2008 MONTELEONE ISABELLA
This stunning example of the luthier’s art was custom-built for Mark Knopfler by John Monteleone in 2008 and was subsequently used on a song in tribute to the maker’s skills, simply entitled Monteleone, from Knopfler’s 2009 album, Get Lucky. The guitar’s body is built from dramatically quilted, big-leaf maple, while the top is Adirondack red spruce.
a Dobro and a fiddle and banjo and a flat-top guitar and you can only play with a pick, and whatever else…’ Well, who cares? I love all that music, but a lot of the new stuff, it’s far too fast. I call it ‘turbo grass’. Actually, if you listen to the really great people – you know, Bill Monroe and the people who started it – it’s not played that fast. The originals never really played that fast.”
Knopfler adds, as an aside, that his intense focus on songwriting in recent years has left him wanting to brush up on his own playing technique a bit, to the extent that he’s even toying with the idea of taking guitar lessons.
“You do get one thing at the expense of the other to a certain extent. I certainly think that my playing has suffered from just being so preoccupied with writing songs over the years. I’m not bitching about it, I love songwriting more than anything and that is why I’ve ended up where I am with it, with the guitar.
“I tell you the truth, though, I’d like to have a guitar teacher come round on a Tuesday morning or something and ring the bell, and not set me a load of theory but just talk about a little passage or a little sequence and leave it with me and then go through it with me the next week… That’s exciting to me, because I’ve never had a teacher like that. I don’t want to start learning some shit that I’m not interested in, but there’s lots and lots of other stuff I’d still love to get into.”
It’s heartening, if surprising, to learn that Knopfler feels he could use a few lessons this far into his career – meaning there’s surely hope for the rest of us yet. All the same, on the evidence of tracks such as Drovers’ Road and Nobody’s Child, it’s clear he hasn’t got too much to worry about. Knopfler sounds great on the album: as well as the languid, lyrical phrasing he does so well, the guitar sounds are top-drawer throughout. But anyone hoping to crib detailed notes from the Knopfler school of guitar tone is in for a disappointment, he reveals.
“People say, ‘How do you get that sound?’ Well, I plugged it in and then I started fiddling with the knobs until I got something that I quite liked [laughs]. That’s how I did it. But I can tell you some things that I do,” he admits. “I’ve just found on my old Tone King amp, for instance, that I like the rhythm channel better than the lead channel for a lot of things that I do.”
When it comes to the guitars used on the album, he says it’s a mixture of his go-to vintage instruments and lesser-used guitars that had a more specific role in tracking certain songs.
“There’s a slew of Les Pauls on the album. Gibson copied my ’58 [pictured opposite]
“My playing has suffered from being so preoccupied with writing songs”