This was easily the most challenging thing I’ve done so far on guitar. I imported the song into Logic Pro, split out the stems, deleted all the guitar portions (leaving only the vocals, bass and drums), then recorded myself playing the rhythm I learned from Justin’s lesson. Then for the last loop, I recorded the lead portion over it all together. It was a heck of a learning lesson and quite challenging to mix everything together and synchronize the videos.
I really love this song and it was a pretty significant milestone for me to bring it all together, even though there’s a good number of mistakes it’s quite challenging to get through 6 minutes of almost completely unique lead guitar parts while making minimal mistakes. I’m in the process of trying to find my own unique voice with the guitar and I’m making some good headway with that. I want to revisit this song soon and do a complete rhythm + lead cover at the same time with my own style added to it, once I can refine that all a bit more. Recording these two together in video format like this helps me visualize what lead notes are being played over which chords, and understand it probably better than any other way I can think of.
Nicely played, there were very few flubs I could hear! Mark Knopfler isn’t easy to emulate, his playing style won’t sound right unless you do it the same as he does, you can only do that by watching exactly what he’s doing. That was where you did the odd flub, catching strings he didn’t - nothing to worry about at all, in my opinion a carbon copy isn’t the right approach, you should always try to put your own spin on it which is what you’ve done!
Holy cow Ryan.
When you set your sights on something you go all in.
The biggest kudos and good vibes to you for this massive achievement.
Wow.
All power to you - keep on keeping on.
Terrific stuff Ryan, it’s also one of my favourite DS songs. What a lot of work you’ve put into this one and the fact it’s not an exact copy of the original makes it all the better in my opinion.
Well done.
@twistor59 twistor, that’s a funny one to think about. I play guitar about 3-7 hours a day and probably spent about an hour each day for the past two months on it, so probably somewhere in the ballpark of 50 hours. I listened to and played through this song so many times that YouTube awarded me a badge for being in the top 0.5% of Dire Straits’ 42 million monthly listeners just from this song alone. I probably could have learned it a bit faster had I been more experienced with guitar, but I just started playing January this year so it was quite a task to get this all down.
Still a very impressive result Ryan! I guess you could take advantage of youtube’s slow down function to help learn the licks. If you haven’t discovered it already, the Transcribe! software tool is great for doing this, and looping sections.
@twistor59 Thanks! I appreciate the info and I’ll check it out. I’ve been using Guitar Pro to loop certain sections and slow them down for other songs as I learn them, but it doesn’t have the exact song to slow down - more like a “realistic” MIDI version of it to do so. I should mention that hour wasn’t spent directly on playing through the song over and over, that would also include technique work mixed in. For example I practice various techniques probably about an hour a day, and some amount of that time was spent on stuff like trying to fingerpick licks or fingerpicking arpeggios like Justin outlined in this lesson:
At some point in the night I’d practice memorizing the song by playing the lead by myself at whatever pace it took me, and then I’d play through the actual song (or at least how much of it I’d memorized at that point) 2 or 3 times.
Thanks!! @roger_holland , guitar and music creation in general is completely new to me, but I did play drums for a year or so back in high school - though that never extended beyond trying to play along to songs by myself in the garage. I wouldn’t say drumming skills translate physically to guitar at all but I do feel I had built up a pretty good baseline sense of rhythm to start with as a result. I’ve been documenting my journey in the learning logs section of this community, as well as with monthly song progress videos that I started uploading to YouTube because my phone couldn’t take all the storage.
Amazing performance, especially taking into account your short guitar learning period. You obviously have talent, man! 