of the king” – giving the guitars a name that was both regal and surfy sounding, although many of these guitars (including the one shown here) were still branded simply Teisco.

By any name, they sold in significant numbers to young aspiring players, thanks to their flashy looks and very affordable prices.

While Fender’s price list of the time shows the Stratocaster selling for $289 and the top-of-the-heap Jaguar going for a whopping $379 (both in standard finish, with tremolo), Teisco had a raft of models – including a deluxe three-pickup solidbody, a slimline semi-hollow and a bass – priced at $39.97 each, roughly one-tenth the cost of a Jaguar.

The ET-460 (also seen with the model names Super Deluxe and K4-L) would soon be top of the heap, selling for $59 to $79, depending on the seller and the era.

The model represented Teisco’s effort to go all out and do Fender one better – well, two if you’re counting pickups.

As seen on the featured guitar, the ET-460 carried four of Teisco’s unique single-coil pickups, with metal shields around the coils and distinctive square pole pieces.

It has individual on-off switches for each pickup, a three-way tone selector that goes from bassy to bright, and master rotary volume and tone controls.

At least some of the guitars were wired so that the two different pairs of pickups nearer the neck and the bridge worked in unison as humbuckers when selected together.

The guitar’s simple vibrato is some amalgam of a Bigsby and Fender’s Jaguar/Jazzmaster tremolo, with a bridge that looks much like those on the latter models.

Also distinctive is the ET-460’s aluminum pickguard, with alternating stripes of gloss and buffed-satin finish, an appointment that featured on many guitars of the 1965-’69 era, when this model was made.

Although the luscious antique-white finish of the featured ET-460 hides any hint to its timber, the bodies of sunburst ET-460s reveal a wood that can occasionally appear to be alder or mahogany but is most likely one of the more generic species used in many budget Japanese guitars of the era.

The bolt-on necks of some were carved from planks made with several thin laminates of wood, although some examples had a three-piece maple neck.

Unlike some Teisco models, the ET-460 had a truss rod, with adjustment accessed at the body end, and many had a zero fret.

The fingerboards were rosewood, by appearance, but could be something else.

Alongside the guitars’ gizmo-fied electronics, the overall styling makes them strangely lustworthy in the eyes of many retro-minded players.

Often dubbed the “shark’s-fin models” for obvious reasons, the pointy body horns trace lines that seem to be uniquely shared by Italian and Japanese designs of the era.

They also sport a distinctive four-plus-two headstock that enables a nearly straight string pull from nut to tuner posts.

Sound-wise, the ET-460 is perhaps best described as “funky yet characterful.”

It can lean toward thin and bright when played clean, depending on pickup and tone settings, but the pickups on earlier examples can be fairly hot for single-coils and will sound effectively gnarly and edgy with a good distortion pedal applied, or into a cranked amp going at it old-school.

Given their budget origins, you’d expect pro sightings to be rather few and far between, but a surprising number of notable guitarists have taken an ET-460 or one of its siblings in hand.

David Lindley owns and plays several Teisco models, including an ET-460, as does his brother in slide, Ry Cooder.

Mark Knopfler owns at least a pair of fancy Spectrum 5s, which were used in the studio on “True Love Will Never Fade” and “Postcards From Paraguay.”

A young Edward Van Halen found his first electric guitar in an earlier Spectrum 5 model, and during his session days studio ace Glen Campbell often played a Teisco T-60.

Fans of the brand sometimes point to James Iha of Smashing Pumpkins using an ET-460 in the video for “Rocket,” but the similarly styled guitar is actually the two-pickup ET-230.

Japanese instrument maker Kawai bought Teisco in 1967 and made changes to the model names, but the ET-460/Super Deluxe remained in the U.S. catalog until around 1970, about the time the brand name was discontinued on guitars shipped to this country.

Long the $50 pawnshop specials, fancier Teiscos like this ET-460 and the Spectrum 5 are fetching prices into the four figures these days, and it’s hard to deny the major dose of cool they bring with them for the player who digs the styling of the era.

