Musician 1990
PRINCE'S GUITARS AND EQUIPMENT
On this tour Prince uses a selection of five guitars, including two Cloud guitars, one blue with bats inlaid down the fretboard; the backup one is black with Roman numerals down the frets. Both the guitars have an EMG single coil pickup at the neck and an EMG Humbucker at the fixed bridge, active electronics and a tone and volume control. As guitar technician DALLAS SCHOO says; "Prince is more into the sound of the guitar rather than having extra gadgets on the body."
An Oswald 'Model C' Guitar, which Prince calls his 'Rock' guitar, with the same pickup configuration as the Cloud guitars above, but with an extended lower horn from the body which rejoins at the head. This feature, apart from looking well
flashy, also gives extra sustain. These guitars have a new set of regular guage 10 to 46 GHS strings before each gig.
A Hohner Telecaster, Prince's 'clean' guitar, a natural finish standard passively wired instrument, but one of his favourites, is strung with 11 to 50 gauge GHS strings each night.
A Roger Sadowsky Telecaster, a replica of the Hohner - in bright red.
All guitars are three quarter scale and are covered in finger-Ease before being handed to Prince. He designs the straps (are you surprised?).
Via a Nady 1200 radio lead, the guitars plug into an onstage pedal board incorporating a VB-2 Vibrato, a DSD-2 Digital delay, a BF2 Flanger, an OC2 Octaver, an SD-1 Super Overdrive, a PSM 5 Power supply, a Coloursound Wah-Wah and a Boss EV5 expression pedal.
The signal then travels to a concealed rack specially designed by studio technician, MATT LARSEN.
This contains a JBL UREI third octave graphic equaliser which is only adjusted if the concert is outdoors, two Rocktron HUSH IC modules which cut out the noise from the Boss foot pedals, a Yamaha SPX 90 and two Roland GP16 multi effects units. At the bottom were two Mesa Boogie series III amplifier heads for the clean and dirty sounds. A custom made switching unit switches between the two sounds and then sends the sound to one of two speaker cabs, miked up in the guitar technician position under the walk way.
A duplicated set of cabinets positioned between the wedge monitors at the front of the stage also receives the sound so that Prince can clearly hear what he's playing.
