Down to the Waterline – Dire Straits – Chord chart for the solo
Huge Dire Straits fan and admirer of his guitarist singer Mark Knopfler, the first albums of the band particularly marked me, especially the first and Communiqué, the second. Sultans of Swing is probably one of the songs I've worked on most (and it's still the case today!) But also Down to the Waterline whose solo is simply fabulous.
Curiously, it's already been 1 or 2 years that I have almost in my fingers the solo Waterline but until today, I had not taken the time, shame on me, to write down the chord chart behind this solo. It is also a typical error of the guitarist who throws himself on the solo to memorize it without leaning on what happens behind a harmonic point of view while, especially in this case, it is capital.
Indeed, the chord grid for rhythm changes for the solo with very tasty modulations.
Like all modern-day internet guitarists, I went to Google to find the chords. Big mistake ! The search results give bad grids or some very rough approximation if not downright wrong. There are even cases where this instrumental sequence is simply omitted.
Anyway, here is my transcript of this sequence of chords. It seems to me that it is correct but of course I am ready to review it if there are errors.
Note: it did not fail, I published an error in the previous version. Thanks to Aurélien Budynek who made me notice on Twitter that the F# is major and not minor for the solo (while it is minor in the rest of the piece).
Until the next blog post, I will get back to work on this solo that I am far from mastering!
Pierre Journel.
