Giving stupid answers to smart questions, it’s our weekly snarky pseudo-interview… Fret Buzz. This week: Bob Dylan’s guitarists keep going on garden leave. But what makes The Bard a tough gig, and who are rock’s most notorious paymasters?

Dylan’s guitarists are walking out? You just can’t get the staff…

They’re dropping like flies. Last month, long-term sideman Doug Lancio quit the road band, followed a fortnight later by Bob Britt. We wouldn’t like to speculate, but Britt’s farewell post – “Sayanora Bobby” – seemed flippant (at best) or a man bursting with bottled-up venom (at worst).

Yes, I’ve always gone with ‘thanks for the opportunity’. What’s Britt going to do now?

Gardening, apparently. He wrapped up his next post by announcing he was off to weed his flowerbeds.

He’d rather do that than play with Dylan? Next you’ll be telling me Stevie Van Zandt has quit the E Street Band to creosote his fence.

Well, tell that to the 35-plus guitarists who’ve blown through Dylan’s lineup [indeed, Dylan debuted his third new guitarist in three weeks, Jad Tariq just this past weekend – Ed]. The guy gets through sidemen like kamikaze pilots.

But Dylan is the era-defining poet of the rock ’n’ roll epoque. A seminal visionary who…

Yeah, yeah, we know all that. But being his guitarist isn’t necessarily easy.

Isn’t it just G, A minor, C, and A?

In theory (although what you just said is slightly reductive). But Dylan’s freewheeling onstage tendencies can apparently feel like one long hazing ritual.

“I was great friends with the Heartbreakers,” Dave Stewart of Eurythmics once recalled. “They were on tour with him and said he’d suddenly play the song in a different key, or he decides to miss out a verse.”

Heh. What a jokerman. I bet he’s a riot in the studio?

Not according to Robben Ford, who recalled one ’90s session where Dylan arrived in the studio only to slump wordlessly on a stool – “[he] doesn’t say anything, head down, nothing”. Then there’s the relentless death march of his touring schedule.

Don’t people nickname it the Never Ending Tour?

Yep. By the time you finally get home, the babies whose births you missed are arthritic old gargoyles hobbling around looking for their dentures.

Is Dylan the toughest rock icon to work for?

Not by any means. Rock ’n’ roll is full of borderline despots. Take James Brown, who reportedly fined his players for missing a note, or even just wearing the wrong shoes.

Wow. So by the end of Sex Machine, you could owe him $50? Maybe I would be better off as a dog-walker.

That’s nothing. Prince demanded a ‘purple’ lifestyle of his band members.

What does that even mean?

Search me. Lots of beets on the backstage rider?

Maybe he should have just hired Barney the dinosaur.

Then there’s Frank Zappa, whose standards were so absurdly high that you literally had to be Steve Vai.

And what about that poor sessioner that Axl Rose humiliated by making him wear a KFC bucket every night…

No, that was his choice. I mean, the guy’s called Buckethead. He’s kind of painted himself into a corner on that one.

So how do I apply for the Dylan gig?

Just hang around the stage door for the next sessioner to storm out. We’ll have your gardening gloves waiting for you…

While some guitarists are known for playing hugely complex rigs loaded with state-of-the-art digital tech, others prefer the old-school, less-is-more approach to playing electric guitar.

Lenny Kravitz is one such traditionalist whose rig is, more often than not, as simple as it gets: a vintage electric guitar plugged straight into a vintage tube amp – with nothing in between.

In an interview with Guitarist, Kravitz discussed his minimalist signal flow, which he utilized for his 2024 album, Blue Electric Light.

During the conversation, he also recalled how such a workflow once baffled Prince – a guitarist famously known for operating at the other end of the gear spectrum – while the pair were casually playing together.

Namely, the Purple One couldn’t fathom how Kravitz had managed to create such varied sounds and textures with simply a guitar and a Fender Deluxe without the aid of additional effects.

“I remember jamming with Prince once, and he was like, ‘What is that effect you have on your guitar?’” Kravitz recalled. “And I looked at him and said, ‘Nothing. It’s a guitar into a Deluxe, turned to 10.’

“He couldn’t believe it. He was a guy that used a lot of processing and did it very, very well. But here he was: he thought it had some kind of effect, you know? I showed it that it was nothing, absolutely nothing.”

The guitar/amp combo has always been at the crux of Kravitz’s tone, which highlights the nuances of his playing – and not much has changed.

To this day, the songwriter strives for a “pure sound” by utilizing a select catalog of equipment that includes “vintage Les Pauls, Strats, 335s” and a couple of smaller amps that help contribute to a bigger sound.

“I don’t depend on pedals,” he stresses. “Maybe if there’s a lead and I need a little added texture, I’ll use the pedal in that case. But all my rhythm sounds are just a guitar into an amp, with no processing whatsoever.”

“I saw Keith Richards on TV with Ronnie Wood the other day saying, ‘The new rock bands are terrible. They all rock, but they don’t know how to roll.’ And the interviewer says, ‘What does that mean?’” says Randy Bachman, guitar hero since the ’60s and renowned for not one but two hit-making bands – the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

“Keith said, ‘Rolling means you don’t play to a click track. You get together, you rock out, and you speed up when you get excited. It’s like you're jogging. You take off with a start, you slow down, you get to a pace, you speed up again. Very few bands can rock and roll anymore.’ And the interviewer asked, ‘Which bands do you mean?’ and Keith said, ‘Well, like the Guess Who’ – and he named a couple of other bands like us who play live and don't have a click track.”

Bachman has every right to be proud of his band’s reputation. Like that of his admirer Richards, the Guess Who has a heritage that goes back six decades to the birth of amped-up rock ’n’ roll, building a name along the way for compelling songwriting and fiery guitar playing.

The Canadian group’s heyday might be some years in the rear-view mirror, with the classic lineup doing its best work between 1965 and 1970, but their catalog still has a loyal following, as the reaction to their recently announced Takin’ It Back spring-and-summer 2026 tour has proven.

Not that getting to this point has been plain sailing for Bachman and his long-time songwriting and performing partner, singer and keyboardist Burton Cummings. The Guess Who have been touring for some years in a new line-up formed by the group’s best-known bassist, Jim Kale, doing good business nationwide – until Bachman and Cummings stepped in with legal action. The situation was resolved out of court in 2024, allowing the two musicians to form a new line-up and announce Canadian and U.S. live dates.

“We went after them for false impersonation, fraud, things like that, and then our lawyer and I shut down the publishing from BMI,” Cummings says, with audible relief. “The promoters were told that if they hired this band, they were breaking the law because the band was playing unauthorized, unregistered songs and they would be sued, so the promoters actually shut it down.

“There was a lot of meditation and mediation. It took another year and a half or two years to get that done. Finally, the whole thing was settled.”

Now that the authentic Guess Who lineup has been re-established, fans are in for a treat in May, when the spring portion of the tour kicks off in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. Bachman and Cummings, now 82 and 77 respectively but on fine guitar and vocal form, will be backed by guitarists Tim Bovaconti and Joe Augello, bassist Jeff Jones, percussionist Nick Sinopoli and drummer Sean Fitzsimons, delivering songs from their entire catalog.

Shoehorning all the fan favorites into a standard set will be no easy feat, simply because of the band’s long and prestigious history.

The first iteration of this group appeared way back in 1958, when the Winnipeg-based singer Chad Allan formed a local band called Al and the Silvertones. By 1962, the lineup included Bachman, Kale and drummer Garry Peterson and, after a sequence of singles and a change of name to Chad Allan and the Expressions, the local Quality Records label released a cover of Johnny Kidd & the Pirates’ Shakin’ All Over.

A domestic chart-topper, the single bore the words “Guess Who?” on its sleeve, reportedly because the group’s manager wanted people to think that it might be by a famous British Invasion band working anonymously. The same slogan appeared on the 1965 album Hey Ho (What You Do to Me!); within a year or two, the name had stuck.

True success didn’t come until 1969, when the albums Wheatfield Soul and Canned Wheat yielded the hit singles These Eyes, Laughing and Undun; stardom followed with the immortal American Woman in 1970, something of an anthem for a generation despite some confusion over its lyrics, thought by some to be anti-American.

The American Woman album was a Canadian Number 1 and charted highly in the U.S. and U.K., while the singles No Time and No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature also made an impact.

Bachman departed the band in 1970, somewhat curiously given their newfound success, although he had the last laugh, forming Bachman-Turner Overdrive with two of his brothers and scoring with a series of hits, notably the huge-selling You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet in 1974. The Guess Who continued under Cummings’ leadership until 1975, followed by occasional reunion tours and an induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1987.

Thirty-nine years later, the original Guess Who singer and guitarist will be treading the boards together once again, as the two men explain – dropping in plenty of guitar adventures along the way.

This is set to be a busy year for the Guess Who. How does it feel to be back on the road?

Randy Bachman: My whole year is going to be rock and rolling. I’m really looking forward to it. We kept getting offers and offers and offers, and finally, we got a really good one, too good to refuse, for January in Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls. It sold out in an hour.

Then we got asked to do the Rock and Roll Legends Cruise in February that goes from Florida to Jamaica and back, and then we announced our tour in May, right across Canada, and boom, it’s 80 percent sold out already. The fans are going crazy. [In March we announced] U.S. dates soon for June, July and August.

After that, in September, October, November, I’m touring with BTO. My three brothers passed away during Covid, so I inherited everything. I owned it anyways, but I got no speed bumps in my way to stop me.

How is the Guess Who lineup sounding with the new members?

Burton Cummings: We just did a week of rehearsals in Toronto, and I was just so proud of everybody and very proud of how the songs were sounding. We’re going out to give the music to the people that really want to hear the guys that made the records. And Randy has never played better.

Bachman: Let me say that Burton sounds incredible on vocals. When there’s a song you haven’t played for 30 years, and you play it and it sounds exactly the same as ever, it’s fantastic.

Cummings: What’s great is that there have only been a few bands in history that have had three lead guitar players. I can think of the Allman Brothers and Moby Grape and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and that’s about it as far as well-known bands. And now, last week at rehearsals, here was Randy as the general of a guitar army.

We never had that before in the Guess Who, and the stuff sounds great. Back when we recorded some of these records, Randy did all the guitar parts, so when we played live, we could never sound like the record. Now we can, and it’s very exciting.

No backing tracks needed, then?

Cummings: I don’t like them. We’ve never used them. No band that I’ve been in has ever used them. We brag on stage that everything you hear tonight is being played live. We don’t use machines. I don’t even want to go there.

Bachman: I also think people come to hear mistakes. They know that everything they hear on the radio has been sung or played on guitar 30 times, so they’re hearing a close to perfect record. You see us play live, and sometimes you start in the wrong key, or you play the wrong note, and you go, “Oops.” And everybody goes, “Wow.” It’s like jazz guys improvising. Like in Spinal Tap – play it once, it’s a mistake. Play it again, it’s a cool jazz transition note.

You also play the guitar, Burton.

Cummings: A little bit. Randy taught me just enough guitar to be annoying. He gave me a book with all the chord formations and he helped me learn certain chords, so I switch to rhythm guitar once in a while on stage. I’m not that good, but it’s nice to put on an old Gibson once in a while.

Randy, your treasured 1957 Gretsch 6120 was stolen from you in 1976 and you only got it back in 2022. I assume you’re not bringing it out on the road.

Bachman: No, although I did play that Gretsch on every Guess Who song. It’s a very clean guitar, a big hollow-body. If you turn it up loud, you get an incredible honking feedback, so I use it for rhythm.

That’s what I played on These Eyes, that’s the beginning of Laughing. It’s the rhythm track on American Woman, but then I put my ’59 Les Paul on top of that, which is very thick, sounding like a cello or a viola. They go well together.

That’s a classic ’60s combination.

Bachman: Well, in those days, in the middle and late ’60s, there were no pedalboards. You had an amp, usually a Fender, or maybe a Marshall if you were British, and you got your tones from three guitars.

You had a Gibson if you wanted to sound Clapton-esque, you had a Strat if you wanted to sound like Hendrix, or you had a Gretsch if you wanted to sound cleaner, like John Fogerty. And then if you had a 12-string, obviously it was a Rickenbacker, like Roger McGuinn and the Byrds.

But no, I will not be playing the Gretsch live. It’s never going to leave my house again. It took me 46 years to get it back. If I lost my Gretsch again or somebody stole my ’59 Les Paul, how do you replace that? You can’t.

How did the 6120 come back to you?

Bachman: Here’s what’s amazing. The guy who found my Gretsch, his name is William Long. He did it from facial recognition of the pattern of the wood and my pickguard on my guitar. Since then, he also found Neil Young’s ’59 Gretsch.

I saw Neil two weeks ago; it was his birthday in Malibu. He and I are gonna do a video together where he’s got his Gretsch and I’ve got mine. We’ll play our Gretsches and sing together, because we both got them from the same store, Winnipeg Piano in Winnipeg, back in – holy cow – ’62 or ’63.

Which guitars will you take out in May?

Bachman: It’ll probably be a ’57 goldtop reissue Les Paul. That’s a lighter guitar. I was touring before and I got a call from Gibson saying, “Why aren’t you playing your ’59 Les Paul? That was your sound.” I said, “Well, mine weighs 14 lbs. That’s why I’m not playing it.”

If you put a 15 lb. brick on your shoulder for four hours a day for decades and decades, you’ll have a screwed-up shoulder, and I have a screwed-up shoulder and back, so I only play it sitting down in the studio. And they said, “What would it take to get you playing a Gibson again?”

I said, “Make a lighter one,” and they said, “We’ve got a lighter one, a goldtop ’57. It’s Steve Lukather’s backup guitar. He’s on tour in Japan with Toto and he’s not coming back for two weeks, so we’ll send you his goldtop. We’ll make him another one for when he gets back.” They sent me the goldtop and I’ve been playing it ever since.

Any other guitars in the current arsenal?

Bachman: I was in Nashville at a Christmas party for Kevin Shirley, the producer. He’s a really good friend of mine, and he produced my Heavy Blues album [2015]. At his party, I got to meet Paul Reed Smith, who says to me, “You’re a legend.” I said, “Are you kidding? You’re a legend. You’re the new Leo Fender. You’re the new Les Paul. You’re the new Orville Gibson.” And Kevin Shirley says, “Two legends get together, what are you going to do?”

And I said to Paul, “I’m looking for a lighter guitar, even lighter than my ’57, because I’ve got a back issue. I had my left knee replaced. I’m a cancer survivor. I had four cancers, and I can hardly stand up. I’m learning to walk and balance again.

Standing on one foot and operating your pedals is like tap-dancing, and I can’t do that yet. I’m still building up. I work out every day in a pool with weights.” And he said, “I’ve got a new guitar. It’ll be under 4 lbs.” So I got his number. I’m typing him a letter right now.

Will you be taking an amp and effects out with you?

Bachman: I’m using a Fender amp. I found a guy in Florida who takes the Roland blues pedal [Boss BD-2 Blues Driver], removes the little transistors and puts in military-grade ones, so they’re more stable and more solid. I have two of those. One of those on half will give me a rhythm like the beginning of an AC/DC song.

Has any effects company ever offered to make an American Woman pedal?

Bachman: We did that about 12 years ago. I bought a Tech21 SansAmp, the little black pedal, and then the rackmount, and I'm clicking through the tones on the rackmount and I get to number 48 and it says American Woman. So I turn it on, and I plug in, and it’s the American Woman sound off the record, which is my ’59 Les Paul, a Garnet Herzog amp and an RCA tube mic into a 3M tape machine.

It’s all that distortion and sustain all put together. So I called this guy in New York City and I said, “Can you just take that sound out of there and put it in a pedal for me?” and he said, “We don’t have a casing big enough to put in, so we’ll jam it in an old casing.”

He took what he thought was two preamps in there and put them in the casing, but when I would step on it on stage, it was so jammed in there, it would short out because the switch would be touching the metal. I’d have a roadie crawling on stage trying to push the buttons. Nobody could see him, and he was trying to push the buttons, or loosen it up, so I could get my sound back.

The American Woman solo is a classic. How do you compose your solos?

Bachman: I grew up playing violin, and all you play in violin is lead; it’s a lead instrument. But when I was 14, I saw Elvis on TV and I said, “What is that?” They told me it was a guitar and that this was rock ’n’ roll. I said, “Well, I want to do that, it’s wild.” Elvis was going crazy, and I loved the guitar player behind him, Scotty Moore.

I wanted to play that way. Then I met [jazz guitarist] Lenny Breau in Winnipeg, who was a year older than me, and he could play that way, so I hung out with him for two years. He taught me that if you can sing a guitar solo in your head, other people can sing it in their head.

The simpler you play, the more people will remember it. I can do that shredding stuff, but it just shows people you’re the fastest gun in town. It’s not memorable, so I try to play solos you can sing, like American Woman.

Is it true that you collected hundreds of Gretsch guitars over the years while you were trying to find the original 6120?

Bachman: It is. This was way, way, way, way back. My guitar was stolen in 1976 in Toronto, so I went to the Ontario Provincial Police and the Mounties, and they said, “Your guitar’s probably gone east to Montreal,” because it was really easy to cross the border then; in the mid-Seventies, there wasn’t a whole lot of border crap going on. Bands would come to New York and then play Montreal and Quebec City and go back into New York.

So, my guitar was gone. I got a letter every month from Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, Norman’s Rare Guitars in L.A. and Pete’s Rare Guitars in Minneapolis, saying “Hey, man, we’ve got a Gretsch here that we paid some guy $100 on a trade-in. We want to make $50. Will you pay $150? We’ll send you the Gretsch.”

How come they were so cheap?