Essential Ingredients

• Bolt-on neck with rosewood (or similar) fingerboard
• Unique double-horned “shark’s-fin” styling
• Four single-coil pickups
• Individual on/off switches and three-way tone switch
• Striped aluminum pickguard

Exhibiting a diversity of playing styles – including fingerpicking, clawhammering and frailing – on electric guitars and acoustic guitars, Mark Knopfler writes and performs songs that showcase a deep knowledge of folk, rock, and blues idioms.

An important event in his evolution as a guitarist occurred during the mid-‘70s while he was playing with the pre-Dire Straits band Café Racers.

“I was playing a rhythm/lead thing with a plectrum, sort of like [British rock ‘n’ roll guitarist] Mick Green,” Knopfler told Guitar Player in a 1979 interview.

“I used to use a pick until a few years ago, when I started getting more and more involved with playing without one. Then, a sort of synthesis happened between fingerpicking and getting plectrum-type effects by just using my fingers.

“Eventually, I found myself doing things with just my thumb and two fingers that I couldn't do with a pick. But I still use a plectrum now and again for strumming or for playing on acoustic tracks."

Relying on finesse and economy rather than brute force, Knopfler’s distinctive style has influenced the guitar world ever since Dire Straits’ eponymous debut album featuring the standout single “Sultans of Swing” dropped in 1978.

His out-of-phase tone, eccentric melodicism, and extensive use of hammer-ons and pull-offs have inspired countless guitar players throughout the decades.

In the following interview extract from the September 1984 issue of Guitar Player, Knopfler discusses his matchless technique…

You have a very vocal-like guitar style, but it’s not at all like the B. B. King style you mentioned earlier.

Part of the difference, I suppose, would be chucking away the pick when I was evolving my own style.

Style, I find, is always impossible to define, but it's easy to recognize.

What made you start playing lead with your bare fingers?

It just started to happen. I remember sitting in a house in London – starving to death at the time – playing a cheap Japanese acoustic with really light electric guitar strings on it.

I knew then that it was on a turn – it was developing. I was doing things with my fingers that I couldn't do with a pick – really fast things and what have you.

I still love to play with a pick, and sometimes you have to record certain parts or songs with a pick – for instance, “Expresso Love" [from Making Movies].

But it's interesting that now I'm not nearly as comfortable with a pick as I am with my fingers.

Did you go through different stages of developing techniques and experimenting with fingerpicks?

Yes. I went through thumbpicks and even steel fingerpicks with the Nationals, and I dispensed with them.

It's a bit of a disadvantage without them sometimes, because a thumbpick is just great for that chunk thing that Chet Atkins can do so brilliantly.

What does your picking technique consist of now?

It's the thumb and first two fingers, and I tend to anchor with the back or my hand and my other two fingers, so it's a solid base.

Do you pick with your fingernails or with the meat of your fingertips?

It's really from skin, but sometimes the nail will catch. You can use the nail to snap it.

A lot of times, I’ll hit a note with the thumb and second finger together, so it might seem as though I'm pinching the string – squeezing it.

The second finger hits it first I think, behind the thumb, so you can get a real physicality with a note.

Is your tone a product of the type of guitar you play, or is it a result of your picking technique?

I think it's a combination. I like to play all kinds of guitars, not just Strats, but I wasn't getting the sound I really wanted until I got a Stratocaster.

It was about a ‘61 with a rosewood neck. I like rosewood necks a lot, even though I end up playing a lot of maple necks.

Your old Fender Strat used to have the 3-way toggle switch taped so that it would stop in the position between the middle and rear pickups. Why didn't you just get a 5-position switch to achieve the same pickup combination?

I liked the 3-way switch better than the 5-position; it had a better sound. But I kept knocking it out.

I have a 5-position switch on the Strat now. The roadies are always pulling bits out and sticking things in.

Browse the Dire Straits catalog here.

