Nail the ToneDire Straits

Sultans of Swing

Dire Straits · Dire Straits · 1978

Knopfler cut this on his red 1961 Stratocaster with the three-way switch wedged between bridge and middle for that nasal "quack," played with bare fingers into a small Fender combo set clean with just a hair of hair on the peaks. Set treble up, bass moderate, gain right at the edge of breakup, and let a compressor even out the attack. Most of the tone is in the right hand — pluck near the bridge with the flesh of the fingers, not nails or a pick.

Where these numbers come from: worked out from the documented rig and the sound of the record

Tuning

Standard tuning, no capo

Standard tuning, played entirely with bare fingers (no pick) on light-gauge strings; the solos sit in D minor with a lot of open-position and 10th-fret pentatonic work.

Part: Solo

Guitar

  • Fender Stratocaster (1961, red) · Fender single-coils (middle possibly DiMarzio FS-1) · bridge + middle combined

Amp

Fender Vibrolux (brown 6G11-A)

GAIN
5.5
BASS
4.5
TREBLE
6.5

Ingo Raven's mk-guitar research and engineer Chas Herington place this amp (borrowed from John Illsley) on the Pathway demo and single and consider it likely for the February 1978 album take; the brown Vibrolux has only Volume, Treble and Bass, so use the bright/normal channel just under breakup.

Amp

Fender Twin Reverb

GAIN
3.5
BASS
4.0
MID
5.5
TREBLE
6.5
REVERB
2.0

Knopfler himself told Guitar World the solo was "just a Fender Twin and the Strat"; a competing account notes he only started using Twin Reverbs live around May 1978, after the album session, so the memory may be retroactive — either amp clean with a touch of edge gets there.

Pedals

  • Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer · compressor · No controls — fixed compression; disputed, some sources say the squash came from the mix, not a pedal
  • Studio plate reverb (EMT-type) · reverb · Short, subtle — a light wash behind the lead, added at the desk

Tone character

glassy Strat quack · clean with slight breakup · forward upper mids · compressed, even attack · percussive fingertip pluck

hard

It's all fingerstyle — thumb and two fingers — with fast pull-off flurries, rolled double-stops and arpeggios that have to stay clean at tempo, plus the outro solo's rapid repeating figures.

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Sources