Bachman: Nobody wanted Gretsches then. The factory had burned down in Brooklyn. They were being made in Arkansas, and they weren’t made that well, but they looked beautiful. So I’d say, “OK” and send them $150 when I was on tour, and when I got home, there were 20 guitars at my house. I’d open each one up, and it was never my guitar. The years went by, and my midlife crisis wasn’t a young blonde chick and a red Corvette; it was finding my Gretsch. It became an obsession. I ended up with 350 of them over the years.

What did you do with them?

Bachman: I got a call in the mid-’90s from Fred Gretsch and from Duke Kramer, who was the head of his production at the time. And he said, “Do you really have this many Gretsch guitars?” And I said, “Yeah, it’s my obsession, because I still haven’t gotten back my 1957 6120.”

Fred says, “We want to come and see them,” so he comes to my basement, where I’ve got a white wall that’s all White Penguins and White Falcons, I’ve got an orange wall that’s all 6120s and 6121s, and I’ve got a sparkle wall of gold and purple and champagne Sparkle Jets.

He looks at it and he goes, “This is truly amazing. I’ve only been able to make Gretsch drums for the last 10 years, but through corporate shuffling and divorces and people owning the copyright, I can now make Gretsch guitars again, but all my templates are gone. They were burned in the factory. Can I borrow your guitars and we’ll copy them, and then we can put out new Gretsches?”

I started lending him five or six at a time, so every Gretsch that’s out in the world from the mid-’90s onwards is a copy of one I had in my collection.

Which songs are you most looking forward to performing on tour?

Cummings: My favorite Guess Who song has always been No Time. When we do it on stage the people sing every lyric with me. I’ve always liked that song because before that, we had Laughing, Undun and These Eyes, and they were all softer songs. When No Time came out, I think we started getting taken more seriously as a rock band.

Bachman: I’ll tell you this much – I heard No Time on the radio the other day. It sure didn’t sound that old. It’s still pretty rocking. And I always love doing No Sugar Tonight and New Mother Nature together. We do that live, and the people just sing along with every word. It’s amazing.

What did you think of Lenny Kravitz’s 1999 version of American Woman?

Cummings: I liked the way they put the background vocals in with harmonies. On New Year’s Eve a while back, there was a broadcast of Lenny Kravitz and Prince together, and they were doing American Woman.

Oh, man. Two of my all-time favorite artists, and there they were, jamming stuff that came out of Randy’s head and my head. That was pretty special for me, I’ll tell you. Prince was an amazing, amazing guitar player. The solo he does is incredible. Hey, Randy, were you with us when we played it with Lenny in Toronto?

Bachman: I was there – it was the MuchMusic Video Awards [1999]. At the end, it was cool because Lenny and I were trading vocal ad-libs. It really worked very well.

What's the best song you guys wrote together?

Bachman: It’s going to come back to No Time. It’s got everything. It’s got guitars. It’s got great lyrics. It’s got a good melody. Tailored to a three-and-a-half-to-four-minute single, I think it was a perfect record for us.

Good times ahead, then?

Cummings: Oh, yes. We’ve got six guys singing now on stage. I’ve always been a stickler about the vocals, and I have never heard the vocals sound better in any band I’ve ever been in in my 60 years in the business. So for many, many different reasons, this is exciting and it’s valid, and Randy and I are very happy that all the fake, false stuff is over with. The future looks great for us. We’re coming out to honor the music.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

An iconic figure in the world of gospel bass guitar, Andrew Gouche’s reputation as an A-list sideman is founded on decades of exceptional bass work with the likes of Gladys Knight, Andrae Crouch, Destiny’s Child, Michael Jackson, Prince and Chaka Khan.

Like most gospel musicians, Gouche grew up in church, but his roots stretch further than most. As a boy, he sang in the choir of Rev. James Cleveland, who revolutionized African-American praise music in the ’50s and ’60s by using soul, R&B, and jazz in church, creating the template for today's gospel/secular fusions.

Within a year of receiving his first bass at age 14, Gouche began training at the left-hand of Cleveland and his pianists. “James always had the greatest piano players,” said Gouche in the September 2001 issue of Bass Player.

“There was a time when I was playing with James Cleveland, the Jazz Crusaders, the Winans, the Hawkins Family, and Andraé Crouch all at the same time.

“I was working a lot with James, visiting cities around the country four or five times a year, and I got to know a lot of people. That was a great time for me – I was doing everything, paying dues by playing in church on Sundays for $40.”

While Gouche admits that his bass playing favours busy lines over simplistic ones, that's exactly what his fans have grown to expect.

“Some people think I play too many notes, but I did what I had to do to change how people thought about gospel bass,” Gouche told Bass Player in 2013.

“Most people thought the bass guitar was nothing but the keyboard player's left hand, and that it was all about paying attention to the kick drum. People didn’t look at the bass as an instrument that could set the tone.

“So it took a while for me to understand that not everyone’s ready for me. And that’s cool. I've been fired off more gigs than anyone I know!”

It was in December 2011, having served as musical director for Chaka Khan, that Gouche got the call to play for one of the world’s most celebrated stars, Prince.

“I was Chaka Khan's musical director for six years, and in 2011 we opened for Prince on a tour. Shortly after that, Chaka decided to fire the whole band – I don’t know why. But the week after she fired us, Prince called me and said he was doing some things and asked if I wanted to be a part of it.

“It reminded me that you can't be bitter about anything that happens to you, man. I mean, if I hadn't met Chaka, I would have never met Prince.”

Gouche went on to contribute to several studio tracks during Prince’s HITnRUN Phase Two era, including Black Muse, Baltimore, and Stare.

The following Bass Player interview took place in October 2013.

What is it like to work with Prince?

This guy has more energy than anybody I've ever seen. He has so many things going on at once. He may have one band rehearsing in one studio, another band rehearsing in another studio, and be mixing a record in a different studio, and he'll just jump back and forth between them all.

It's hard for anyone to sit around and talk about how they're overworked, because he never gets tired. But the shows are incredible, and the music is like no other. For me to land a gig like this is truly a blessing.

What have been the most challenging elements of this gig?

I have my own style and I do my thing, so the biggest challenge is to play these songs exactly as they are on the records. It's been a huge area of growth for me.

There's no embellishment at all; I have to play through every song with no improvisation, so I can't put a lick at the end of eight bars with that music. I played the two shows this weekend and never played a bass fill once. That is a gigantic achievement for me – anyone who knows my playing style knows that!

Did you have to change your tone at all to fit his vibe?

My tone is my tone, and that is one of the main reasons why he called me. He told me he never heard bass as deep as mine. I use my MTD signature basses on that gig, and they fit in with the music perfectly.

Was this a difficult gig to prepare for?

He has so many songs; as soon as you think you've learned them all, you find more to learn. And besides, Prince has no problem picking up a bass and showing you exactly how he wants it to be played.

How is Prince on bass?

He's funky, man! Super-funky. Prince can play everything well. He definitely has his own style on bass; nobody can top him at what he does. There's griminess in the way he plays. You know it when you hear it.

How would you say you've evolved to this point in your playing?

The thing I try to do is just keep growing as a player; I'm always evolving. I see these kids coming up doing things that are really impressive, and I want to try to learn how to do that, too. My ego isn't too big to learn from them. So I just keep up on whatever is current, but while always being myself.

You never get to the point where you've fully arrived. I give every situation the same level of respect. There are no big gigs and there are no little gigs for me. If I'm going to do it, I'm going to put my whole heart into it or not do it at all.

The room is small and cave-like, maybe five feet long, with a low, rounded, gold ceiling that slopes gradually down to a floor covered with a snow white, shag pile carpet. The space has a slightly claustrophobic feel and smells vaguely of perspiration and lord knows what else. If there were a brothel in Disneyland, it might look something like this.

At the big end of the cave, right behind a red velvet curtain, stands a huge mixing console. Down at the smaller end there’s a mirrored dressing table and a throne-like chair upholstered in leopard skin.

Welcome to the Endorphin Machine – the on-stage inner sanctum of The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.

Who else but O(+> – as he wishes now to be identified – would design a stage that includes a place where the artist can hide from his audience? Exclusive and withdrawn, O(+> is a man of mystery. Ticket holders will never see behind the red velvet curtain. Perhaps they are meant to imagine scenes of deliciously unutterable decadence unfolding in that lair every time O(+> retreats inside. But now the truth can be revealed: he goes back there to primp and mix the show.

The mirror and mixing board are fitting symbols for the boundless ego encased within the 5-foot, 3-inch frame of The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. If it weren’t for the incredible, genre-bending, funkier-than-God music created by that Artist, the ego might be totally unbearable.

You'd think that (1) singing his heart out, (2) making his O(+> guitar wail like St. Theresa on ecstasy, (3) leading his awe-inspiring band, and (4) being the all-round focal point of the whole damn show would give the guy enough to do. He’s gotta be the sound man, too? Everybody in the music business knows you can’t mix house sound from the stage.

Or can’t you?

“It’s been a real trial-and-error process, but it’s getting a lot better,” says Michael Bland, the drummer for O(+>’s current band, The New Power Generation. “Right now O(+> doesn’t trust any sound man – and rightfully so .

“Back in 1990 during my first tour with Prince, as he was called then, he would go into his guitar solo on Purple Rain, and sometimes it would be like four bars before the sound man would boost the signal and the guitar would finally kick in. Now, where’s that at? The whole solo would be shot.

“O(+> is a very hands-on person. His attitude is, ‘If you can’t give it to me, I’ll get it myself.’”

It certainly sounds good inside O(+>’s Glam Slam club in Minneapolis, where the man is leading the mighty New Power Generation through a set that comes on as hard, strong, and relentless as a locomotive.

The whole crowd is dancing three feet above the ground – elated to see their hometown hero at such close quarters, in the intimate confines of his own night club. Chalk up another one for O(+>. If anyone can mix house sound from stage, it’s this slender enigma, who can get utterly slammin’ funk out of everything – from a “cloud” guitar to an SSL mixing computer.

He has in fact, made a lifelong career of breaking all known showbiz rules.

At the tender age of 17, Prince, as he was known, was singed to Warner Bros. and given complete artistic control over his music – the youngest artist in the company’s history ever to be so privileged. Since then he has resolutely refused to conform to anything resembling a safe or predictable career path, always taking chances that many would deem reckless, if not downright foolish. He’s never been afraid to expose himself to potential ridicule. And he has consistently been vindicated by the superlative quality and imaginative intensity of his music.

Speaking of imagination, O(+> designed the entrance and interior of his onstage mixing cave as a stylized replica of the female sex organ – complete with a two-foot high, faux gold clitoris. It's worth noting that his stage set also includes a massive gold tower that in no small way suggests the main anatomical peculiarity of males.

The fact is, O(+> has never been one to discriminate. His bands have always included musicians of all genders and races. His music spans a wide spread of styles, from rock to funk to bop. The man has always delighted in taking what appear to be irreconcilable opposites and demonstrating that they are really part of the same cosmic Love Vibe.

Typical is the new name he’s taken on: O(+>, a combination of the symbols for male and female. Even the design of the form-fitting bodysuit he wears at the Glam Slam – one black trouser leg, one white, and a bold interweaving of the two colors up and down the garment – reflects his obsession with the true harmony of apparent opposites.

But there is a down side to all this. With one foot squarely in funk and the other one firmly planted in rock, O(+> has never gotten his full propers in either field. And his talents as a songwriter, singer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and all-around image maker have tended to obscure the fact that he is one kickass guitar player.

But he certainly isn’t hiding his mastery from his Glam Slam audience. O(+> opens his show with several thunderous hard rock numbers, tearing up the fretboard of his eponymous “love symbol” guitar.

The set is heavy on brand new material, mostly from albums the public may never get to hear. Never one to pander to audience expectations, O(+> isn’t performing any of his old hits tonight (they were, in any case, recorded by a forgettable someone named Prince). His one concession to commercialism is his performance of his newest single, The Most Beautiful Girl In The World.

Not surprisingly, the concert is compelling from beginning to end. It’s clear that O(+> is currently going through one of his most rock-guitar-intensive phases since the glory days of Purple Rain. He even closes his set with a medley of classic Santana guitar moments, deftly evoking Carlos’s hot phrasing while adding something of his own unique tone and style.

“I always wanted to be thought of as a guitarist,” O(+> quietly admits. “But you have a hit and you know what happens...”

The interviewer must content himself with such tantalizingly brief pronouncements when dealing with The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. Just as he disdains showbiz conventions for concerts or albums, he ignores the rules when it comes to playing the interview game. Journalists are forbidden to even use the word “interview” in his presence, use a tape recorder, refer to a question sheet, or take any form of notes during their “conversation” with O(+>. (Of course, the “P-word” is verboten).

Reporters are simply supposed to remember everything he says. This seems a daunting task – until you realize how little he does say: O(+>’s responses are monosyllabic and often deliberately evasive. The man seems to harbor a deep mistrust of the written or spoken word. Even his new name is a symbol that cannot be expressed verbally or represented in the alphabet of any language.

Knowingly or otherwise, O(+> has allied himself with those post-modernist intellectuals who feel that language is inherently deceitful – a tool of oppression wielded by those in power.

“He’d just rather say it through his music,” his current bassist, Sonny Thompson, says. “His thing is, ‘I’ll put out as much music as I can and express myself that way.’”

In any case, inquiring reporters are given little opportunity to learn about The Man Who Calls Himself O(+>. Audiences with O(+> are typically brief. Journalists are generally kept waiting for hours and hours, typically till two or three in the morning. It should be noted that the press aren’t the only ones O(+> singles out for this kind of treatment.

On the evening of my own appointment with him in Minneapolis, he also had Barbara Streisand’s lighting director flown in all the way from New York, presumably to discuss hiring him for the big upcoming O(+> tour. This poor fellow was kept cooling his heels for five hours before being ushered into O(+>’s presence, where he was told, “My work is my love. My love is my work. We’ll talk.”

My own first meeting with the Man Whose Name You’re Not Supposed To Say comes a few hours after the Glam Slam gig, at an after-show party held upstairs at the club. Two of his functionaries lead me with due reverence up to a spot next to the DJ’s console where O(+> is standing, holding court.

Despite the strenuous set he’s just played, he looks quite fresh. He’s changed into a striped polo shirt and flares – the sailor boy look. (The Hendrix-cum-Little Richard bouffant seems to have gone out with the P-name). His pencil-line sideburns and mustache are connected in a single sinuous line.

My research on O(+> has prepared for me for his slight stature and the quarter-inch thick layer of make up on his face. But the real surprise is his everyday speaking voice. He sounds so normal, like a regular guy from the Midwest. This comes across with particular force over the telephone, where his carefully-preened physical presence can’t serve as a decoy.

As the crowd around him thickens, O(+> abandons his post and scoots up onto a brick window ledge behind the DJ booth. He’s said to be sensitive about his height, and from this vantage point he’s able to look over the heads of most of the other people in the room.

O(+> was purportedly eager for an interview that would deal with music and guitar playing instead of focusing on issues like his sexuality or his relationship with Kim Bassinger. So I start by inquiring whether he considers the guitar his main instrument. He replies reasonably enough, that he doesn’t considers any instrument his “main” one. He just reaches for whatever seems necessary to bring a song into being.

“I start with the city. Then I choose the street,” he adds somewhat cryptically.

And what instrument did you start on?

O(+>: Piano, I went to guitar later on, when I was about 13.

What is your idea of the ultimate guitar tone?

O(+>: A woman in climax.

Do you plan your solos on record or are they spontaneous?

O(+>: Spontaneous.

Which solo or guitar track of yours is your favorite?

O(+>: All are different.

What was the genesis of the Santana medley you performed tonight?

O(+>: It was Sonny (Thompson)'s idea.

Is Carlos a particular favorite guitarist of yours? Have you two ever met?

O(+>: I would consider Carlos a friend.

Who are your all-time favorite guitarists? Your biggest guitar influences?

O(+>: I listened to everybody. My favorite of all time is Sonny T.

The influence question is a sticky one with O(+> – there’s no making him cite any name players who have affected his guitar style. Not that he doesn’t wear many of his musical antecedents on his sleeve. The young Prince cut his teeth on a mixture of R&B and early-Seventies FM radio rock: Sly & the Family Stone and Earth, Wind & Fire, along with vigorous helpings of the likes of Grand Funk Railroad and Chicago.

According to the account, the ability to play the solo from Chicago’s album rock hit 25 Or Six to Four was the acid test for aspiring guitarists in Prince’s high school. And an early band of his was named Grand Central, in homage to Michigan’s own Seventies trio, Grand Funk Railroad. Also, as the son of a working jazz pianist, John Nelson, the young Prince must surely have picked up on that side of the Black musical tradition.

But today there’s no getting him to acknowledge any of this. It’s as though he wants to create the impression that he was created ex nihilo – from nothing, like Venus springing fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. So he won’t play the name game when asked about his influences.

Perhaps he’s afraid of leaving someone out, or naming someone who might be considered unhip. The more he is pressed to identify role models on the guitar, the more he returns to Sonny Thompson, the bass player in his own band. Thompson played guitar with several Minneapolis groups before joining the New Power Generation.

“I thought Sonny was God,” says the man many speak of in similarly exalted terms. “Sonny was my hero. A lot of what I do on guitar, I learned from him. I’d go over to his house and we’d play records and he’d show me things on guitar.”

Thompson seems agreeably surprised when informed of his boss' high praise: “Oh, man! He said that? Wow!”

Sonny has known O(+> since childhood. “We grew up together,” the bassist narrates. “I met him on the south side of Minneapolis. I was carrying my guitar somewhere and he was carrying a guitar, too.”

Sonny remembers what he and the young O(+> listened to during their formative stages as guitarists: “At that particular time, I was about 13 or 14. I was listening to a lot of Hendrix and Grand Funk Railroad. I had a band I was playing guitar in then. Chick Corea and them were around and I was just starting to get into them. A whole bunch of wild stuff.”