The guitar players who most influenced Browan Lollar serve as bookends of a sort. In style and tone, the guitarist for horn-heavy soul purveyors St. Paul and the Broken Bones hangs out somewhere between Steve Cropper and Radiohead, and never more so than on his band’s latest album, The Alien Coast (ATO).

“I’m so impressed with somebody like [Radiohead’s] Jonny Greenwood or Ed O’Brien, because those guys were guitar players in the biggest band on Earth,” he explains. “Then they were like, ‘We don’t want to be a guitar band anymore; we want to be an electronic band.’”

Lollar says he and his bandmates can relate, although he’s reluctant to make the comparison.

“Our band is sort of at the same point, where we’re like, ‘We don’t want to make that type of music or be known for one type of music,’” says the guitarist, who previously played in Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit band in the early aughts.

“We want to explore and really press ourselves. I find myself thinking about those guys a lot and what they would do in certain situations.”

After forming in Birmingham, Alabama in 2012, the octet became darlings of the festival and club circuits for its throwback look and sound. It didn’t take long for the band members to grow out of their matching suits, though.

Once their experimental streak began to show, they tugged on that thread and kept pulling it forward.

“A lot of times, especially these days, we’ll bring in something that’s totally written on a synthesizer,” Lollar says. 

Once the other band members get ahold of an idea, though, that synth phrase could end up as a guitar riff or horn blast. And for Lollar, that’s the fun of it. 

On the eve of releasing The Alien Coast, he talked with us about finding his place in an eight-piece band and coming of age in a music town with a backstory all its own.

You grew up near FAME Recording Studio. What was it like to develop around so many great musicians?

I lived over in Florence, which is just across the river from Fame. Everybody knew exactly what Fame had done back in the day.

I grew up going to bars and seeing people like Kelvin Holly, who was Little Richard’s guitar player for a long time, play to people who were just ignoring them. I thought you had to be that good to play at a bar.

Years later, after I started touring, I realized how special what we have there is.

How did your early recording sessions impact you as a young player?

We recorded the Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit [2009] record at FAME. That was the first time I’d actually been able to set up camp in there with a band, where we had the studio for a week and got to move in.

It was also my first real opportunity to get into the studio with all the toys and have time to experiment and do things that Jason didn’t have planned out before going into the studio. I still think about that session a lot.

Which players were you most impressed by growing up?

I loved Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler, and people from the old style of playing. Then I got into more band-oriented players like Steve Cropper and David Gilmour. I felt those players knew their role and the spot in the music they needed to fill, and they filled it perfectly.

Steve Cropper isn’t flashy, but he would come in with a really raw sound. It was just crazy to me how he was able to make that Telecaster sound work in that setting.

For a long time I’ve been interested in guitar as an instrument that adds to a band instead of overtakes it, especially with St. Paul and the Broken Bones, because we’ve got so much stuff going on, and it’s so important to be dynamic in the band.

How did you find your place in such a large ensemble?

I had to discover that I didn’t have to go in there and be “guitar guy” and come up with riffs and stuff. When we first started, before [2014’s] Half the City, I told the guys I didn’t want to take a bunch of guitar solos. I didn’t think that this band needed to be a guitar solo-y band.

At that point in my life, I was pretty tired of it. I just wanted to focus on writing songs. Luckily, it doesn’t really lend itself to that, anyway.

Do you lean on any music theory tips or lessons to find complementary notes to what the horns are playing?

Very little. I’m the one guy in the band that isn’t great at music theory. I know it enough to have a grudging respect, because I have to. All our horn players can just spout the stuff off, and Al [Gamble], too, our organ player. I know what works and doesn’t over a certain chord.

What do you find most challenging about playing in this band?

There’s eight guys onstage, okay? All the low-frequency stuff is organ and bass. All the mid- to high-frequency stuff is pretty much covered by the horns, and all the high-frequency stuff with our singer.

Where does that leave the guitar player? For a long time, I was experimenting to find what kind of guitar tone really suited us.

Where did that journey take you?

