Archived Edition of Chromatic Musings

Technical details on how Prince recorded

Music Thing has a few posts about how Prince got his sound on some of his mid-80's music.

1. Kiss was originally a country song. Prince recorded it on cassette and gave it to a band he was developing. They were called Maserati. The tape was just a verse and chorus with Prince singing and playing acoustic guitar. Maserati weren’t impressed.
2. The band worked on the track for a day, trying to make it work. They still weren’t impressed.
3. Early the next morning, Prince came into the studio and listened to what they’d done. He recorded the electric guitar part and his vocal. Then he threw the band out of the studio and stripped off most of what they’d recorded.

Off the top of my head, if Prince writes a song for you, you pretty much damn well find a way to make it work.

Also some details on the keyboard player who always dressed as a surgeon.

1. Those massive synth sounds on ‘1999’? They came from an Oberheim 4 Voice, multi-tracked four times with different patches.
2. Everything was always played live. The only time he let Dr Fink use a sequencer was to play the rhythm part on ‘I Would Die 4 U’ from Purple Rain. Prince could play it live himself, but Dr Fink couldn’t.

For what it's worth, I feel this guy's pain. Back when I was playing with In The Pocket, we did a Jeff Beck tune called Star Cycle. It had this heavily sequenced keyboard part that Tommy refused to program; he played it all by hand. The upshot was that we could only rehearse the song once or twice a week because his hands would get too tired to play through the song.

Posted by Casper at September 28, 2004 10:56 PM