Sonny adds that O(+> was a fast learner.

“Oh, man! Photographic memory. Anything you played for him, he could repeat it. I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s definitely got perfect pitch. Anything he hears, he can play.”

It’s hardly surprising that O(+> and Sonny worked out on Hendrix riffs during the early Seventies: what guitarist who grew up in that era didn’t?

At times, specially during the 1984-85 Purple Rain phase, O(+> seemed intent on turning himself into Jimi Hendrix. The lace neck cloths and spangly frock coats were a defiantly blatant rip from the cover of Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? album. Many of the stage moves for his lengthy in-concert guitar solos during this period also seemed carefully copied from Hendrix film clips.

One wonders whether the whole thing was just another costume change for him – another disguise, something new to wear, like his Sign O’ the Times terrycloth miniskirt or the Zorro getup in the front cover of O(+> [Prince and the New Power Generation's 1992 album]. But in donning Jimi’s stage weeds, O(+> seems to have taken the man’s music deeply to heart as well.

Even his latest album, Come, concludes with a free-form solo guitar track called Orgasm, which finds O(+> erupting on the fretboard in a manner that bears no small resemblance to Jimi’s Woodstock rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. Only, O(+> has added his own inimitable touch to the proceedings. The only other sound on the track is that of an unidentified woman experiencing a prolonged, and rather vocal, sexual climax.

You’ve often been compared to Jimi Hendrix. How do you feel about that?

O(+>: People make the world go ’round.

Was your guitar solo on Orgasm directly inspired by the track’s title/subject matter?

O(+>: Yes.

So many people think of the guitar as a phallic symbol. Do you?

O(+>: People make the world go ’round.

Sonny Thompson has his own perspective: “A lot of people say he sounds like Hendrix; but to me, he doesn’t really. His vibrato is different. Just the way he attacks the guitar is different. I think his guitar sound is coming into its own at this point. I think he incorporates whatever he hears into his guitar playing, like from different instruments and all. It’s like he's absorbing all this stuff and spitting it back out.”

One reason why it’s difficult to get a fix on O(+> the musician is that he’s so incredibly prolific. In addition to his own prodigious output – roughly an album a year since 1978 plus a slew of singles, remixes, and non-album B-sides – he’s said to have some 500 songs in the can that have never been released, not counting bootleg material. And let’s not forget his activities as a film and video actor/director/screenwriter. Or the hits he’s written and/or produced for other artists, including Sheila E., the Bangles, Sheena Easton, The Time, even Kenny Rogers.

He’s all over the just released 1800-NEW FUNK album, which includes his duet with Nona Gaye (daughter of Marvin), Love Sign. Beyond this, songs are always turning up on soundtracks and he even finds time to play keyboards on recordings by the jazzy instrumental group Madhouse. The man is almost perpetually writing and recording. His whole existence is apparently set up so he can do as much as possible.

Paisley Park headquarters is located near O(+>’s house out in Chanhassen, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. It’s a sanitary, corporate-looking building that could easily be the headquarters of a prosperous Midwestern insurance company. Not a rococo phallus in sight.

“People are always disappointed that there aren’t women in bondage gear hanging from the rafters,” deadpans Paisley Park’s house publicist. Instead, the place is staffed by clean-cut, efficient-looking young women and men, all of whom seem able to say “The Artist Formerly Known As Prince” with an entirely straight face.

“Hope you have a good conversation with The Artist Formerly Known As Prince”, one told me, beaming. Or “have you seen this new picture of The Artist Formerly Known As Prince?” Among themselves, though, they usually just refer to him as “The Boss”.

The top floor at Paisley Park houses O(+>’s many business operations. This includes his newly created NPG Records, headed by Levi Seacer Jr., who left his post as the New Power Generation’s consummately funky second guitarist to concentrate on the biz.

On the main floor, there’s the famous Paisley Park recording studio, which houses, among other things, one of the slickest SSL consoles on the planet, and certainly the only one that bears a symbol in place of the manufacturer’s logo. Down a level is a massive sound stage which is used for everything, from video shoots to full-scale tour rehearsals and impromptu jams. Basically, whenever the inspiration strikes him, O(+> will slip down from his house and futz around with any of these state-of-the-art facilities.

People at Paisley will tell you that their Boss “is very hands on” with the business, and that he’s in his upstairs office by 10 or 11 every morning. But far more of his time is spent in the studio. Apparently, O(+> sleeps very little. It’s not unusual for his band members to be awakened at three or four in the morning and summoned to a recording session.

“It’s like being a fireman,” Michael Bland suggests. “If there’s a fire, you get up, put your rubber pants on, and you slide down the pole. The turnover rate, in terms of writing material and recording it, is incredible.

“O(+> works quicker than anyone could imagine. He has a tendency to walk around with this notebook that has words in it – just lyrics looking for a song. And if he hears something he likes while we’re jamming, he’ll pull [the book] right open and we’ll be working on a new song. Other times, he’ll come into the studio with a completed song that he’ll have finished at his house, at his grand piano and a cheap little cassette deck.”

O(+> himself doesn’t like to talk about songwriting; “childbearing,” he calls it. “Those questions are too personal. Thank you for not asking.” But if we talk to the people around O(+> you learn things. From the guys in his band, you learn that O(+> is a virtual antenna for song ideas. He’s perpetually in receive mode, ever ready to snatch a new song idea from the air around him.

“A lot of ideas for songs come from our soundchecks,” says Levi Seacer. “I mean, our soundchecks are sometimes longer than our shows! We just start jamming. If someone has a good idea, we put it on a cassette and we may go to the studio after the show and cut the song. Like Diamonds and Pearls – the basic tracks for that album came together in like a week and a half. I remember one night we cut three songs: Money Don’t Matter, Willing and Able, and [the non-LP B-side] Horny Pony. All three of those in one evening.”

O(+> tends to go for spontaneous, first take, live-in-the-studio tracks – even when he’s cutting a complex, episodic piece like Three Chains Of Gold, from the O(+> album.

“That’s one of many we had to do in one take,” Bland remembers. “We had to cut that all in one big hunk, and it was murder, man. All O(+> had was all these little sections that he’d written while he was in Paris. We had to piece it all together and then play it.”

Another artist O(+> has been compared to is Frank Zappa – for the staggering amount of high quality work he’s released, for his ability to play instruments, and for his obsessive, workaholic perfectionism. And like Zappa, he meticulously composes and arranges some of his records in advance, while on other discs, like Come, he trusts more to improvisation.

“The Come album really evolved from a boredom during Christmas vacation,” Bland laughs. “Sonny and I were the only two cats in the band who hung around Minneapolis during Christmas vacation. And O(+> got bored, as he usually does. Because when he’s not creating he’s not alive, you know.

“So, he went down to the soundstage where we were set up for rehearsal before vacation began. And he just played by himself all day; they say he stayed in there for like eight, 10 hours, just messing around with ideas. And then the second day he got up the courage to call us and ask, ‘You guys bored, too?’ So we came out and worked on a good half dozen tunes. And we went in the studio and started cutting them – we cut the rhythm tracks for Dark, Come, Papa, and a few other things like that.”

As his band members returned to town, O(+> did quite a bit more work on these basic tracks, and Come ultimately turned out to be a pretty slick album. But the idea of just working in a trio context with just Thompson and Bland triggered in O(+> the idea for another kind of record.

In the midst of work on Come, the three of them set up together on the soundstage at Paisley Park, their amps cranked up full, and did some bluesy jamming. The result is an album called The Undertaker.

“Picture this” says Bland: “A DAT machine, a 32-channel board, two techs, and three players. It was about three o’clock in the morning. We got our sounds together and just let the DAT roll. We took about an hour to make that record, from start to finish, playing straight through with no overdubs. The sequence of songs on the record is exactly the way we played it. The guitar segues from one song to the next, like when we do live stuff.”

There’d been talk for a while of a straight-up blues album from the Artist They Used To Call Prince, but The Undertaker, says O(+>, is not that album.

“It starts off in a blues vein,” he admits, “but then quickly goes to funk. But because of the first song, people tend to want to put it in that [blues] glass of water.”

I take a seat behind the SSL board in the control room at Paisley Park’s big studio. An engineer cues up a tape and a lean, powerful three-chord blues called The Ride flows from the speakers. The song is squarely in the classic automotive double-entendrè tradition: “If you got the time baby, I got the ride”. But O(+>’s guitar solos (and there are many of them) fling themselves violently outside the confines of traditional blues riffing.

The first solo is fluid and slippery, with a tone that combines honking wah and the envelope filter sound from a Zoom 9030 effects processor (apparently O(+> has become infatuated with the Zoom. He’s currently using it heavily, much in the same way he used a harmonizer on the Diamonds and Pearls album). And with the second guitar solo, all hell breaks loose – mega-distorted, dissonant madness which, in its own guitarristic way, is the most excessive thing yet from an artist noted for always going over the top.

“He tends to really start opening up and playing a lot of different things when me and Michael do a trio thing with him,” says Thompson. “There’s no keyboards there – no nothing. So he can venture out and play what he wants to play.”

As for O(+>, he says he’s really pleased with The Undertaker; “It’s real garage, you know? But Warners won’t release it...”

Which brings us to the real sore point for The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. To the essence of his dispute with Warner Bros. To put it as simply and naturally as possible, O(+> produces more music per year than the label feels it can profitably release. So they don’t.

“Don’t you think there’s restraint of trade?” O(+>, who has avidly followed singer George Michael’s lawsuit with Sony Records over artistic freedom, demands.

His own impasse with Warners has been building to a crisis over the past several years. The public’s first awareness of the struggle came circa 1988, with the notorious Black Album – an album of raw funk that the Artist Then Known As Prince was originally going to release through Warners, but then decided to pull.

The reason generally cited for the record’s withdrawal was its “dark subject matter,” but there were also gripes from the Princely camp about “scheduling conflicts” with Warners. Meanwhile, the Lovesexy album appeared so quickly that the Black Album was soon forgotten – by all but the bootleggers and collectors, that is.

Cut to 1994. After losing money for some time, the former Prince’s Paisley Park Records label (distributed by Warners) finally folds. Meanwhile, the Artist Who Formerly Owned the Label has at last three albums’ worth of material in the can. Warners says it will release only one. So what happens? The Artist announces that he is no longer Prince, that he has changed his name to O(+>.

Thanks to a special dispensation from Warners, he is allowed to release his first work under his new identity – the hit single The Most Beautiful Girl In The World – on his newly created NPG label. The record is distributed not by Warners, but by R&B entrepreneur All Beller’s Bellmark Records.

What will happen with The Undertaker? If Warners won’t release it, will they permit the Artist They Continue To Market As Prince to put it out on NPG/Bellmark? In other words, was The Most Beautiful Girl In The World deal a one-off courtesy or was it a precedent-setting policy move on Warners' part? Apparently, lawyers and managers are duking that out right now. Ask O(+> about the whole affair and you’ll get a characteristically enlightening answer.

Will The Undertaker come out on your own NPG label?

O(+>: I don’t know. Levi runs the label.

Ask the same question to Levi Seacer and you don’t get much further: “As to when it’s gonna come out, I don’t know. The thing is that he’s always working on something. But I think this needs to be heard.”

If the controversy were only about some bonus jam-out disc, it wouldn’t be worth all the ink that’s already been spilled over it. But also in the can is a brand-new, full-fledged O(+> and the New Power Generation studio album called The Gold Experience, which was a much more deliberate effort than Come, says Michael Bland, who drummed on both discs. “I think O(+> wanted to write some strong songs that are classics.”

Hearing O(+> and the New Power Generation perform songs from The Gold Experience in concert, one is inclined to believe he succeeded. Songs like Acknowledge Me and Days Of Wild are stupefyingly funky – among the best stuff O(+> has recorded under any name. And yet, according to Bland, The Gold Experience will probably never see the light of day. O(+> is presently attempting to release it by himself. But his contract prohibits him from doing so.

“There’s no release date,” says Bland. “We don’t know where it’s gonna go – except for into the hands of the fans. There’s a possibility that we might just give the record away. It’s about time that we actually gave something back to our fans who have supported us for so many years.”

Distribution of the album via the much-vaunted “information superhighway” is another possibility that seems to be under discussion. O(+> is reportedly quite interested in the new computer technologies and recently issued his own CD-ROM disk. So does the name change signal O(+>’s entry into the new cyber era – perhaps like Todd Rundgren’s decision to change his name to TR1?

In adopting his new name, The Artist We’ve Been Talking About All Along Here had purportedly decided to release only old material on Warners – things laying around in the can that he’d recorded back when he was still Prince. Yet according to his sidemen, the Come album dates from the same period as The Undertaker – and is, consequently, a fairly recent work. Yet, it has been released on Warners under the name of “Prince.”

So is the name change a merely a business convenience – a thinly veiled ploy to bring out extra product under another imprint? Or is it a personal thing, as O(+> has alleged in interviews? Perhaps a rejection of the identity his parents thrust on him at birth? Or is it yet another artistic persona? Questions, questions.

Does your name change signal a shift in your approach to marketing music?

O(+>: We’ll have to see. Not deliberately.

In the midst of all this there exists the intriguing possibility that the Ego Formerly Known as Prince is simply and finally spinning irrevocably out of control.

If the Paisley Park complex resembles your average mid-sized American corporation (and it does), it seems distinctly like the kind of company run by a real “cut-to-the-chase”, “shoot-from-the-hip” kind of CEO. You know, the kind of guy who’s got so many plates spinning in the air that a crash seems inevitable. Around Minneapolis, there’s talk of the high employee turnover rate at Paisley Park. “If you want to talk to disgruntled ex-employees, you can do plenty of interviews”, one local informs me. There’s also talk of money leaving the company under mysterious circumstances.

There certainly have been moments in the past when the Artist Then Known As Prince looked like he was really losing it. He followed the rampaging success of Purple Rain with the lackluster Around The World In a Day, and the willfully obscure (but musically fascinating) Parade. It seemed he’d never have a hit again.

Ultimately, however, O(+> had the last laugh over his detractors – many times over. There can be sensed among the people who work with O(+> an almost cultic faith – unshakable belief that, no matter how things look to the outside world, everything is really and truly okay. The capacity for this kind of faith of seems to be a requirement for working with O(+>.

What do you look for when hiring a musician?

O(+>: Sickness.

Up on the stage at Glam Slam, in full cry, the New Power Generation are a sight to behold. Keyboardist Morris Hayes, his hat resembling a Hostese Snowball, leans over a transparent plexiglass Hammond B-3 that is festooned with George Clintonsque white feather boas. Tommy Barbarella, the other keyboard man, with his floor-length hair, looks like somebody’s hippy mom who picked the wrong biker bar to get drunk in.

Michael Bland pounds a 14-carat gold drum kit – a gift from “the Boss” – while Sonny Thompson wrestles a five string bass bigger than he is, his dreadlock-style braids half obscuring his face.

And then there’s Mayte (pronounced My-Tay). Schooled in every form of dance from belly to ballet, NPG’s resident temptress knows more ways to grab people's attention than her boss knows ways to dodge interviewers’ questions.

During O(+>’s extended guitar solo on The Ride, Mayte ascends the clitoral tower atop the Endorphin Machine. A magician’s top hat crowning her long, dark, silky hair, she performs a series of splits and squats that defy the laws of both gravity and anatomy, and which must surely be illegal in certain Southern states. What heavy metal shred god would ever consent to be upstaged in this way during his Big Guitar Moment? As guitar heroes go, O(+> is a breed apart.

And he’s such a loose guy that he’ll even introduce a new song to the band right on stage. About mid-way through the Glam Slam set, the energy of the show changes drastically. The rock concert vibe gives way to the ecstatic feel of a hip hop show. O(+> has slipped on a demo tape he’d recorded earlier that very day.

“Right in the middle of the show he asked us, ‘Y’all wanna hear a new song?’” Michael Bland later explains. “And he went back to the Endorphin Machine and put it on.”

The song, called Pussy Control, inspires three women from the audience to leap on the stage and dance in a manner appropriate to this title. Ostensibly, they’re just ordinary concert-goers but the woman in the almost non existent red dress is most certainly a pro.

“You mean was that, like, staged or something?” Bland laughs later. “No. Uh-uh. We didn’t have a clue it was going to happen. But then I gotta say – and I mean this totally respectfully – all sorts of freaks come to our shows. And we see ’em. You can identify them a mile away. So sometimes you just let ’em get on stage and do their thing. ’Cause, you know, we’re pretty freaky, too.”

• This story was originally published in the November 1994 issue of Guitar World magazine. Subscribe and save.

Rolling Stone has unveiled its list of the 100 greatest guitar solos of all time, placing Prince’s Purple Rain in the top spot.

The purple one beats out stiff competition from the likes of Maggot Brain, Steeley Dan’s Kid Charlemagne, Stairway to Heaven, Eruption and Hendrix’s generation-defining leadwork on Machine Gun to nab number one.

In doing so, Rolling Stone appears to be righting a historic wrong, having famously excluded Prince from its 2004 list of greatest guitarists (though it ultimately reversed that call in 2023, placing him at number 14).

That initial decision allegedly led a fired-up Prince to give it both barrels at the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame ceremony – producing an iconic off-the-cuff solo during a tribute performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

Now Rolling Stone has not only given the number one spot in its guitar solos list to Prince, it has also placed the 2004 award show performance itself at number 15, acknowledging the mythology around the appearance.

The list is otherwise notably less controversial than RS’ 2023 list of Greatest Guitarists, but still contains a few conversation starters, Prince positioning aside.

