Is Avid’s Eleven Rack still a worthy competitor in the modelling world over a decade on from its release? Guitarist Mark M Thompson sets himself a rather difficult task to find out.

Last year the guitar world was seemingly turned on its collective head with John Mayer’s admission that he was using, shock horror, Fractal amp modelling for some of his recordings. Earlier this year, the argument of whether real amps still trump their digital counterparts, at least in the live arena seemed to have finally become a moot point when it transpired that the “tonemeister general” himself was confirmed to be using a Kemper rig on tour: Mark Knopfler! Using a digital rig. What?

Of course, this revelation has now started the scavenger hunt to end all scavenger hunts for what is the holy grail of guitar tones: how do we get our grubby mitts on the Kemper profiles he’s using? Do you want to play through THE amp that Knopfler used on the Brothers In Arms album? Well if he’s using that particular profile live, it’s going to be out there somewhere; it just has to be. His tech team were apparently working on modelling his gear for a year or so prior to the most recent tour, so understandably such treasures will be under the heaviest of lock and key, but at some point... they will turn up online. Maybe as a collection of licenced “signature” expansions for the Kemper units or some such. Until then, we can only look to this other treasure that has been doing the rounds online for a few years now:

Above, my fellow tone hunters, is a chart containing Knopfler’s Soldano SLO 100 amp settings used on the very last Dire Straits tour back in 1992, one that I found here. Anyone who has listened to the 1993 release “On The Night” will most likely agree that, for a live album, this is still as good as it gets for guitar sounds.

The chart itself contains a fair bit more information than just the amp settings, most of which are relatively easy to decipher, but for the sake of this article the amp settings are what we shall be looking at.

I myself do not own a Kemper system (or anything similar produced in the last couple of years) for the sole reason that I’m still utterly in love with my Eleven Rack. It gives me everything I need for both stage and studio use, so until it croaks it or a future incarnation of the Pro Tools software renders it obsolete, it’s not going anywhere. With this in mind, along with the fact that the 11R does a damn fine job of its Soldano modelling (along with pretty much everything else) I had me an idea:

Could I, without a Kemper, without Knopfler’s profiles, and without his fingers or soul or dream guitar collection, use only the above chart to dial in the settings in my trusty 11-year-old workhorse, and recreate as close as possible some of those guitar sounds?

Admittedly, I did spend a fair amount of time analysing the reverb types, decays, pre-delays etc for each patch so I didn’t copy the chart’s settings verbatim, but please have a listen for yourselves. I’m honestly happy with the results as a whole, but to me my experiment proved if only one thing: the Eleven Rack is still one hell of a piece of kit. It may not have all the bells and whistles compared to other more modern and complex units, but what it does do it does exceptionally well. It may even take another decade before I find something newer to plug into, and especially one that makes many a live sound engineer chef-kiss the air more than this unit does the minute sound-checking starts. Oh, and a tip for live use: stick the Graphic EQ last in chain and roll that bottom end off. Your engineer will (silently) thank you.

Free Eleven Rack Mark Knopfler Presets

Audio Examples

Mark plugged his ’94 Fender Strat straight into his Eleven Rack and recorded with Pro Tools 2020.9.1: no additional effects were used.