I went from a [Gibson] ES-335 to an old [Gibson] Trini Lopez that I really love. It didn’t really work, though, so I went to a [Fender] Jazzmaster and finally settled on a [Southside Custom Guitars] T-style, because it’s got that Steve Cropper thing where it kind of threads the needle between all those other very rounded, beautiful instruments.

You’ve been upheld as a plug-and-play guitar player. Considering how far out you get on The Alien Coast, has that reputation held?

Yeah. Actually, it’s gotten a little better. When we fly, we’ve got 1,000 bags to get from point A to point B. Right now on my pedalboard, I’ve got one of those Cry Baby Mini Wahs, and I really like it a lot.

I’ve got a Boss ES-5 multi-effects processor; that’s what I use for flange and a little bit of echo. That goes into a Strata reverb pedal, and from there I go out.

I don’t have a lot of pedals because I have to focus on what I’m playing with my hands. If I start tap dancing too much, I can’t play well.

Your playing in this band is well suited to a combo amp. What are you using?

For a long time, I was playing the Supro Thunderbolt Plus, but our horn player Allen [Branstetter] is playing a lot of secondary guitar parts on the new record, and he’s going through the Thunderbolt now, and I’ve moved back over to a Fender Twin.

I can’t seem to get away from a Fender amp. Most of the time, if it’s not a Fender amp, I’m just trying to make it sound like a Fender amp.

As a band, it sounds like you threw out the rule book this time.

We have been evolving in that way ever since the second record. With this album, we asked about every single part of this record, “Does this song need this?” We didn’t just throw guitar on a track if it didn’t need it, and honestly that went for anything.

There’s barely any horns. We really just wanted it to be a challenge for us. We wanted it to be out of our comfort zone.

Order The Alien Coast here.

A blues-rock guitar player of astonishing prowess, Jeff Healey impressed everyone who heard him ply elastic licks, fluid bends and emotive vibrato from his Squier Strat. 

Here are five reasons he remains a guitar legend…

1. Matchless Technique

Born in Ontario, Canada, on March 25, 1966, Healey developed eye cancer before the age of one, requiring the removal of both eyes, which were replaced with ocular prostheses. At age three, he was given a guitar and shown how to place his hands on it, but Jeff preferred to play it in his lap, with both hands over the fretboard. He quickly developed on the instrument and by his early teens had formed his own rock quartet, Blue Direction.

2. Music Fanatic

Jeff’s early musical passions included old-time jazz, and he became proficient on trumpet and clarinet. While still in his teens, he began hosting his own music show on CIUT-FM, where he spun discs from his ever-growing collection of 78 rpm jazz records.

Later, after achieving fame, he would host a similar program titled My Kinda Jazz on Jazz.FM91 in Toronto, and eventually amassed some 30,000 jazz records, including many rare sides.

3. Platinum Success

By age 17, he had formed the Jeff Healey Band and begun playing at Toronto clubs, where he was spotted by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Albert Collins. In 1988, Healey and his band signed to Arista Records and released their debut record, See the Light, which contained his number-five Billboard Hot 100 hit, “Angel Eyes.” The disc went Platinum in the U.S. and made Healey a star.

4. Road House

During the making of See the Light, Healey and his band were cast in the Patrick Swayze movie Road House. The role gave Healey several scenes with Swayze and helped raise his profile further. He continued to fuel his success with albums like 1990’s Hell to Pay, which included performances from Mark Knopfler, Jeff Lynne and George Harrison, whose song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was featured on the record.

5. Multi-Instrumentalist

Healey’s later work became more jazz focused, and he went on to release three albums of traditional jazz music featuring himself on trumpet with his band Jeff Healey’s Jazz Wizards. He opened the club Healey’s in Toronto, where he performed with his blues band on Tuesday nights and his jazz group on Saturday afternoons.

Sadly, in 2005, he developed cancerous sarcomas in his legs, and in January 2007 underwent surgery to remove cancerous tissue from his lungs. Jeff Healey died on March 2, 2008, in Toronto at age 41, just nine days before the release of his final album, Mess of Blues.