There are some slightly tokenist bungs to modernity, most notably with band-of-the-moment Geese’s Getting Killed, which takes number 98 and MJ Lenderman’s Knockin’ (81) – which are both fine compositions, but seem odd placing ahead of AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long, the sole Angus Young nod, at 100.

One choice GW has no trouble endorsing, though, is Mdou Moctar’s Afrique Victime entering the list at number 53.

That said, aside from the aforementioned Rock & Roll Hall of Fame live performance – a 2004 cover of a 1968 composition, albeit one beautifully elevated by Prince’s intervention – there is nothing in the top 30 that was written or released after 1990.

There’s certainly been no shortage of guitar solos in the last 35 years or so, but cutting Rolling Stone some slack, perhaps it does say something about the solo’s position drifting outside of the mainstream.

Music listening and production has certainly fractured into a mosaic of niches in that period and while the RS list offers a diverse and relatively comprehensive coverage of genres (at least compared to its controversial Greatest Guitarist picks), it still has a bit of a blind spot for contemporary metal and hard rock.

For instance, Extreme’s headline-generating shred renaissance Rise is nowhere to be seen (nor is any Nuno outing, for that matter – something we’re sure he is absolutely fine about) – let alone Plini or any of the more bleeding-edge progressive players.

It wouldn’t have been a bad time to give Mastodon’s Brent Hinds a nod, either – a little Crack The Skye perhaps.

Still, there’s always 2046. At least Prince can rest easy, knowing his protest was noted.

To view the full list, head to Rolling Stone.

In 1994, Prince had already reimagined himself under the elusive moniker O(+>, known to fans as the “Love Symbol” – an act of resistance against Warner Records amid a contractual dispute.

During the turbulent period, Guitar World managed to get exclusive access to the on-stage inner sanctum of The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.

While Prince (or O(+>) was reluctant to comment on his guitar heroes or any guitar influences, he did mention his reverence for Sonny Thompson, better known as Sonny T., the bass player in his own band, New Power Generation, and a childhood friend.

Thompson was a core part of the Minneapolis scene, playing with bands such as Back to Black and The Lewis Connection, before joining Prince and co.

“I thought Sonny was God,” Prince commented matter-of-factly. “Sonny was my hero. A lot of what I do on guitar, I learned from him. I’d go over to his house, and we’d play records, and he’d show me things on guitar.”

As for Thompson’s thoughts on his student-turned-boss’ guitar playing, Thompson said, “A lot of people say he sounds like Hendrix; but to me, he doesn’t really. His vibrato is different.

“Just the way he attacks the guitar is different. I think his guitar sound is coming into its own at this point. I think he incorporates whatever he hears into his guitar playing, like from different instruments and all. It’s like he’s absorbing all this stuff and spitting it back out.”

The bassist went on to reveal that the two grew up together, meeting “on the south side of Minneapolis. I was carrying my guitar somewhere, and he was carrying a guitar too.”

The duo bonded over Hendrix and Grand Funk Railroad, Chick Corea, and “a whole bunch of wild stuff” – and Thompson noted that Prince was quick when it came to picking up the techniques he showed him.

“Oh, man! Photographic memory,” he gushed. “Anything you played for him, he could repeat it. I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s definitely got perfect pitch.

“Anything he hears, he can play,” Thompson concludes.

In more Prince news, Charles ‘Chazz’ Smith, Prince’s cousin and the original drummer in his high school band, Grand Central, recently recalled the moment Prince the guitarist was born.

It's been nearly a decade since the passing of Prince, and his former bandmate has looked back on the day the Purple One became a guitarist – recalling he was always destined to be a great.

Prince needs no introduction, but if he were to get one, his list of achievements would be as long as Stretch Armstrong’s limbs. Seven Grammy wins from 38 nominations only scratch the surface of a bona fide guitar god and music legend, who has sold over 150 million records and inspired a generation of artists.

Speaking to The Guardian, Charles ‘Chazz’ Smith, Prince’s cousin and the original drummer in his high school band, Grand Central, recalls the moment Prince the guitarist was born.

“It seems only yesterday that we were kids and went to see Sly and the Family Stone playing at the Parade stadium, Minneapolis,” Smith recalls. “We didn’t have tickets, but they tore the fence down, so we ran in and ended up on the front row, with Sly looking down on us.

“After that, Prince said: ‘We’re gonna form a band, and you’re gonna be the drummer.’ He had an upright piano in his basement and a TV in the wall, and we’d play TV themes such as The Man from UNCLE.

“Two weeks later, his dad got him a guitar, and the next day he came back playing Black Magic Woman by Santana, note for note. He was obsessed with being great at guitar, writing songs, playing rock, funk, ballads, everything.”

Most players start off learning simple guitar riffs on one string, or maybe a few cowboy chords. Prince, of course, isn't like most players.

“We’d practice for hours, then cut each other down about how ragged or tight it was,” Smith develops. “Then we’d go play basketball. Prince could probably have played professionally if he’d wanted to, but it was always music foremost.

“He studied all the badass players, and at the local jams, he burned everybody. We’d play on our bikes and gaze at the stars, and he’d go, ‘I’m gonna be up there one day.’”

Prince released his debut album, For You, in 1978, and by 1986, he was scaring his record label with his music. And as his star rose, he used his powers for good. From paying Warrant $5,000 to record their first demo to inviting young talents to jam with him at Paisley Park, Prince never stopped inspiring and supporting those in the music world.

In related news, as the producer behind the Guitar Hero video game gears up to release a spiritual sequel, a clip of Prince explaining why he declined a role in the game has resurfaced.

Parade began with a bruised ego. Two years earlier, in 1984, the 25-million-selling Purple Rain had set a sky-high bar. Now, the critical consensus was that Prince had fumbled the follow-up with Around the World in a Day.

“A not very convincing approximation of McCartney-esque Beatles innocence,” sniffed John Rockwell of The New York Times, “clashing egregiously with his own image of defensive arrogance…”

While a lesser artist would retreat to lick their wounds, the Minneapolis peacock was so headspinningly prolific in that period – he fired out albums at one-year intervals all through the ’80s – that Parade arrived almost immediately to course-correct his career.

In fact, flanked by his band of the era, the Revolution, Prince was spilling over with ideas to the extent that he reportedly sketched Parade’s four opening tracks – Christopher Tracy’s Parade, New Position, I Wonder U and Under the Cherry Moon – in a single session.

The received wisdom is that Prince stepped away from the guitars on Parade. True, there is no skyscraping outro solo to match Purple Rain. But there are myriad flashes of quirky brilliance, all smaller but still potent. Try the squelchy, highly processed lines in Girls & Boys, evoking something Robert Fripp might have played on Bowie’s Fashion. Try the indecently funky hits that underpin Mountains.

“I’m sorry,” Revolution guitarist Wendy Melvoin told Rolling Stone in 1986 of the telepathic jams between herself, Prince and keys player Lisa Coleman, “but no one can come close to what the three of us have together when we’re playing in the studio. Nobody!”

Meanwhile, just as he had on Purple Rain’s Computer Blue, the bandleader invited his female protégés to co-write several Parade standouts, including Sometimes It Snows in April, decorated by Melvoin’s ringing acoustic fingerstyle. The guitarist was more prominent still in the video for flagship track Kiss, perched on a stool with a Gibson Byrdland as her boss cavorts shirtless.

In fact, during that period, Melvoin was more closely associated with a Rickenbacker 330, but as she told Guitar.com in 2022, spec was less important than spirit.

“Prince was much more concerned with your performance rather than the actual sound of the guitar. He wasn’t really one of those guys that dictated the tone. I learned early on in a band situation that as a rhythm guitarist you shouldn’t make your distortion as loud as the lead guitarist because they’ll kill you! I had to kind of sit right underneath him, so he could be the main attraction.”

According to the Parade album credits, for the studio take of Kiss, Prince played all the guitar parts. But it’s surprising to learn, through an interview with original producer David Z for Sound On Sound, that the global smash that went on to top the Billboard chart in February 1986 almost didn’t make the cut.

“Kiss was so different to everything else out there that the Warner Brothers executives freaked out when they first heard it. When I talked to the Warner A&R guy he said, ‘Oh man, Prince really screwed up. It sucks.’ At that time, however, Prince had enough power to go, ‘That’s the single and you’re not getting another one until you put it out.’”

The less said about the movie that was soundtracked by these songs, the better (Under the Cherry Moon, wrote Kevin Lally in The Courier-News of Prince’s directorial debut, “is the kind of embarrassment that makes your mouth gape”). But while Parade went on to sell a speck of Purple Rain’s numbers, this underrated corner of the catalog saw the Purple One’s reputation restored among critics.

“It’s the sound of Prince at his most effortless and assured,” wrote The Guardian’s Simon Price. “Cohesive and ice cream-cool, nobody would guess it was a soundtrack for a (sub-par) film. And it has Kiss on it…”

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Amp Week 2026: With credits including David Lee Roth, Run-DMC and Robert Palmer, Eddie Martinez is a session guitar legend.

His chart-dominating career ran in parallel with Prince, who quickly established himself as a music icon with the likes of Let’s Go Crazy, When Doves Cry and Purple Rain.

The pair knew each other before Prince hit it big. But their connection would run far deeper when Martinez bought – albeit unintentionally – Prince’s most beloved guitar amp from the halcyon Purple Rain era: a heavily modified Mesa/Boogie Coliseum 300.

The story of how he came to own the iconic head is a reminder of the unexpected joys of buying used gear. In fact, he was advised not to tell Prince, in case the Purple One asked for it back.

In his own words, Martinez tells the story of how a search for a backup combo led him to a piece of amp history…

It was May 29, 2011. I was at home playing my guitar, and for some reason, acquiring another amp popped into my thoughts. [Laughs] Mind you, this was quite unusual because when I go to guitar stores, I’m first looking for guitars; so looking back on that day, I believe it was more of a divine impulse.

I already had killer amps, but I was playing clubs locally with my band and needed a combo that wouldn’t be a back breaker; plus, I’m big on redundancies. I also needed something practical for small clubs.

I decided to visit one of my local guitar shops and began looking around for amps. I had looked for a good while and didn’t see anything that caught my interest.

As I was exiting, something caught my eye – a Boogie head that reminded me of the Simulclass series from the ’80s that I’d rent along with a Soldano and modded Marshalls from Andy Brauer when recording in L.A.

I asked what model Boogie it was, and the salesperson didn’t know. When I saw 6x 6L6 tubes, I knew it wasn’t a Simulclass. The only thing the salesman said was that they bought it at a Seattle guitar show and that it was allegedly once owned by Prince.

I had known Prince a bit from when we shared the bill when I was playing with Lenny White and Twennynine. We both had opened for Rick James in 1980, and we became friends with Dez [Dickerson], Andre [Cymone] and Prince.

I recall seeing Boogie amps on that first tour. I was becoming familiar with Boogie because my bandmate and brilliant guitarist Nick Moroch used a Mark 1 when we played with drummer Lenny White. But I digress…

I took a peek at the back and saw Prince’s corporate logo, “PRN Music.” It was also written in a marker on the chassis – “PrinceNumber 1.” And there’s a sticker that reads “retubed 11-88.”

There’s also “Prince Roman numeral One” written on some duct tape. I also knew Prince’s middle name was Rodgers and his surname was Nelson, hence the “PRN.” So I called my friend Artie Smith and told him about it. He suggested I call JD Dworkow.

JD worked closely with Prince and Wendy Melovin with stage gear and the guitar tech backline vibe for the entire Purple Rain tour. Plus I’ve known JD for years, and he’s worked with so many huge artists and bands.

He’s a total pro. I described the amp to JD and told him the serial number, “K303.” His mind was blown; he said it was Prince’s Number 1 amp on the Purple Rain tour. The dots were starting to connect because it was correlating to everything I was seeing written on the chassis of the amp. After JD told me that, I knew this was the real deal and bought it.

That was May 29, 2011, and although it wasn’t a backup combo amp that I was originally looking for, it was quite historically significant. I had fallen upstairs with such an incredible and iconic find. [Laughs]

I reached out to Boogie and my rep – who shall remain nameless and who is no longer there – confirmed it was an amp that, at one time, belonged to Prince.

He also asked if I knew Prince and I told him that I did, but it had been years since I’d seen him. He also suggested that I don’t let him know about the amp because he preferred the clean sound on this amp in my possession.

There was a tone of reticence in his dialog with me about digging deeper into the amp's history. At least that’s what I felt, so I stopped communicating with him. Remember, Prince was still very much alive when I first communicated with Boogie about the amp.

It wasn’t until 2019 that I reached out to Mike Bendinelli at Mesa/Boogie, and he gave me the full story. The amp model is called The Coliseum 300 series. The amp was later modified by Mike himself to the 2C+, which is the coveted mod. It’s a beast of an amp, packing 6x 6L6s and delivering 180 watts.

The clean sound is so good, and I can see why Prince dug it so much. The crunch side of the amp is monstrous and huge-sounding. I owe Mike a huge debt of gratitude for providing a letter of provenance and the historical context for such an iconic and important amp.

• For more stories, tips and insights on all things amplified, check out the rest of our Amp Week coverage.

John Mayer has recalled how he once crossed paths with one of Prince’s guitars – and ended up using it on one of his records.

The PRS-wielding hitmaker has given CBS Sunday Morning an access-all-areas tour of Chaplin Recording Studios, which is part of a history-steeped Hollywood lot he recently co-purchased with film director McG. They want to help preserve and celebrate L.A’s rich cultural history, with the grounds hosting film, television, and music recording studios.

Mayer recorded his 2021 solo album Sob Rock there, as well as 2018’s smash single, New Light, which also featured on the LP. It isn't just the Silver Sky that you can hear on that track, though...

“It was a pretty big hit for me,” Mayer says of New Light. “I remember being here. Someone had brought Prince's guitar. This was after Prince had passed away and someone had brought by his guitar, and I went, ‘We’ll put it on this song.’

“So there’s a part of this song, in the bridge, where I'm standing here playing one of Prince's guitars,” he adds. “That was cool.”

Speaking of the track in 2018, while he sadly didn’t clarify which guitar it was, Mayer did speak about how the guitar entered his orbit.

“It was an incredible day, because we were working on this part of the song, which was definitely Prince-tastic, and the guitar magically came across the table in the studio from a friend,” he says. “It just appeared, for an hour. We didn’t know it was coming. It was one of the strangest, most beautiful, serendipitous moments.

“We sort of got into the spirit of the way Prince would’ve done it. So we plugged it into an API, put a little compressor on it – so that little bit of the song is direct input, I’m not even plugged into an amp.”

Now, the question of the day is, which of Prince's guitars did Mayer actually use on New Light?

Could it have been the infamous Yellow Cloud guitar that recently sold as part of the historic Jim Irsay Collection auction recently? After all, in 2019, Irsay did lend Mayer Jerry Garcia's Tiger – which also sold at that same auction earlier this month – for a Dead & Company show.

Irsay had purchased Prince's infamous Yellow Cloud guitar in 2016, so it wouldn't be outrageous to hypothesize that that was the guitar we hear on New Light...

In related news, Mayer has opened up about his insecurities about playing alongside his idol, Bob Weir, in Dead & Company, and recently said he isn't in a hurry to finish the successor to Sob Rock.

“I love it, it’s very uniquely Prince – though it’s weirdly heavy, which you wouldn’t necessarily expect from its diminutive size,” says Christie’s Amelia Walker of the fluoro yellow, baroque-looking Cloud guitar, built around 1993, that originally belonged to the pop-funk genius himself and just sold for $635,000 as part of the Jim Irsay Collection.

“Prince’s Cloud guitars have come up at auction previously and have quite a range of value points depending on what era they are and what they were used for,” she explains, “and whether they were one of the first four, built by Dave Rusan from 1985 to ’93, one of those made by Andy Beech from ’93 onwards, or later Schecters.

“This one was a bit of a mystery because it was accompanied by a letter from [guitar tech] Zeke Clark about its usage, stating that it was Prince’s main guitar and used in most of his early videos from around 1988 to ’94.

“However, Prince’s first and original Cloud was donated to the Smithsonian in July 1993 and the other three Dave Rusan Clouds [2, 3 and 4], one of which was resprayed yellow at various points, have all been sold at auction between 2016 and 2020. That meant that this guitar was one of those made by Andy Beech, who was only commissioned by Prince to make Clouds from 1993 [as opposed to 1988].

“The serial number – which we now think was probably put on a bit later – didn’t appear in the numbers listed in a Paisley Park fax dated January 1995 of all known Cloud serial numbers at the time. What we’ve since discovered is that we think this was the first one made by Andy Beech, effectively his prototype, which was delivered to Prince prior to his ‘Act II’ tour in the summer of 1993.”

Amelia adds that stage-played Yellow Cloud guitars are rare, even within the exalted niche of Prince’s collection: “Since we know that the one in the Smithsonian [Cloud 1] was donated in July 1993, and Cloud 3 was given away in March ’93, we believe that Prince used the first Andy Beech Cloud – this guitar – for his 1993 tour of Europe, and close examination of the position of the controls, which vary quite a bit among the Clouds, as well as the profile of the headstock scroll, appear to confirm this.

“Following the final show of the Act II tour at Wembley, Prince ended up playing an after-show at Bagley’s [former rave venue in London, in September ’93] and then tossed it [onto the stage floor] and the neck got broken – and that’s the last time he played it.

“Zeke Clark stated that he repaired the neck after a break and that he fitted the guitar with a Floyd Rose, which meant he had to move the input jack – and while you can see the ‘scar’ from this change to the scroll below the controls, the complete refin makes it tricky to see any neck repair with the naked eye.

“We were so happy to discover he’d played it live. Obviously, it got broken and mended, and it’s been completely refinished. But it’s been done so well that you can’t see any kind of evidence of the repair, even when you blacklight it. It’s a really cool thing.”

• “Lot after lot we felt like we were making history”: World record for most expensive guitar shattered three times in one night as Jim Irsay auction sees David Gilmour's Black Strat fetch $14.5m
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Many famous guitar collections are simply impressive – but some go far beyond that. So far, in fact, that they become as culturally important as anything found in a museum and raise questions about the role private guitar collections play in preserving pillars of modern culture.

Jim Irsay, who died last year, was that kind of collector. The catalogue of his collection reads like a roadmap of American pop culture and includes everything from the original paper-roll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to Miles Davis’s Martin trumpet and, of course, some of the most important guitars the world has ever seen.

“As a very wealthy individual, Jim Irsay had the means to collect so many iconic objects, which most of us can only dream of,” says Amelia Walker, who is specialist head of the Private & Iconic Collections at Christie’s.

“But I think he was genuinely just a really nice guy who loved guitars, loved music, and felt a responsibility to look after these things and steward them onto their next home. I think he was aware that you can’t be buried with these things – you are but the temporary custodian of them.

“So I think his main aim was to bring them together and let people access them, and he did a lot of touring exhibitions. He got the instruments played by The Jim Irsay Band, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd played the Black Strat. So I think he was very open to sharing them. And because he was also a player, I think he knew that, where the instrument’s condition allowed, these things should be played – they should be loved and warmed up and all of that sort of thing.

“While he was definitely somebody who had them behind glass in his office – which I think is every guitarist’s worst anticipation of what happens at auction – he did also play them.”

Eleanor Jane, founder and editor of Eleven magazine and the book Superstar Guitars, concurs, recalling her time documenting Jim Irsay’s instruments in a similar light.

“His office was like a museum – but one in which you were encouraged to interact with the artefacts,” she recalls. “I photographed the guitars up close and personal – a phenomenal collection of hitmaker after hitmaker. After the photoshoot, Mr Irsay arranged for a private concert for me and the team, demonstrating the most iconic guitars and flying in some of the best musicians around to perform and jam, including Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

“He even drove in Hunter S Thompson’s iconic ‘Red Shark’ car as an incredible backdrop for the event. This turned out to be the first of many, much larger, free concerts and exhibitions across the USA, in which Mr Irsay brought in artists such as Billy Gibbons and Tom Bukovac to perform, allowing thousands of fans an experience of a lifetime.”

All very commendable, but surely a collection of this calibre represents, in the final analysis, a cultural commonwealth of the kind that typically belongs in museums. Now that it’s all up for sale, is it likely that major pieces from the collection will end up in public hands again?

“Well, it’s interesting – and I’ve had the same conversations with people here in LA and in London,” says Amelia Walker. “You looked around the room at just a few of the highlights that we had and it was sort of like a museum exhibition, rather than an auction, because each of those items is an amazing item on its own individual merit, like you would see in a museum celebrating the best of the best of whatever category – and so it is museum-quality.

“People have all sorts of different thoughts and feelings about where collections such as this should end up, and I imagine there will be some participation from institutions.

“But people also forget that museums don’t have any money and it’s often down to generous philanthropic donations that they get pieces like this, like The Met collection donation from Dirk Ziff, which is one of the most incredible philanthropic donations ever, in this world [of iconic guitars].

“So it’ll be interesting to see who bids on these items. I suspect it will be a huge, varied mixture of guitarists, collectors, museums and investors.”

Indeed, the authenticators behind high-profile sales of this kind have to employ the sort of forensic approach normally reserved for academics.

With many of the modifications made to famous guitars taking place over decades on dim backstage workbenches or even at the hands of DIY-oriented players themselves, how do latter-day specialists determine what changes have been made (and when) in order to establish provenance?

Sometimes techs keep methodical, detailed notes over the years, but that kind of evidence is rare when it comes to fully confirming the backstory of iconic guitars.

“It’s a really good question and it keeps me up at night a lot of the time,” Walker says. “But we do our utmost to talk to every single person who’s touched that instrument, in terms of the techs, the roadies, the restorers, the dealers. Obviously, with the Black Strat, Phil Taylor wrote a whole book about it, so he was very, very involved, so we’ve obviously spoken to him recently.

“We do everything we can to get to the bottom of modifications, and we’re really lucky to be able to call up people like Seymour Duncan and ask, ‘Do you remember doing this? Is that what happened?’ And most of the time, people are so kind and generous with their recollections or their records, and it’s part of our due diligence process.

“But we do have to include a caveat that we will never be able to fully list every modification that would have happened since 1970, for example. This was a big issue with the Jeff Beck sale because they were Fenders [Beck’s Strats] and he continually swapped necks around and continually swapped the pickups around, and did it himself without telling his techs most of the time.

“I had such a nightmare trying to marry things up. We have a very clear line that we try to be spot-on with everything, but we cannot possibly list the full modifications, and part of being a touring and recording artist’s instrument is being modified for their needs. So that’s what we do. Basically, we go to pretty extreme lengths to try to get to the bottom of everything.”

• Christie’s will auction The Jim Irsay Collection: Hall Of Fame, including the iconic guitars in this feature and others, plus some of the most important cultural objects of the 20th century, on the evening of 12 March. For more information on the four-part sale series, visit Christie's
• Photographer and editor Eleanor Jane’s new book, The Guitar Chronicles, is due to be released on 17 September via Welbeck.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Prince’s words about Guitar Hero, and his rejected involvement in the video game, have resurfaced, with the Purple One once explaining why he turned down the franchise.

Guitar Hero has been in the news recently, after its producer – Red Octane Games – announced Stage Tour, a spiritual successor to the hugely popular music rhythm game.

The impact Guitar Hero has had on the wider music world is hard to ignore. It made DragonForce a household name, rekindled the careers of bands like the Fall of Troy, and inspired generations of players to pick up the instrument.

With the game at the height of its powers, its developers apparently approached Prince to strike up a deal. He didn’t bite – and it wasn't just for financial reasons.

When asked by American talk show host Tavis Smiley about his thoughts on the Guitar Hero craze in 2009, he said: “Well, I'm not mad at ‘em. I hear it made like $2 billion, and they came to us and offered us a very small portion of that.

“But,” he adds, “I think it's more important that kids learn how to actually play the guitar. It's a tough instrument. It took me a long time, and it was frustrating at first, but you just have to stick with it.”

The Purple One wasn’t wholly against the game, even though some critics were more vocal about it game-ifying the craft of learning the instrument. Led Zeppelin famously turned the game down, and Jimmy Page was particularly vocal about his feelings, for instance.

Meanwhile, Prince quietly declined the offer and focused on why people should pick up a real electric guitar rather than a guitar-shaped controller.

“It's cool for people who don't have time to learn the chords or ain't interested in it,” he says, “but to play music is one of the greatest things. To create something from nothing is one of the greatest feelings. And I would wish it upon everybody. It's heaven.”

In the comments of an Instagram reel sharing the interview clip, Journey's Neal Schon also weighed in.

“That’s cool, I didn’t know he turned it down,” he comments. “I did as well for the same reason.”

On the flip side, however, many guitarists, including Stray Kids’ Garrett Jones and Fender signature artist Steve Lacy, both say the games were a vital part of their playing journey. Its success also came at a time when rock music was falling out of the mainstream, helping to revitalize the genre in the public consciousness.

Elsewhere, the Cult of the Lamb video game has tapped up an all-star cast of shredders for its revamped soundtrack, and Fender has collaborated with Fortnite to bring its most famous guitars and basses to the hugely popular video game. Music and gaming will always be intertwined.

Prince’s eye-catching Taylor 612ce acoustic guitar is back in stock, but you’ll have to travel to Paisley Park to get one.

The guitar, which sports a custom purple finish – it was never going to be any other color – first featured on the genre-bending musician’s Musicology tour in 2004. It was the same year he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where he exacted his revenge on Rolling Stone.

It’s the first time the guitar has been available for fans in 15 years, and it arrives decorated with plenty of subtle – and not-so-subtle – nods to the Purple One.

Featuring a mother-of-pearl inlay of Prince’s Love symbol on the front and back of the headstock, some rather gorgeous-looking binding against the Purple finish, and gold tuners, it’s quite the looker. And with this being a Taylor signature guitar, it seems that no expense has been spared.

Paisley Park says the guitar “faithfully represents the original,” and calls it “a piece as collectible as it is playable.”

The catch is that it is only available to purchase at Prince’s home-turned-museum, Paisley Park, and there’s no mention of price on the Instagram post announcing its arrival. The website makes no mention of it, either.

Over his lifetime, Prince built a reputation for wacky guitars, including a floral Telecaster that ‘ejaculated’ foam, his instantly recognizable Cloud guitars, and his adoption of a rarebreed Vox semi-hollow. Many of those guitars have since fetched six-figure sums at auction, underscoring just how strong his legacy remains.

In related Prince news, Spike Lee recently recalled the time he asked Prince for one of his signature guitars. He was shocked by what happened next.

Retrospectives on ‘80s rock often paint the whole decade with the hair metal, er, brush. But nobody used the term back then.

Mötley Crüe and Poison were regarded as glam metal, and while some members of Skid Row and Warrant had hair as big as their choruses, one listen to the Skids’ Monkey Business or Warrant’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin should convince you they were both essentially hard rock bands.

Delve into Warrant's first two platinum-selling albums, Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich (1989) and Cherry Pie (1990), and you'll hear hints of Thin Lizzy and AC/DC, along with ample proof of vocalist Jani Lane’s songwriting flair.

Still, it seems Warrant’s producer on those records, Beau Hill, felt differently about the ability of guitarists Joey Allen and Erik Turner – and in the years that followed, a rumor arose that the pair had not played on the records.

That was put to bed in 2023, when Allen told Masters of Shred that Hill had drafted in session man Mike Slamer (ex-City Boy, Streets) to play some of the lead guitar work on Filthy Stinking Rich. However, Allen and Turner played all the rhythm guitars on both albums, and Allen contributed some solos on the debut.

While respectful of the producer’s decision, Allen argues that Hill’s focus on other projects resulted in the band’s guitarists not being given sufficient time to work on their own solos.

Hill, for his part, felt that Warrant needed additional power to compete in a market where Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai loomed large.

Showing remarkable character and tenacity, Allen took lessons with Slamer, and the lead breaks were split equally between them on Cherry Pie.

Allen was powerfully vindicated on the band’s third album, 1992’s Dog Eat Dog. It was helmed by Michael Waegner, who'd already worked with four of the era’s premier guitar heroes in George Lynch, Vito Bratta), Nuno Bettencourt and Zakk Wylde.

Allen turned in a ripping performance, prompting Wagener to state in the credits: “No artist, except those listed, performed on this album in any capacity whatsoever.”

Lane added: “This album is dedicated to Joey Allen, one of the most underrated guitarists in rock today.”

After Lane died in 2011 his Warrant bandmates, along with vocalist Robert Mason, continue to tour and release new music. Guitar World caught up with Allen to chart his remarkable progress through the band’s first three records.

Which players were your main influences?

The first was Ace Frehley. Some of the solos he did on those first three Kiss records were great. Strange Ways on Hotter Than Hell, was just killer.

Before Metallica I was in a band with Lars Ulrich, when he came over from Denmark, and Lloyd Grant. We jammed for about six months. Lloyd played on Hit the Lights on Metal Massacre. I'm still friends with Lloyd. I haven't seen Lars in a long time, but we’re fine.

Warrant opened for the Black Crowes, Metallica and Aerosmith on a few gigs in America. I’m real happy for him and his success. What a great band. Lars turned me on to Gary Moore – he played me White Knuckles.

I found out Gary played on Black Rose by Thin Lizzy, which is one of my favourite bands. Scott Gorham’s another huge influence. I've ripped off the dual guitar thing a few times. Brian May is another – the layering and harmonies. And Randy Rhoads.

Warrant formed in 1984 and you joined in 1987, a few months after Jani Lane and Steven Sweet.

Erik and I were in a band in Orange County called Nightmare 2 in 8’2 or ’83. He left and started Warrant in LA, with Jerry Dixon. I lived in Hollywood; I was auditioning for bands and I ran into Erik on Sunset and Doheny. He said they were looking for a guitar player, and I was like, “Let’s do it!”

I worked with Erik for a few weeks before auditioning for Warrant at a rehearsal place called Mates in North Hollywood. About three weeks later, we played our first gig at Gazzarri’s.

Prior to signing with Columbia, you cut demos for Prince's Paisley Park label. It’s worth noting that he had no problem with the guitar solos on the demos.

Yeah. Great guy, another great player. Probably the best Super Bowl performance ever. One of the people that brought Prince to prominence was Jamie Shoup, who was managing Warrant. Prince was looking for a band, because that genre was blowing up with Bon Jovi, Motley Crue and Poison. He paid for our first demo, which he liked. Then he saw us live, which he did not like.

We didn’t end up on Paisley Park, but he let us take the demo and shop it around, which helped us get a deal with Columbia Records.

It was Beau Hill’s decision to bring in Mike Slamer to play some of the lead work.

There's always this folklore that neither Erik or I played on either record. Number one, this was a Beau Hill thing. By the third record, with Michael Wagner, that’s all Warrant.

On the first two records, all the rhythm guitars are Erik and I. Mike Slamer was a friend of Beau Hill. At the time, Beau was working with people like Warren DiMartini and Reb Beach, two friends of mine, and two incredible players. And then along comes Warrant. There was no Reb Beach, Warren DiMartini or Ed Van Halen in Warrant. Warrant was more of a clumsy solo type band.

When Beau was producing our first record, he was producing Winger’s first record, managing Winger and was part owner of Interscope Records with Jimmy Iovine. He had a lot going on. So when it came to solos, and you have a guy that you have to work with, I think he got a little impatient with me.

On the first record, Big Talk, is all me, 32 Pennies is me, and Heaven is me, except for the last three seconds – that’s Mike. I’d track then literally hand Mike the guitar, he’d do a few riffs and Beau would say, “That’s it. Let’s move on.”

Mike taught you and Erik his parts and you played them live, and you took lessons from Mike between the two albums. You played some great solos on Cherry Pie, on tracks like Mr Rainmaker – so it seems unfair that Mike was used again on that album.

It’s about 50-50, Mike and I. Mike’s a fantastic gentleman; a good friend of mine. I would go over to Mike’s house two or three days a week and take lessons. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is Mike and I. You can't tell who’s who, I bet, unless I tell you!

I remember working with the engineer, Jimmy Hoyson, on Mr Rainmaker. I had to play that solo until my fingers were bleeding, because Beau was in the vocal booth, on the phone, talking business about Winger, or whatever. He just wasn't present; he didn’t engage with me. I think he was juggling a little bit much.

You can say he was maybe impatient; maybe my chops weren’t as great as they could have been. They’ve certainly gotten better over the years! I think it was just because he was on the schedule, boom, boom, boom. So no disrespect to Beau. He did what he thought he had to do.

It was a different story on Dog Eat Dog. You played all the lead work. The statement Michael Wagner put in the credits was quite a vindication.

There you go! I had two records under my belt, two world tours under my belt, and I was still taking lessons. And it was a different situation with Michael – he cared. We had a whole day or two where we just went through amps and cabinets. I never did that with Beau.

When I did my first solo the engineer went, “Wow, I heard you didn’t play on the records. Alright! this is gonna be great!” And off we went, and it was a lot of fun.

If you want to hear what Warrant sounds like, that's a Warrant record. Not that the first two weren’t, but now we had a sixth member in Mike Slamer.

You left the band in 1994, and rejoined 10 years later. Robert Mason has been with you since 2008. Your most recent album Louder Harder Faster (2017) shows that you're continuing to progress.

I went back to school. I had a young daughter to take care of, and I got into computer engineering for about eight years. And right when I burned out on that, Erik knocked my door. I’ve been back about 21 years, and it's where I belong. I tried to stop – but you can’t!

I’ve worked hard on my playing. My tone, where I place my notes, rhythms; everything’s just gotten better. And I’ve been sober for a few years. Not that I had a big problem; but I always played with a few pints under my wheel. Sobriety really helps with going back through the catalogue and going, “Let’s play these like the record, instead of getting gratuitous.”

It's a lot harder to write three notes that sing than it is to do three hundred in the same amount of time. I prefer to listen to something I can hum, like a vocal. I could hum Brian May’s whole solo to Now I'm Here right now.

The Warrant sound is Eric Turner and I. We have a lot of fun and get along like brothers. It’s been a fun trip, and it’s continuing!

• Louder Harder Faster is out now.

Moving to Berklee while still in her teens, Alissia Benveniste, who records under her first name, soon found herself riding a wave of recognition in the wake of her first viral YouTube video back in 2015.

“That was how Prince found me,” says Alissia. “Social media wasn't a big thing at the time. There was no TikTok or Instagram, so I was just posting whatever I was shedding on YouTube. Then we shot a video with my band from Berklee, which went viral and all of a sudden I was getting a lot of attention.”

Prince fans will not be surprised to hear that on receiving a call from the great man, Alissia thought it was a joke.

“I wasn’t really posting anything on Twitter back then, but then I saw his name on a DM. He’d seen some of my YouTube videos where I’d played some tracks by The Time. I got an invitation soon after that to go to Paisley Park and jam, but at first I thought it was a prank, so I didn’t answer!”

Aside from jamming with Prince, Alissia’s desire to experience and play as many different styles as she can – “variety is the spice of my life musically” – has seen her build up an impressive client list as a bassist and producer, including Bootsy Collins, Lenny Kravitz, Bruno Mars and Mariah Carey, while also featuring Nile Rodgers and rap duo EarthGang on her latest single.

“2025 was a big year for me. I was nominated for producer of the year at the Grammys, and spending more time in the studio has meant working with a lot more artists. But now feels like the right time to start releasing my own music.”

How did you get into bass?