Explore Jeff Healey’s catalog here.

Mark Knopfler’s incredible collection of studio guitars – comprising go-to vintage instruments as well as some lesser-used models for more specific sounds – is hard to beat. 

Here we take a look at six of the Dire Straits man’s favorites…

1. 1937 National Style O Resonator

The guitar that graced the cover of Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms is still used extensively today for studio and live work. It dates to around 1936 or ’37 and has a few details that might not be obvious at first glance, such as the right-hand f-hole, which hides a jack socket for an instrument cable so the guitar’s internal pickup can be used. Due to its position, only right-angle jacks can be used, for obvious reasons.

National’s Style O resonator debuted in 1930 and continued in production until 1942, when demand for resonators was waning during the war years. The Style O came in several cosmetically different variations. Knopfler’s is a Variation 7 model, most of which were issued with a tortoiseshell-style Lucite pickguard, which, as here, was often removed.

2. 1958 Gibson Les Paul Standard

Knopfler has two ’Bursts that get used frequently on recordings and live dates: a 1959 example and this beautiful ’58 that he says is remarkable not only for its tone but also for its rock-solid tuning stability. This ’58 formed the basis for a Gibson Custom replica model that was issued with a long neck tenon, PAF-style custom humbuckers and hide-glue neck construction. Knopfler has recorded using examples from the original run of 100 hand-aged and 150 VOS (Vintage Original Spec) replicas along with the original ’58.

3. 1937 D’Angelico Excel

John D’Angelico, one of history’s most influential archtop guitar makers, built only 1,164 guitars in his lifetime, starting out in a Kenmare Street, New York City, workshop. Earlier pre-war examples of the Excel tend to have less ornamentation than the ones that followed later, so this example does not feature the stair-step tailpiece that became a D’Angelico hallmark from around 1940, nor other art deco–style appointments. The body measures 17 inches across the lower bout. The headstock is topped by classic “pineapple and pediment” D’Angelico ornamentation and sits atop a seriously chunky neck.

4. 2008 Monteleone Isabella

This stunning example of the luthier’s art was custom-built for Knopfler by John Monteleone in 2008 and was subsequently used on a song in tribute to the maker’s skills titled “Monteleone,” from Knopfler’s 2009 album, Get Lucky. The body is built from dramatically quilted, big-leaf Oregon maple, while the top is Adirondack red spruce.

5. 1935 Martin D-18

This vintage Martin is one of Knopfler’s most often used acoustic guitars and was built just three years after the company began making the D-18. An earlier version of this classic mahogany-bodied model had been built as the D-1 beginning in 1931.

6. 2011 “Blue” Pensa Custom

Rudy Pensa has been building custom electric guitars for Knopfler for many years, and this P-90-equipped model with a carved double-cut body is the latest in an evolving series. Knopfler says a thinline double-cut electric by Pensa is on its way to him next.

Browse Mark Knopfler albums here.

Mark Knopfler has has done it all: recorded massive hit records, written critically acclaimed soundtrack work and collaborated with heroes and contemporaries alike. Here's what some of his fellow guitarists had to say about him...

Sonny Landreth

“I was already a big fan before I ever met Mark. Like so many others, I was won over with "Sultans of Swing." When that first came on the radio back in the day, it seemed like it came out of nowhere. The sound was so unique, so different.

“When I was touring the U.K. for my album Outward Bound in 1992, Mark got in touch with my manager and he said he wanted to come to the gig. That’s how we met. After that, he came down to Louisiana and played on some tracks on my next album. Then we went up to Nashville, and I played on his first solo record.

“It’s been a great experience for me, and I’ve learned so much from him. We all love hearing his playing on records and on the radio, but to experience that touch and tone in the same room, through a loud amp, while he’s creating it right there in front of you – man, that’s mesmerizing! It brings you to another level. It ups my game because it’s so inspiring. I instantly find this deeper well that I can draw from.