My first instrument was the piano, but I actually entered Berklee as a vocalist. I switched to the bass guitar in my second semester. I’d been listening to a lot of P-Funk, Prince, The Brothers Johnson and Michael Jackson, and in all of those songs I always felt like it was the bass that was driving the music.

How did you come to audition for Berklee?

I never really auditioned because I had a scholarship. I was classically trained on piano, so I couldn’t really play jazz, but I had a good ear and I could sing.

What was the first bassline you ever learned?

Good Times by Chic. I remember having a bass in my hands and somehow being able to learn that bassline really quickly. I just felt immediately connected to it.

Who are your bass heroes?

Bootsy Collins, Larry Graham, Louis Johnson, Bernard Edwards and Paul Jackson. I went through different phases of wanting to dial in all of their bass sounds.

What was it like working with Nile Rodgers on your single?

It was incredible. Nile is one of those people who you could drop into any musical environment from the past 40 years and he would find his own space within that music. It's just amazing how he does it.

On the track you’re using an envelope filter?

I actually used a Mu-Tron pedal that Bootsy Collins had given me. Working on his Worth My While album was my first big project as a producer, and he ended up giving me a few effects pedals including his original Mu-Tron.

I love the way Bootsy approaches effects. He’d always be looking to dial in the Mu-Tron, or a distortion pedal, or different delays and reverb. He thinks about effects like a guitarist.

Are there any other pedals that you couldn’t live without?

The only other envelope filter that I would use on bass is an MXR. Sometimes I mix them both together because the MXR is newer and a little cleaner, but I love that Mu-Tron. It’s like having a cheat code because it sounds so good.

When did you first meet Bootsy?

His manager invited me to come and watch a show they were filming in New York. It sounded like the perfect place to hang and check out the concert.

I walk into the venue and Bootsy is sat behind the drums, Bernie Worrell is at the keys, and George Clinton is on the mic. Then Bootsy looks at me and he says, ‘Where’s your bass?’ I thought I was just there to watch the show!

Thankfully, we found a bass at the venue and 10 minutes later Bootsy is counting in Flashlight. Luckily, I knew all those P-Funk basslines, but it was definitely a learning curve! Bootsy has been my mentor ever since.

You’ve also worked with Anderson .Paak.

He’s an incredible musician. He can do it all! He brought me onto a lot of other projects with people like Mary J. Blige and Rae Khalil. I also worked with him and Bruno Mars when they were working on Silk Sonic. I actually put them in touch with Bootsy. Bootsy’s always hungry to help push the next generation forward like that. It’s the same thing with Nile Rodgers. I love that whole mindset.

Do you ever get nervous?

I don't really get nervous, but I do get excited! So it’s usually a case of trying to control the adrenaline. It’s also rarely about the person I’m working with, but more about the music and what I can learn from the situation.

I don’t even remember being starstruck when I met Quincy Jones, and he’s one of my biggest influences. I was just on a mission to learn!

How do you prepare for a session?

When I got the Prince call I prepared so hard. I learned as much as I could from all his live shows. It was the same thing working with Mariah Carey. I knew a bit more about what I was walking into, but I still made sure I was prepared. I never want to miss an opportunity like that because I don’t feel ready.

I did a session with Lenny Kravitz where I was going to shred this really quick progression. He’s such an amazing guitarist that I don’t think I even used it! But I had it in my locker just in case he asked me to bring something to the table.

Do you have any advice for aspiring bass players?

If your dream is to work with Lenny Kravitz or Bootsy Collins, how ready would you be if they called you tomorrow? That’s always been my mindset as a bass player, and it’s something I’ve carried through to my career as a producer.

It could be something simple, like being aware of the back catalog, or knowing the live arrangements of the studio recordings. You never know when the call’s going to come, and it always pays to be ready.

You could say that Danielle Haim and her sisters – Alana and Este – were born and raised to be guitar-wielding rockstars.

“I was around 10. We started our ‘band’ – which was us just learning songs and playing them in our living room,” Danielle reminisces. “Our first gig was in fifth grade.”

Danielle, Alana, and Este – the triumvirate that forms the band Haim – have been on quite a journey since their first-ever gig as a trio at a Jewish deli in Los Angeles.

Their debut EP, Forever, released in 2012, set them on a path that continues to redefine what a contemporary rock band – and modern guitar heroes – sound and look like, with subsequent genre-blending records, Days are Gone (2013), Something to Tell You (2017), Women in Music Pt. III (2020), and this year’s I Quit taking as much from hip-hop, Joni Mitchell, Destiny’s Child, and TLC as they do from conventional rock.

Danielle’s own guitar playing is no different. The multi-instrumentalist shifts between percussive, funk-adjacent rhythmic guitar parts and searing classic-rock-esque solos – a style she embodies, partly due to her background as a touring guitarist and gun-for-hire, but mostly from her rigorous foundation as a drummer.

“I actually approach guitar playing more as a percussive instrument,” she says. “I've always loved funk music. I love muted jabs and more rhythmic playing. I think that's the stuff that I really, really love.

“[Dr. Dre’s] The Chronic 2001 was huge for me. The way that [Outkast’s] André 3000 in The Love Below utilizes guitar was huge for me, like Prototype and Hey Ya! – all those kind of muted guitar lines were super-influential.”

How did playing classic rock covers with your family band, Rockinhaim, shape your guitar playing and tone?

I played guitar, and so did my mom. My mom played more rhythm. She played a Mexican Tele that she still has, and I would kind of fit around and take leads – whatever I could play.

I would play a lot of blues and pentatonic stuff, but I think learning classic rock songs really informed my guitar playing, and it really informed my songwriting. It was such an incredible way to learn about music and learn what sounds good with a band and where to fit in.

You toured with the likes of Jenny Lewis and Julian Casablancas. That must have had an impact, too.

It was incredible. I was around 19. If you had told me five years or four years before I went on tour with them… when I was 14 or 13 – they were my favorite artists. I snuck into so many Strokes concerts and Rilo Kiley concerts.

It was crazy when I got the opportunity to work with both of them. When it comes to guitar playing, I love the Strokes' guitar parts so much. I learned so much about guitar parts through those songs.

We played [The Strokes’] Hard to Explain at Coachella [with Julian Casablancas], and I literally was playing guitar, and I couldn't believe my life, but I [also] learned so much about performing and where I could fit in.

What would you say are some of your all-time biggest guitar influences?

I love Tom Verlaine's playing. I love Television. I love Marquee Moon – to me, it’s one of my favorite guitar solos of all time. I can just sing it from memory. I know the whole thing.

I'm a huge Mike Campbell fan, also a super-rhythmic genius. Bonnie Raitt – I think she's the most incredible. Every time I watch videos of her playing guitar, I'm just melted on the floor. I think she's one of the most genius guitar players.

I'm also a huge Joe Walsh fan. Life in the Fast Lane, that guitar, to me, is some of the hottest shit of all time. George Michael is always an inspiration. Prince is always an inspiration – I think Prince is the most underrated guitar player. Keith Richards’ playing is always an inspiration.

U2’s The Edge is a huge inspiration. I will say we did track down his effects pedal for Numb [Haim recreated the Numb sample for Now It’s Time, a track from their latest album, I Quit.]

Throughout the years, you’ve mostly been spotted wielding SGs and Strats. What would you say is your go-to guitar nowadays?

I turned into a Strat player. I never thought I would. It's such a fun guitar to play. I love my SG. I love getting so high up on the fretboard. I actually started playing a Melody Maker my dad bought me. My dad would find guitars, and he bought my first guitar [because] it was just so light.

It was a very light, black ’80s Melody Maker, a Gibson. And he was like, ‘All right, this will do.’ And then when it came time to graduate to my next guitar, I picked the SG because it was, honestly, so light, but it just turned into my favorite guitar.

And so I just kind of continued with it for a long time, and then Rostam [Batmanglij, from Vampire Weekend and one of Haim’s collaborators] bought a really nice Strat from the ’50s, and it's the most fun guitar to play, so we used that a lot on the last two albums [Women in Music Pt. III and I Quit]. And so I kind of melded into more of a Strat player.

Would you ever consider releasing a signature model?

Oh, my God, I would love to. No-one's asked me! That'd be incredible.

How do you and Alana navigate arranging two guitars in a Haim song?

She's been playing a lot of acoustic on the road – a lot of the acoustic parts. She's an incredible rhythm guitar player. We're all drummers, so we really are huge on the rhythm.

Alana does everything, literally. We call her Merlin. She's playing guitar, she's playing percussion, she's playing keys, she sings. She does it all. It's pretty incredible to watch.

I take lead, but Alana lays it down. When it comes to her rhythm, she doesn't miss a beat. Her feel is so in the pocket all the time, which really helps.

What are some of the biggest things you switched up when writing and recording I Quit?

Letting the rockier moments speak louder. I do think that, sonically, it's a lot more raw and a lot more visceral. A little angrier – in a more free-spirited way. It's more [about] letting go, and that's what we're talking about. “I Quit” energy is like quitting the shit that doesn't serve you and really going for it. And I think it's just way more raw than our earlier stuff, which I love.

You’ve collaborated with a wide range of artists – including Taylor Swift, Bon Iver, and even film maker Paul Thomas Anderson. How have these collaborations developed your own artistry?

I mean, collaborating with Paul… he's such a genius. And I think the thing that we keep coming back to is: keep it simple.

Taylor Swift and Bon Iver, I mean, they're just such geniuses. I feel so lucky to be able to kind of get a peek into their process. Taylor's so incredible, so prolific. Justin [Vernon, Bon Iver] is an incredible musician. I’m just so honored to be able to work with such great artists.

Haim made history when you were the first “all-female” rock band ever to earn a Grammy nod for Album of the Year – and you made history again this year when you were nominated in the Rock Album category for next year’s Grammys. Do you feel these nominations have changed the way the industry views Haim, and, more broadly, how it views women in rock?

First of all, we're so honored to be nominated in the rock category. Growing up, my favorite artists that were rock musicians were women.

When I think about Stevie Nicks, when I think about The Pretenders, Heart, The Go-Go’s, The Bangles… when I think about all of these incredible women who were in rock bands, to me, growing up, those are the artists that I looked up to.

All we want is to inspire women to pick up guitars, to pick up drums, and that’s truly the biggest gift to hear [if we’ve inspired other women].

As far as being recognized, I think we were just so honored that we were nominated for Best Rock Album – part of the reason why I love what we do is that people have had a hard time putting us in a box.

Maybe there was confusion about what box we fit into. But I think what's amazing is, over the last few years, we've just kind of kept doing what we’ve always done, and to be recognized in this way is really, really special.

• I Quit is out now via Columbia Records/Polydor.

Since their lauded debut, Days Are Gone, back in 2013, Haim have firmly established themselves as genre-bending multi-instrumentalists who quickly redefined what constitutes a rock album in the 2010s and 2020s.

In fact, the trio have just bagged their first Grammy nod for “Best Rock Album” – making them the first band composed entirely of women ever to be nominated in this category.

Danielle Haim – the band’s lead guitarist, co-producer, main vocalist, and drummer – switches from funk-inflected rhythm playing to searing, classic-rock-esque solos, and her influences are as wide-ranging as the band’s own repertoire: from hip-hop classics to cult alt-rock heroes.

“[Dr. Dre’s] The Chronic 2001 was huge for me,” she tells Guitar World in a new interview. “The way that [Outkast’s] André 3000 in The Love Below utilizes guitar was huge for me, like Prototype and Hey Ya! – all those kind of muted guitar lines were super-influential.

“I love Tom Verlaine's playing. I love Television. I love Marquee Moon – it’s one of my favorite guitar solos of all time. I can sing the Marquee Moon guitar solo from memory. I know the whole thing.”

Classic rock is also big in Haim's world, with Danielle singling out Joe Walsh (“Life in the Fast Lane, that guitar, to me, is some of the hottest shit of all time”) and “super-rhythmic genius” Mike Campbell.

But she saves her biggest praise for a blues star who is no stranger to the Grammys herself.

“I think Bonnie Raitt is the most incredible [player]. I don't play slide [but] every time I watch videos of her playing guitar, I'm just melted on the floor. I think she's one of the most genius guitar players.”

Other key influences include Prince – who she deems “the most underrated guitar player” – and Keith Richards, as well as U2’s the Edge, whose effects pedal the band tracked down specifically to recreate the Numb sample used in Now It’s Time, a track from their latest album, I Quit.

For more from Danielle Haim, keep your eyes peeled on Guitar World, as the full interview will be published in the coming weeks.

Besides vintage influences, Haim are fans of vintage instruments, too. Bassist Este Haim has previously shared how she ended up buying her dream ’70s Fender Precision Bass on Craigslist for a bargain price.

Direct Flyte is a track from my 2022 album, Power Station, and features the great Victor Wooten on bass. The song has morphed a little bit in subsequent live performances, as we’ve tightened up the arrangement and gotten very specific about the individual parts.

What I’d like to talk about today is how the syncopations of the tune’s primary guitar part work in conjunction with the chordal accents supplied by the keyboard, which I think is a good example of effective ensemble arranging.

When you hear how the two instruments work in tandem, you’ll get a good idea of how I like to approach coordinating various musical elements like an orchestral arranger.

The form of the tune is “AABA.” The three “A” sections are in A minor, and the “B” section modulates up a minor 3rd to C minor. The rhythm guitar part I play during these sections is a four-bar phrase that’s fairly simple.

Following the AABA form, there’s a single-note ensemble (band) section, shown here in Figure 1.

In bar 1, a pattern based on the A minor pentatonic scale (A, C, D, E, G) descends across the bottom three strings in straight 16th notes, followed in bar 2 by octave shapes for F# and G. Notice that I palm mute the entire phrase.

My inspiration for this tune was Flight of the Bumblebee by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, but through a funky lens, as if Tower of Power had written and recorded the melody.

As you listen to Direct Flyte, you’ll hear that the guitar part lands in one place and the keyboard part lands in another. We’re very intentional about that because, when you have a 10-piece band, there’s a high potential for individual parts to step on each other. Communication and arrangement is key to making sure all of the parts are precise, serve a purpose and do not get in each other’s way.

Figure 2 illustrates the primary guitar part: I begin on the A root note and then play C and E together by barring the G and B strings. My strumming hand is moving in continuous 16th notes, so that each single note, dyad or muted-string accent will occur at precisely the right place in the “grid.”

In the spaces left by the rhythm guitar, the keyboard adds chord “stabs.” Figure 3 shows the keyboard part. It begins with a heavy accent on Am7 on beat 1 of the first bar. In bar 2, Am accents are played twice during beat 3. Bar 3 is identical to bar 1, and bar 4 is silence.

The initial keyboard accent adds a lot of power to the downbeat, and the subsequent hits effectively fill the space left by the rhythm guitar. If we pan the instruments left and right, it feels like a musical conversation.

Figure 4 puts the entire arrangement together. In bar 9, after eight bars on Am, we move up to Cm, and in bar 12 a chromatically descending line is played as a band figure to modulate back down to Am, where the four-bar “A” phrase is repeated. This is followed by the single-note descending figure from in Figure 1.

The takeaway here is how every element integrates into a very specific Minneapolis/Prince-style rhythm, with all of the instruments coming together on the chromatically descending line shown in bar 10 of Figure 4.

In my arrangements, I use the mindset of an orchestral arranger for the instruments to play off of one another in a “call and response” manner and then to coalesce into a big, powerful unison part.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Once hit-making guitarist Mike Scott showed up in Minneapolis from his native D.C., it wasn’t long before he was working on records with the likes of Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Lionel Richie, and Gladys Knight.

Soon, Scott found himself landing one of the most highly coveted guitar gigs: at Paisley Park, as part of Prince's New Power Generation.

Among the many anecdotes that come with being Prince's first-call guitarist, Scott recently looked back on the one time he – accidentally – caught the Purple Rain legend using his own guitar gear.

“We never talked about gear,” Scott says on the 100 Guitarists podcast. "But my wife, Rachel Scott, she was a producer at MTV, and Prince ended up hiring her to do a multi-camera shoot of the band when he was doing 3rdeyegirl. We had to leave the room when 3rdeyegirl rehearsed, and she told me that he would be playing through my amp.

“I even walked in once and saw him – caught him – playing through my gear, and he got really upset,” he chuckles. “He's like, ‘Oh, Mike, you're not supposed to be in here.’ He's a captain, but he was playing through my amp and my rig that day.”

While the two never “talked shop”, as Scott puts it, Prince would sometimes have him check his guitar for soundcheck.

“He used to always say, ‘You step you step on my pedals like you're killing cockroaches or something. Why do you step on my pedals so hard?’ They call them stompboxes for a reason!” he continues.

“But when she [his wife] told me that he was playing through my rig... I mean, at night, the whole band's gear is sitting there, [so] I'm sure he was trying [it] out. You know, if I lived at Paisley and he didn't live there, I would go try his rig out at night!”

In more recent Prince news, Spike Lee recalled the time he asked Prince for one of his highly bespoke signature guitars – and didn't expect what happened next.

Standing as a prime example of the ‘don’t ask, don’t get’ mantra, Spike Lee has recalled the time he asked Prince for one of his highly bespoke signature guitars, and wasn’t met with the warmest of responses.

The Purple One had a wild taste in guitars, with his eye-catching Cloud guitars – one of which sold for $900,000 last summer – and his Sadowsky-made Telecaster just two examples of that. Lee, it turns out, was an admirer, but didn't get his way when he tried to claim one of his own. Initially, at least.

“He looked at me like I had five heads,” he tells Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show. And though it seemed his cheekiness had backfired, Prince was perhaps just testing the producer’s patience.

“A year later, this big-ass guitar case shows up,” Lee adds. “A year later!”