“The funny thing is, he’s known for his understated lines that just captivate you, but he’s a real badass. In the studio he’ll let loose with riffs that just turn my head around and make me say, ‘What the hell was that?’ But he’s never about being flashy. For him, it’s all about serving the song.

“I think he’s truly the ultimate musician. Think about what he’s accomplished as a guitar player, a singer, a songwriter, a producer and a film score composer. I’ve got friends and people who I admire big time who can maybe do three of those things. But I don’t know anyone else who can do all of them.”

Jason Becker

“The first time I heard Mark Knopfler was on his song “Wild West End.” It gave me instant goosebumps, as everything of his does. His beautiful tone and touch come straight through his fingers from his heart.

“He knows how to inject his soul into a soundtrack like The Princess Bride or a rocker like “Money for Nothing.” Not many people can do that. The two pieces that always get me all emotional are “Wild West End” and “Why Worry.” I would love to work with this heartfelt genius someday.”

Nuno Bettencourt

“He’s probably made the quietest big impact on guitarists, if that makes sense. I wouldn’t want to focus solely on “Sultans of Swing,” but that song really is the epitome of what he does in my mind. I love solos where you can sing every note, like “Hotel California,” where it’s just melody after melody after melody. I feel that way about “Sultans.” Every time it comes on the radio, I can sing every lick, and I look forward to every lick.

“So much of his stuff is that way. It’s about his touch – it’s so tasty. He’s not doing it through aggression or distortion, the way most of us guitarists do. It’s all about dynamics, taste and patience. I think that’s what sets him apart. It takes a lot more to get your message across with a tone like his than by cranking a Marshall. It’s easy to hear a clean sound and think that it might not be that powerful, but with him it really is.

“I would never say that he’s underrated, because his music and his songwriting speaks for itself, but he might be one of the most undercelebrated guitarists. He has all these jazzy tendencies, but he made it pop. He made it singable. He got hits with it. Who gets that kind of guitar playing on the radio? Nobody except him.”

Joe Satriani

“I was sitting down making bracelets at the Liquid Bracelet Factory in Berkeley, California, when I first heard Mark’s guitar coming over the radio. It was 1978, and Dire Straits had just released their debut album. His sound was so pure and fresh, and personal too. It was as if he was sitting right in front of me singing and playing. Fantastic!  I love how you can hear and almost feel his fingertips on the strings as he’s playing. His touch is unmistakable, no matter the amp tone he’s got dialed in. And the vibrato is all his.

“He’s a great writer, singer, communicator, and a master storyteller. In Dire Straits, as a solo artist, with other artists, or with film scoring, you can hear his compositional voice. I like how he gets to the point but somehow takes his time getting there. How does he do that?”

Buy Mark Knopfler's latest solo album Down the Road Wherever here.

Happy birthday to Mark Knopfler!

Multiple Grammy award-winner and one of the greatest guitarists of all time, Knopfler’s lengthy and prolific career includes recording no less than nine solo albums; the same number of soundtrack albums; collaborations with co-legends Chet Atkins and Emmylou Harris; and country rockers The Notting Hillbillies’ Missing...Presumed Having a Good Time long-player.

And that’s before we’ve even mentioned Dire Straits.

Recorded At SARM/Basing Street Studios in Notting Hill, London during early 1978 and released later that year, Dire Straits’ eponymous debut album along with its lead single, "Sultans of Swing" brought Knopfler’s superlative fingerstyle technique to the masses. It also made him an instant guitar hero to many, helping to repopularize the Fender Stratocaster in the process.

Composed on a National guitar, “Sultans of Swing” took a different course after Knopfler acquired his first Fender Stratocaster in 1977, the year Dire Straits formed in London. “It just came alive as soon as I played it on that ’61 Strat,” Knopfler once told Guitar World magazine, “which remained my main guitar for many years and was basically the only thing I played on the first album.”

On the subject of the song’s epic guitar solo, Knopfler comments, “It was just more or less what I played every night. It’s just a Fender Twin and the Strat, with its three-way selector switch jammed into a middle position. That gives the song its sound, and I think there were quite a few five-way switches installed as a result of that song.”