The guitar in question was one of his unmistakable Auerswald Symbol electric, which he played throughout the '90s. Built for him by luthier Jerry Auerswald, who also made his equally as bonkers Model C and Cleo axes, it features a maple body, locking tremolo, and an active single coil in the neck, and an EMG humbucker in the bridge.

The guitar and its rather impractical, but oh so Prince, silhouette can be seen in the videos for Endorphinmachine and Gold. Purple and White models were also built, with the latter featuring in the promo for his 19th studio album, Emancipation.

Lee ended up with a Gold model, and whether or not it was the guitar Prince had used or merely a copy is unclear, but it shows Prince's selflessness, even if his outward demeanor was a little more steely.

It wasn't the only time that Prince gifted an electric guitar to someone he respected, either. During his 3rdeyegirl era, which saw him forging a guitar tandem with Donna Grantis, he had been turned onto Vox guitars by his partner, leading him to embrace the firm's feature-laden semi-hollow HDC-77 into his expansive gear arsenal.

After he played one for Barack Obama at the White House in June 2015, he gifted it to Grantis, and it has since hit the auction block, with a $350,000 price tag.

Grantis has since reflected on her time in Prince's band. She says she expected the unexpected; it is Prince, after all. But she never imagined she'd end up playing the Purple Rain guitar solo, with the man who wrote it watching on.

Meanwhile, an unreleased documentary, which leaked last year, suggests that Prince's iconic While My Guitar Gently Weeps solo at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was an “act of revenge,” having just been snubbed by Rolling Stone.

The most important guitarist in Prince’s career is, undoubtedly, Prince himself.

There are a whopping 22 studio albums (more than half his total output) where Prince is the only credited guitarist. On the others, Prince plays the overwhelming majority of guitar. For his tours in 1994–1996 and 2000–2010, Prince performed all the guitar parts himself, which is longer than any other guitarist has served in Prince’s bands.

Although Prince was a formidable guitarist, that doesn’t mean the backing guitarists he employed were insignificant. With Prince more than capable of handling six strings himself, he only hired musicians who could really add something to the band.

Just 10 people have had the honor of playing guitar on tour with Prince. Two more played guitar on one recorded track each, meaning just 12 humans can officially claim to have played guitar for Prince. Here’s our definitive guide.

Dez Dickerson – (1979–1983)

Dickerson was the guitarist in Prince’s band before it became, and as it evolved into, the Revolution.

His high point came with 1999 (1982), where he sang co-lead vocals on the title track and dropped the classic guitar solo for Little Red Corvette. That performance made him the first guitarist besides Prince himself to record on a Prince album, and later ranked at #64 in a Guitar World list of the greatest guitar solos of all time.

Dickerson performed alongside Prince during the artist's controversial rise to superstardom, including a pair of infamous sets in 1981 as the opener for the Rolling Stones, during which the band faced hostile audiences.

Increasingly at odds with his boss's musical direction, Dickerson left Prince’s band shortly before his landmark Purple Rain album.

“Prince wanted us to become slick and polished, more choreographed. I said to him, ‘This isn’t what we are, and I’m just not as comfortable anymore,’” Dickerson told Guitar World earlier this year. “I wasn’t happy, and I was becoming kind of surly on the road.”

The guitarist would go on to become a born-again Christian, and later became director of A&R at the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) label StarSong.

Wendy Melvoin – (1983–1986)

Melvoin is perhaps the most recognizable of Prince’s backing guitarists, thanks to her appearance in the movie Purple Rain. She can fret fiendish major add 9 shapes with astonishing ease, making her the ideal player for those legendary chords.

She was an enduring Prince collaborator: after leaving the Revolution, she still contributed to Sign o’ the Times (1987) and Graffiti Bridge (1990). She returned in 2007 to record guitars for Planet Earth, having joined Prince for a handful of performances from 2004 onwards, including the 2006 Brit Awards.

Melvoin was just 19 when she joined the Revolution along with her girlfriend, keyboardist Lisa Coleman. As a result, she’s had a fruitful post-Prince career, first performing with Coleman in the duo Wendy and Lisa, and later as a TV composer.

Melvoin and Coleman collaborated on the score for the first season of Heroes (2008) and won an Emmy for their theme tune to Nurse Jackie. Melvoin also found time to record with Madonna, Neil Finn, and Glen Campbell.

Miko Weaver – (1987–1990)

Weaver was Sheila E’s guitarist when he came to Prince’s attention. He and other Sheila E band members recorded an extended jam of I Would Die 4 U with Prince that was released as a 12” single.

When the Revolution disbanded, Weaver and several other Sheila E. musicians joined Prince’s touring band. He would go on to receive guitar credits on Prince’s Around the World in a Day, Sign o’ the Times, and Lovesexy albums.

After departing Prince’s band, Weaver gave guitar lessons to actor Eddie Murphy. Somewhat improbably, the two formed a band, Eddie Murphy and the Psychedelic Psoul, and performed at the Montreaux Jazz Festival.

Levi Seacer Jr – (1990–1993)

In 1990 Prince formed the New Power Generation, which under various lineups would be his band for the next decade.

Levi Seacer Jr, who had been Prince’s bassist from 1987–1989, moved to guitar, and received his first guitar recording credit on 1991’s Diamonds and Pearls. He added another with 1992’s Love Symbol, but was pushed aside from Prince’s touring band in 1994, when Prince took over all guitar duties himself.

Seacer also produced a 1990 album by The Pointer Sisters, and has also been a session musician for Gospel outfit Sounds of Blackness.

In 1998, he and rapper Tony M sued Prince for what they claimed were unpaid songwriting royalties. They ended up settling for less than their legal expenses. Unsurprisingly, Prince and Seacer did not work together again.

Mike Scott – (1996–1999, 2012)

Washington D.C. guitarist Mike Scott relocated to Minneapolis in 1984, where he became a session guitarist for producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, members of Prince’s side project The Time. Scott recorded on projects by Mariah Carey, Lionel Richie, and Janet Jackson.

When Jam and Lewis moved to LA in 1996, Scott was invited to audition for Prince’s band, and became an NPG member, contributing to Emancipation (1996), Crystal Ball/The Truth (1998), and Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (1999).

In 2007, he joined Justin Timberlake’s band, and in 2010 he toured with Timbaland. He also lists session credits with Rihanna, Maroon 5, and Alicia Keys. Scott returned to Prince’s band for 2012’s Welcome 2 Chicago residency.

Kat Dyson – (1996-1998)

After meeting Sheila E at NAMM in the early '90s, Dyson and bassist Rhonda Smith discussed the possibility of joining Sheila’s band. When that didn’t work out, she gave them perhaps the greatest consolation prize of all time: she sent their demos to Prince.

Dyson, who had been playing with Cyndi Lauper, arrived at Paisley Park expecting only to work as tour support, but ended up playing on multiple tracks for 1996’s Emancipation. She also played slide on the New Power Generation (sans Prince) album New Power Soul.

Dyson played with Prince one last time at the 2005 NAACP Image Awards. While her tenure with Prince was brief, she has racked up an impressive session career, including credits with guitar greats B.B King, Buddy Guy, and Carlos Santana.

Ida Nielsen – (2010–2015)

Denmark’s Ida Nielsen is better known as a bassist, which is where she started in Prince’s band. On select dates of Prince’s 2010–2012 tour, the “godfather of gospel bass,” Andrew Gouché, joined the band. For these shows, Nielsen played guitar.

From 2013 onwards, Nielsen moved to guitar in the NPG alongside Donna Grantis. She was also bassist for Prince protégés and sometimes backing band 3rdEyeGirl.

Nielsen played bass on the 3rdEyeGirl & Prince album Plectrumelectrum (2014) but never played guitar on a Prince release. She has released three solo albums but otherwise kept a relatively low profile.

Recounting the steep learning curve of being in Prince's band, Nielsen said in an interview with Bass Player, “There was a lot of stuff to remember, because he liked to change things up and not always stick to what’s on the set list, so I had a lot of different songs to learn in a short time, that was the hardest part of it.

“It wasn’t like a normal bass gig where you have 30 songs: I had to learn 300! That took a lot of time.”

“No concert was the same, because he always switched up the set list,” she continued. “Playing with him gave me an amazing feeling that I’ve never felt with any other musician. With Prince, you were always in the moment.”

Donna Grantis – (2013–2015)

Grantis had played with fellow Canadians like Amanda Marshall and Kardinal Offishall before being invited to audition for the all-female funk-rock trio Prince was putting together, 3rdEyeGirl.

Grantis wrote the title track to their only album, Plectrumelectrum (2014), and also joined New Power Generation. 3rdEyeGirl also appeared on Ain’t About 2 Stop, a duet with Rita Ora, on 2015’s HitnRun Phase I. Grantis supplied the song’s harmonized guitar solo.

She released A Drop in the Bucket, the first song from her Culture vs Policy project, at the 2023 Canadian Music Climate Summit.

Asked what she learned from her boss in a 2019 interview with Guitar World, Grantis said, “He taught me about the funk vocabulary. He taught me about sounds. He taught me about articulation and attitude and power and tones.

“Prince was an incredible inspiration. Whether we were jamming at Paisley Park or playing onstage at the Superdome, I would just be blown away all the time.”

The others

Additional guitars on The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, from 1995’s The Gold Experience, came from Jimi Behringer, earning him his first major session credit. His website says he has also played with Bonnie Raitt, Bobby Caldwell, and Laura Branigan, among others.

Ani DiFranco was a featured artist on Eye Love U, But Eye Don't Trust U Anymore from Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (1999), contributing vocals and acoustic guitar.

Cameroonian singer/songwriter Andy Allo was primarily a backing vocalist for Prince, but played additional guitar on tour in 2011. She has since performed live with various NPG members in her backing band.

Esteemed singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega's 1987 single Luka may have been an unlikely hit due to the sensitive topic it addresses: child abuse. However, it remains her highest-charting single in the United States – and found a perhaps unexpected fan in the High Priest of Pop.

Upon Prince's death in 2016, Vega shared a post on social media that included a handwritten note from him, which read: “Dearest Suzanne, Luka is the most compelling piece of music I’ve heard in a long time. There are no words 2 tell u all the things I feel when I hear it. I thank God 4 u. – Prince.” Vega had held onto the note for almost three decades before sharing it publicly to pay tribute to the artist.

As much a fan as they were of each other's repertoire, Vega and Prince never managed to meet. “But I’ve always felt that connection because of the letter and when I sang at the Grammys, he jumped to his feet after I sang the song and I knew he loved it,” she told Billboard in 2016. “I’ve seen him perform many times and loved him.”

“I share a lot of things with my fans on Twitter and Facebook. I shared some texts I’d had with Lou Reed, as an example, so I just thought this could be something they might like, especially when I feel that we’re all grieving together. Somehow it reached many more people than that, so I’ve been appreciative of all that outpouring and love for Prince.”

Luka went on to earn Vega multiple nominations at the 1988 Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. However, she recently revealed that at its inception, the song wasn’t well received.

“It's because they [the audience] didn't know what I was talking about, and then when they did realize what I was talking about, I think it made them sad and it made some people uncomfortable,” Vega reveals on the Rock & Roll High School Podcast.

It was so far beyond her comprehension that the song could actually become a hit, that it wasn't until her then-manager Ronald K. Fierstein – who also executive produced her 1985 self-titled debut and several subsequent projects – recognized its potential that Vega, very tentatively, began to believe in its mainstream appeal.

“It was at a sound check. And he said, ‘I want to talk to you about that song. Is that what I think it's about?’ And I'm like, ‘What do you think it's about?’ And he said, ‘I think it's about the issue of child abuse.’”

She continues, “I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he told me point blank, he thought it could be a hit. And I was so skeptical. I thought, ‘Yeah.’ He made a compelling argument in the end, I just said, ‘Okay, fine, knock yourself out as long as I'm not going to change the lyrics, and I'm not going to change the way I sing.’”

In a career-spanning Guitarist interview back in 2022, Vega reflected on the enduring impact of Luka, her compulsion to tackle difficult subject matter in her songwriting, and her love of acoustic guitars.

During the mid ‘70s, in and around the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, the big music buzz was on Dez Dickerson.

The hotshot guitarist and singer had been gigging as a pro since his high school days – his parents even wrote notes to his teachers so he could travel to out-of-town shows.

“People compared me to Hendrix,” he says. “I had a power trio and I did the whole thing. I was building a following, and I was sure I was gonna make it.”

As the decade wore on, another young Minneapolis-based musician was quietly making a name for himself. Dickerson hadn’t formally crossed paths with Prince Rogers Nelson, but he was aware of him, particularly once the music press picked up on this young virtuoso musician who signed a contract with Warner Bros. Records and played every instrument on his debut album, 1978’s For You.

“The funny thing is, I was that guy a few years earlier,” Dickerson recalls. “Everything people were saying about Prince they had said about me.”

The guitarist borrowed his sister’s copy of For You, and with youthful arrogance, and perhaps a tinge of jealousy, thought, “It’s pretty good. I could do better.’”

By this time, Dickerson’s band Romeo was in a death spiral, and as he pondered his next move, he spotted an ad in the Twin Cities Reader: “Warner Bros. recording artist seeks guitarist and keyboardist.” “I knew the only person in town who had a deal with Warners was this kid Prince,” Dickerson says, “so I thought, ‘If he’s gonna break big, I’m going along with him.’”

After a 15-minute audition, Prince tapped Dickerson to join his backing band, which over time would become the Revolution.

It didn’t take long for the band (which also included bassist André Cymone and drummer Bobby Z., as well as keyboardists Matt Fink and Gayle Chapman) to become a live powerhouse; even so, Prince treated the studio as his near-exclusive domain, and on albums like Controversy and 1999, he used band members sparingly.

Among Dickerson’s most notable studio contributions were 1999, on which he sang co-lead vocals, and the breakout hit Little Red Corvette, which featured his backing vocals and a stinging guitar solo (which he remembers as being ranked number 64 in Guitar World’s 100 Greatest Solos of All Time. “I thought that was pretty cool”).

Dickerson quit the Revolution in 1983 for reasons both musical and personal – amicably, he stresses. “There was never any bad blood between us.” Several years later, he relocated to Nashville, where he worked as an executive and producer for Christian music labels.

“Nashville is like the town where rock ’n’ roll comes to semi-retire, and I say that lovingly,” he quips.

He gigs around town here and there, but more and more, music has taken the backseat to other ventures. Last summer, he accepted an invitation to host a local talk radio show, and within minutes he felt like he’d come home.

“I’m definitely eyeing doing more radio,” he says. “Live radio, podcasts – it’s all about performing. The same creativity I used to put into a searing guitar solo, I can put that into words at a microphone.”

It’s been nine years since Prince’s death, and Dickerson still finds it hard to believe that his longtime friend and onetime boss is really gone.

“We would talk from time to time,” he says. “Sometimes we’d hook up when Prince was in town. Every time we got together, it was like no time had gone by at all.”

He remembers their last conversation, which occurred three weeks before Prince’s passing.

“We spoke on the phone, and it was kind of strange. After we hung up, I had a weird sense about his mortality. I even remarked about it to my wife. Three weeks later, he was gone.”

When you first met Prince, did you think he was going to be a star?

“Actually, I didn’t. [Laughs] You know, I had been doing my thing for nine years before I met Prince. I formed bands and grew an audience. Prince had been on my radar, though. I started hearing about this kid who plays all these instruments, and he’s amazing.”

The two of you must have hit it off when you auditioned for his band. All it took was 15 minutes.

“Yeah, what happened was, I called his manager, who arranged an audition for me. Of course, Prince and everybody were two hours late. I went up to the manager and said, ‘I’m on my way to an out-of-town gig. Can I go first?’”

And did you?

“I did. Prince and the rest of the band eventually came in. André Cymone was the bass player at the time. He fell in with Bobby Z., and they started riffing. I played some rhythm stuff, and when Prince looked up and nodded, I did my thing. I felt like I said what I needed, then I went back to rhythm.

“It was like that for 15 minutes till I had to leave. Prince asked me to go outside to talk in the parking lot, and he asked me some amazingly career-oriented questions for a kid that young. He said, ‘Look, I know you’ve been doing your thing, but would you help me do my thing? When we get there, I will empower you and do what I can so you can do your own thing.’

“True to his word, he did just that. He hooked me up with management, and they got me booking agents. They put me on the road opening for this band called the Producers. Then it went to Steve Stevens, who was a big fan of mine. His girlfriend worked at Frontier Booking, so thanks to both of them I ended up on Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell tour.”

Did Prince ever tell you what he liked about your playing?

“Not really. His whole thing was, he was kind of looking to have a band like Sly and the Family Stone – not just in how we looked, but in the musical push. It’s kind of funny, because he told me and André that he wanted the three of us to be frontmen.

“I remember him coming to rehearsal one day, and he told me, ‘I want us to be like the Black Glimmer Twins. I’ll be Mick and you be Keith.’ If you look at some of the early videos, Prince and I are singing at the same mic like Mick and Keith.”

Of course, Prince was a badass guitar player. Did you have to adjust your style to fit with his playing?

“In terms of rhythm parts, I had to copy what was on the records. As for leads, he loved what I did and wanted me to be me. Truth be told, he thought I was a better lead player than him at this point. There was a time when he came into the dressing room and said, ‘From now on, you’re going to play pretty much all the leads on stage. I’m going to focus on putting the guitar down and being a frontman.’ He treated me as an equal.”

You guys opened for the Stones in Los Angeles in 1981. That gig famously didn’t go well – the crowd booed and threw stuff on stage.

“Yeah, but those shows have gotten twisted out of context. We played two gigs opening for the Stones, something like 120,000 people. Statistically, they say 5 percent of any audience isn’t going to like what you do.”

Five percent of 120,000 equals a lot of people.