Although Fender didn’t get round to installing the five-way switch as standard on Stratocasters until 1977 (replacing the model’s original three-way pickup selector), it was a popular mod for years prior, helping players achieve a further two pickup options. For many, these unique out-of-phase tones represent the quintessential Knopfler sound.

While the recording showcases a very pure electric guitar tone, by the early '80s Knopfler was using a bespoke-designed live rig masterminded by Pete Cornish – one of the best custom builders in the business and famous for designing similar systems for the likes of Eric Clapton and David Gilmour.

In this classic clip from 1984’s Alchemy: Dire Straits Live (recorded at London’s Hammersmith Odeon on July 22 and 23, 1983) Knopler’s astounding technique can be seen close up as they draw their monumental eight-month Love Over Gold Tour to a climax at home in England.

A masterclass in technique, composition, and style (headband included!) this is undoubtedly one of Knopfler’s greatest moments captured on film.

Get Alchemy: Dire Straits Live here.

Launched in 1981, MTV celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. And for many of us guitar fanatics no other video sums up the 80s MTV Generation as perfectly as Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing”. Musically, lyrically, and visually this Dire Straits classic from 1985 encapsulates it all, primitive computer animation and outmoded politics notwithstanding. 

The song reflects upon a real-life conversation overheard by Mark Knopfler between two men vehemently expressing their mutual disdain for MTV and all it stands for. Taken aback, the guitarist later penned the lyrics to “Money for Nothing” based on the rant. In the video, the grating jealousy and resentment of this pair of macho, cigar-smoking bigots juxtaposes with Sting’s puerile, needy “I want my MTV” falsetto. Meanwhile, the viewer is left somewhere in the middle with Dire Straits who seem far too busy having fun making music to care.

Speaking of which…

Who can forget ‘that’ guitar tone? It sounds like no other. Present yet out-of-phase, crunchy but clear. That mysteriously simple riff is a perfectly balanced set of tonal contradictions that somehow reflects the song’s fragmented lyrical outlook. But how did Knopfler achieve such an elusive sound? It was, as is often the case with so many great moments on record, a bit of a happy accident.

While aiming for a ZZ Top-style tone, Knopfler’s basic guitar sound was achieved by using his fingers (rather than a pick) to play a Les Paul Junior plugged into a Laney amplifier. But the utterly unique timbre of “Money for Nothing” is just as much a product of some fortunate microphone (mis)placement, as Knopfler discovered when he began warming up for the recording session. 

Although the mics were still in the same random position where producer/engineer Neil Dorfsman had abandoned them mid-setup the previous evening, the sound in the control room immediately confirmed they had stumbled upon something special. Indeed, the guitar track required little else in terms of further mixing.

The team later tried to recreate the sound using the same gear, alas to no avail. Despite their best efforts, that particular combination of microphones in that room and on that day – one off-axis, another picking up floor reflections, and another in the room “somewhere else” – captured an unrepeatable magic.

One of the first major releases on CD, Dire Straits’ classic album from 1985 Brothers in Arms contains the track "Money for Nothing" and can be purchased on vinyl from Amazon here

Released in 1990 on Columbia Records, Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler’s Neck and Neck remains my all-time favorite Chet record. Although it’s certainly not a quintessential example of his work and style, it’s a world-class example of great craftsmanship and well-seasoned guitar playing. 

The masterful production was overseen by Knopfler. Les Paul once said the first song of a set is when the audience is checking out what shoes you’re wearing. In some ways, that’s how I feel about the Neck and Neck opener, “Poor Boy Blues.” Although this vocal track won Best Country Vocal Collaboration at the 1991 Grammy’s, it’s probably my least-favorite song on the record. 

That said, it’s an easygoing invitation to the second track, “Sweet Dreams,” which is so relaxed and lovely, it feels like one is laying on water while having a pleasant dream. 

To me, the great Ray Flacke original “Tahitian Skies” is the perfect guitar composition. On this track, the guitars’ sounds are perfectly clean but still have a depth of character, and sometimes join forces with pretty harmonies.

The melody is something you think you’ve heard before but can’t place. Truth be told, I’ve tried to rewrite “Tahitian Skies” numerous times: “Maceo” on Orange, “Alana” on Dream Dictionary, “Molly Harvey” from Last Night, This Morning and “D’Boat” from Table for One all owe a serious nod to “Tahitian Skies.”

I still haven’t been able to seize the poignant beauty Chet and Mark seem to have effortlessly captured on the gem, but I keep trying.

Aside from being a great listen, Neck and Neck serves as an example of how a well-crafted guitar record can be totally satisfying. It never overexerts itself, and it never leaves the realm of trying to be beautiful. Moreover, Chet and Mark have nothing to prove. Every sound is in service of the songs. It’s not a guitar record about guitar — it’s a guitar record about music.

The inventive arrangement exemplifies the powerful subtle touches all over Neck and Neck. The original tonic G major is prefaced by a B7 chord that pulls us to Em. Together with the following A7, this has a ii - V tonality, but the A7 still functions as the secondary dominant of the upcoming D7 chord.

Forgive the theory analytics. More simply, Chet and Mark change one chord and the result is a whole new tonal landscape. It’s a brilliant addition. Meanwhile the guitars play simple, captivating melody lines that I’d be hard-pressed to edit. I couldn’t veto one single note. 

Their musical lines are as memorable as the song’s original melody. Underneath it all, the rhythm section softly percolates as Paul Franklin plays perfect steel pads and the legendary Floyd Cramer brings his iconic stylistic piano fills. It’s a little masterpiece. Neck and Neck has many other high points.

Chet displays his vaudevillian charm on “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” and it’s hard to believe the banter is anything but off-the-cuff. It’s never tedious upon repeated listenings (see Chester & Lester). I chuckle every time Knopfler mumbles, “A little old?” when Chet sings about updating his style to fit current rock trends.

What follows is a tour de force of guitar trade-offs, including double-stops, chicken picking, open-string cascades and the six-string kitchen sink. The result is a perfect conversation between these two guitar masters, without ego or sweaty ambition. Chet and Mark are simply speaking to each other while we voyeuristically eavesdrop.

Some classic Chet Atkins style is showcased on “I’ll See You in My Dreams.” The Chet two-beat serves as a canvas for 64th-note arpeggios, 6th chords and open-string ring phrases, while retaining an effortless, relaxed cool.

There’s a great version of Django Reinhardt’s original composition “Tears,” and while its changes are necessarily easy for mere mortals, Chet and Mark make it sound like a nursery rhyme filled with a melancholy introspection. Mark O’Connor’s fiddle dances playfully over the melody while the two guitars sound simultaneously stark and huge.

Feel free to watch the entire clip. However, if you skip directly to 3:48 in the top video, you'll witness an inspired 1988 performance of J.J. Cale's "Cocaine" by Eric Clapton - with an assortment of special guests, including Elton John and Dire Straits' Mark Knopfler - at Japan's Tokyo Dome.

This was during the period when Clapton had turned "Cocaine" into a production, with a long band intro, background singers, a funky bass line, a lengthy keyboard solo, various stops and starts and the addition of the lyric, "ooh, that dirty cocaine."

Luckily, guitar is still at the forefront of the performance. Clapton's solo starts at 5:12.

Unfortunately, Knopfler doesn't solo in this particular version of "Cocaine" - which is only fitting because Clapton doesn't solo in the bottom video, a 1988 performance of "Sultans of Swing" by Dire Straits and Clapton. Knopfler starts his mesmerizing "Sultans of Swing" solo at 4:58.

But watch out for that smooth jazz breakdown at 6:20! Ah, the Eighties, when everyone felt they had to make a production out of everything. Simple and stripped down went out the window. Just compare the production on Clapton's No Reason to Cry (1976) to Behind the Sun (1985). But I digress...