“It was mostly Hell’s Angels. They didn’t like Prince’s bikini underwear. I found out later that the Stones’ audience threw things back at them – that was their way of showing their love. Prince got freaked and cut the set short. [Promoter] Bill Graham came out and started cussing people out, and they booed at him. The rock stations reported that we got booed off the stage, but that wasn’t true.

“Anyway, we went to the dressing room and found out that Prince had gone straight to the airport. He went home and wasn’t coming back. There was a day off between the shows, and Mick Jagger called Prince and asked him to come back, but he said, ‘No. I’m not doing it.’ Then management called him, and same thing – he wouldn’t do it.

“Finally, management came to me and said, ‘Look, Prince listens to you. Will you call him?’ So I did. I appealed to our manhood as a band and said, ‘We can’t let them run us off like this. We’ll never live it down.’ He came back and we did the second show.”

Little by little, Prince started bringing band members into the studio to record. Let’s talk about your Little Red Corvette solo. Did he give you any kind of direction for what he wanted?

“Not at all. He called me up and asked me to come to his house. By this time, he had a second home with a killer studio. He played me the track and said, ‘Here’s where the solo goes. I want you to solo here.’ As far as direction, he just said, ‘Do what you do.’ I did five passes and we comped them – that’s what became the solo on the record.”

Did you use your Vox Explorer on that track?

“I had custom-made Explorers. There was a music store in town called Newt Coupe, and they built me a couple of custom Explorers from Schechter parts. That’s what I played on Little Red Corvette.”

Did you and Prince sit around and talk guitars and gear? At this point, he wasn’t a multi-millionaire, so I imagine he didn’t have a ton of guitars yet.

“He zeroed in actually on a Hohner Tele. That guitar had a sound he really liked. He wasn’t really a gearhead. He’d find a couple of things that he liked and use them. He had three Boss pedals and played through a Boogie. He liked the saturated channel on the Boogie. That’s about it – it wasn’t about gear. We talked about the band.”

Was there a pattern for how Prince played you and the band new material? Did he make elaborate demos? Did he pick up a guitar and play songs live?

“Most of the time songs were recorded – it was everything from ‘rough roughs’ to sort of board mixes he did in his studio. Sometimes he’d play me things in their early stages. When the tunes got more complete, that’s when he’d get the rest of the band to learn them.”

He hadn’t yet built Paisley Park.

“No. Here’s an interesting tidbit: When he built Paisley Park, the chief engineer had me do these guinea pig sessions. I went in for a week and did my thing so they could debug the A and B rooms. So I actually recorded at Paisley Park before Prince. [Laughs]”

What exactly made you want to leave the band?

“I left five years from when we started. Prince and I had a conversation… We had a lot of conversations in dressing rooms. I was feeling that we were becoming too slick; what kind of brought us to the party was being this raw, unscripted band.

“Now Prince wanted us to become slick and polished, more choreographed. I said to him, ‘This isn’t what we are, and I’m just not as comfortable anymore.’ I wasn’t happy, and I was becoming kind of surly on the road. Soundchecks were going on for a long time, sometimes six hours where we were getting LinnDrum sounds.”

You left before Purple Rain broke Prince huge worldwide.

“We were rehearsing the songs. Raspberry Beret [from 1985’s Around the World in a Day], we played it in soundcheck and on the bus. Baby, I’m a Star, we hashed that out on the 1999 tour.

“He gave us all copies of the Purple Rain script, and the part that ended up being a composite of Wendy and Lisa was actually originally written as my part because I was still in the band. I was going to do the film. Actually, I’m in the film as a cameo; me and my band are doing a song called I Want 2 B A Millionaire.

“During the middle of pre-production, I was in L.A. having meetings with A&R people. Prince called me and asked me to come home to talk. We sat down and he said, ‘Once this film is done, I want us to tour for at least two full years. I need you to either solidly re-up, or you can go off now and do your thing if you want to.’ I thought about it for a few seconds, and I was just tired. I wanted to get back out and do what I did. It didn’t take much for me to decide on door number two.”

No regrets about leaving, especially when you saw Purple Rain become a massive hit?

“None. I knew it was my time. I was so grumpy… There was a soundcheck when [keyboardist] Matt Fink, who himself will admit to being the most annoying person on the planet, said something to me, and I just snapped. I grabbed a boom stand and went after him. Two crew guys stopped me, and they knew, ‘This guy’s going to hurt him.’ I knew I was done. No regrets.”

Prince always championed your lead playing, but he was a badass guitarist himself.

“Oh yeah. What happened was, after I left the band, [guitarist] Wendy [Melvoin] technically took my place. Now, Wendy’s not a lead player, so Prince kind of took that role back. I saw him grow as a guitar player during that time. He didn’t have to timeshare the guitar – it was just him.”

One of his greatest guitar performances was when he played the end guitar solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony in 2004.

“That performance was kind of the culmination – now he’s fully that guy.”

And, of course, he was quite a showman. When he threw the guitar in the air and his tech caught it…

“Which, by the way, he got that from me. I used to throw my guitar up neck first, spin it, throw it as high as I could, like, 20 feet, and my guitar tech would catch it. Everything is borrowed. Everything is recycled.”

Did your guitar always wind up in your tech’s hands?

“I missed a couple of times. About 98 percent of the time, I did it successfully. A few times it landed and bounced.”

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Though not known so much as a bass player, Prince's basslines on such classics as Let's Work and the Time's 777-9311 proved that he was as accomplished on the bass guitar as he was on the myriad other instruments he played.

An avowed disciple of Larry Graham, Prince kept things funky with ghost-notes, vibrato, and plenty of Graham-esque slap work.

“He's a phenomenal bassist – he plays from the heart,” Rhonda Smith told Bass Player back in 2014. “By watching him over the years and being in such a funky environment, I was able to assimilate some of his style.

“If he wants you to reproduce a feel, he comes over and plays it for you, so you need to be able do it on the spot, which is not easy! As a result, I think I play less and with more taste now, and I'm much more confident.”

Recorded at Los Angeles’ Sunset Sound Recorders in early March 1984, When Doves Cry established Prince as one of the most forward-thinking artists of the decade. It remains Prince’s zeitgeist moment, despite his original bassline proving to be somewhat troublesome.

Speaking to Bass Player in December 2005, Prince said: “When Doves Cry was the last song on Purple Rain to be mixed, but it just wasn't sounding right – it was just sounding too conventional, like every other song with drums and bass and keyboards.

“So I said, ‘If I could have it my way it would sound like this,’ and I pulled the bass guitar out of the mix. Singer Jill Jones said, ‘Why don't you have it your way?’ So I muted the bass track.

“Sometimes your brain kind of splits in two – your ego tells you one thing, and the rest of you says something else. You have to go with what you know is right.”

The treatment of When Doves Cry tallies with the Purple One's concept of space in his music – and a shelved bassline is certainly emblematic of that approach.

“Space is what it's all about. I'm always telling people in rehearsal you've got to shut up once in a while. Solo spotlights are fun and everything, but if you make music people want to hear, they'll keep that tape.

“You can listen to one groove all night, but if everyone's playing all over the place all night and not hearing each other – not respecting the music – ain't nobody gonna want to listen.”

Of course, that innate sense of groove is a through line no matter what instrument Prince is playing – and he says being able to tackle both bass and drums is key to his inimitable funk.

“That's the thing about playing both bass and drums – the parts just lock together. Lenny Kravitz is the same way. If you solo his drum part on Are You Gonna Go My Way, it sounds like, hey – he ain't that good. But put everything on top and it comes together. He just gets high on the funk.”

Dez Dickerson, guitarist with Prince and the Revolution from 1979 to 1983, has reflected on Prince’s disastrous stint opening for the Rolling Stones in 1981.

Those shows are some of the most notorious in rock history, with Prince facing such an onslaught of abuse (and bottles) that he abandoned the stage after 25 minutes.

Dickerson, however, tells Guitar World, “those shows have gotten twisted out of context.”

On the opening night at LA’s Memorial Coliseum, Prince was greeted by a barrage of fried chicken, cans, and bottles, not to mention racist and homophobic abuse.

Revolution bassist Brown Mark recalled, “Next thing I noticed was food starting to fly through the air like a dark thundercloud. Imagine 94,000 people throwing food at each other; it was the craziest thing I had ever seen in my life. I got hit in the shoulder with a bag of fried chicken; then my bass guitar got knocked out of tune by a large grapefruit that hit the tuning keys.”

“It was mostly Hell’s Angels,” Dickerson remarks now. “They didn’t like Prince’s bikini underwear.”

He insists, though, that the majority of the crowd was on Prince’s side.

“I found out later that the Stones’ audience threw things back at them – that was their way of showing their love. Prince got freaked and cut the set short. The rock stations reported that we got booed off the stage, but that wasn’t true.

“Statistically,” Dickerson argues, “they say 5 percent of any audience isn’t going to like what you do.”

Prince, however, was unimpressed and insisted he would not play another show. “We went to the dressing room and found out that Prince had gone straight to the airport,” Dickerson remembers. “He went home and wasn’t coming back. Mick Jagger called Prince and asked him to come back, but he said, ‘No, I’m not doing it.’”

Jagger’s failure might have been related to his dismissive attitude. In a 1983 interview, he said dismissively, “I talked to Prince on the phone once after he got two cans thrown at him in LA. He said he didn’t want to do any more shows.”

After Prince’s management also tried unsuccessfully to coax Prince back, Dickerson tried himself.

“Finally, management came to me and said, ‘Look, Prince listens to you. Will you call him?’” says Dickerson. “I appealed to our manhood as a band and said, ‘We can’t let them run us off like this. We’ll never live it down.’ He came back and we did the second show.”

That second show was met with a similar response, and Prince never again shared a stage with the Stones.

For the full interview with Dickerson, check out the latest issue of Guitar World, available now from Magazines Direct.

Joe Satriani has recruited a host of the world's top guitarists for his G3 tour over the decades – among them, Steve Vai, Robert Fripp, Yngwie Malmsteen, John Petrucci, and Steve Lukather, to name just a mere few. However, there were a couple of guitarists on his bucket list who managed to slip away.

“The one that was so close to really happening was me with Jeff Beck and Billy Gibbons,” he admits in a recent interview on the UCR Podcast. “I think we were a week away from actually putting it in ink in the books. It was so close to happening. Then, Jeff bailed at the last moment.

“He used the excuse [that] he thought it would be better if we toured with Prince. I took that as a really good joke, like, he just didn't want to do it, so he came up with the most ridiculous suggestion.”

In terms of his relationship with Beck, Satch goes on to reveal he can't really say that he knew him, as he only met the late guitar great twice.

“So there was no way for me to ever talk to him about it, like, ‘Why didn't it happen?’” he explains. “But yeah, I've always thought in my mind, ‘Let's call up Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck,’ you know, let's get all of your favorite guitar players out there.”

As for why Beck rejected the G3 gig, Satch wonders whether it could have had something to do with the fact he was from a different generation of guitarists – Beck’s era preceding his and Steve Vai’s, and theirs in turn preceding the “classic rock group” of the likes of Slash and Tom Morello.

“I could see them just wondering, ‘Who is this kid? We don't know who he is. [He] plays instrumental guitar, who cares.’ So I never really thought it would happen, but I'd ask anyway,” he adds.

“Once in a while, somebody would agree or just show up and say, ‘I want to play.’ And it would be [guitarists] like Brian May, Neal Schon, or Robert Fripp. So we've been really fortunate in that respect.”

Satch and longtime collaborator Steve Vai recently announced they would be forming a band together – the first time they've ever done so – with a lineup comprising Pete Thorn on rhythm guitar duties, veteran bassist Marco Mendoza, and drummer Kenny Aronoff.

Donna Grantis' relatively short but impactful stint with Prince – as the co-lead guitarist in his final band, 3rdeyegirl – was nothing short of memorable.

Perhaps this comment from a 2019 Guitar World interview best sums up the experience of playing side by side with one of the most influential and revered musicians of all time: “Whether we were jamming at Paisley Park or playing onstage at the Superdome, I would just be blown away all the time.”

And though the group – completed by bassist Ida Nielsen and drummer Hannah Welton – released only one album, 2014's no-nonsense funk-rock Plectrumelectrum, their performances encompassed rock-oriented renditions of select Prince hits, including the inimitable Purple Rain. As expected, Prince always played the song’s signature guitar solo – bar one night in Grantis' native Toronto.

“Prince always kept us on our toes during live performances,” Grantis explains in an interview with CBC News. "We always watched him to cue solos, breakdowns, [and] open up certain sections.

“But that night was a total surprise to me where, after the third chorus, he sang, ‘In the purple…’ and then he pointed at me, which was the cue to take the solo. And I felt like that was a really special moment. I consider that to be a gift to have had the chance to play that for our hometown audience.”

While many might have choked at such an unexpected left turn, Grantis grabbed the opportunity by both hands and, ever the professional, dove straight in.

“I mean, what are you going to do, right?” she says with a laugh. “You've got to jump in and go for it. And, you know, it was such a thrill and such an honor. The last time that I had played that solo with him was that initial [audition] jam in November of 2012.

“But of course, it's just so quintessentially Prince that he always played it. But in that moment, you don't have much time to think about it, right? There's about two seconds, and then you've got to hit the overdrive pedal and the flanger on there, and just jump in.”

And how did Prince react post-performance? “I believe we went to a ping-pong social club, and I said to him, ‘Wow. What a gift! Thank you for that opportunity.’

In true Prince fashion, “He just kind of gives a nod and a smile.”

Marcus Miller personifies the cool bassist. He rubbed elbows with Miles Davis, and even his speaking voice is rife with the trumpeter's jazz slang. But Miller is far from arrogant. Instead, he communicates in thoughtful, casual tones, often delivered at a pace that evokes his back-of-the-pocket basslines.

Of course, his musical voice is much louder. There are his unmistakable compositions, with their textured jazz-hop grooves and moody, open harmonies stalking sing-song melodies. And then there's his slapped and plucked '77 Jazz Bass, which fast became a sonic presence to rival Jaco's fretless.

In addition to his work as a sideman, Miller’s solo career has yielded several esteemed recordings, including the 15-track Silver Rain, which features thunderous bass anthems, ballads, and a title track co-written with Eric Clapton (who also provided the lead vocal and a solo).

Miller's usual run for covers was also in place, with the works of no less than Duke Ellington, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Edgar Winter, and even Beethoven reshaped to flow from his fertile mind to his funky fingerboard.

“I've settled into the concept that covers are a key part of jazz history,” Miller told Bass Player. “It raised some eyebrows when people first heard Coltrane's version of My Favorite Things or Miles covering show tunes, but now they're among our most treasured jazz performances.

“Doing a song people already know tells them so much about you and how you see the world, because they have a reference. I think it's important to have a balance, but I like what covers reveal about an artist.”

The following interview from the Bass Player archives took place in April 2005. We spoke with Marcus before a Japanese tour to discuss his playing style (including the profusion of Marcus clones), and the cool effect on Silver Rain.

What led you to cover Prince's Girls and Boys?

“I'm a big fan; he's an incredible artist, and his bass playing is just crazy. I learned so much about phrasing and attitude on the bass from his 1980 album Dirty Mind. But Ive always liked Girls and Boys because of the baritone sax line; I thought I could do it on bass clarinet to give it an off-center vibe.

“I also like to force myself into different keys; this one is in Bb, which is weird for funk bass. Anyway, I went back to the original once and then did it off the top of my head. I play the melody on my 1977 Jazz. I wanted someone with a lot of character in their voice to sing the hook, and I was fortunate to get Macy Gray.”

Form- and arrangement-wise, your covers of Frankenstein, Boogie On Reggae Woman, and Sophisticated Lady stay fairly close to the originals, in contrast to Power of Soul, which has new material.

“We generally wanted to get to the solo sections and let everyone play, because improvisation was a big part of doing these songs live. Frankenstein was one of those tunes people dug in all the different neighbourhoods back in the '70s, so it's a good piece to bring everyone together. I did it from memory, having last played it in clubs 20 years ago.

“Boogie On Reggae Woman was something we were fooling around with, and I thought, ‘I want to claim that bassline for bass guitar!’ Stevie Wonder's synth part is brilliant; he's got his whole heart and soul in it, and it was really hard to make it sound natural on the electric. I listened to the original to remember all the lines, because he never plays the same thing twice – no doubt from his Jamerson influence. The only change I made was to extend some of the harmonies.

“I had recently recorded Sophisticated Ladies as a guest of Solid Brass, a Japanese brass band, and I fell in love with it again. I thought it was a perfect melody for bass clarinet, which has a longing quality to it. I reharmonized it a bit, and I used my fretless Modulus 6 because I needed the upper range.”

“As for Power of Soul, we've been doing it for a while; it's a feature for Dean Brown. I built a new section from the opening riff, and we play the main riff, but we don't get to the chorus.”

Your most intriguing cover is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

“I've been pointed in a classical direction from having worked on an opera CD with Kenn Hicks, and also because my son plays a lot of classical piano in the house. One day he was playing the Moonlight Sonata, and I found myself going, ‘Man – that Beethoven was a soulful cat!’

“As a kid, whenever I heard that kind of music I always added a beat or a bassline in my head, and it dawned on me that I should present the same concept to people, to show them how I reimagine this music when I hear it.

“So while my son was playing, I was getting on his nerves by playing a bassline on my upright, singing the beat, and telling him that if Beethoven had a drum set, this is what he would have told the drummer to play!”

Were you thinking vocally when interpreting the melody on your '77 Jazz?

“I used a vocal/blues guitar approach, because the groove is sort of gospel 6/8 with a backbeat. I also have blues guitarist Lucky Peterson playing fills throughout and soloing at the end of the track. The key to the melody, though, is that it's so simple and beautiful, and it's all connected with a single line.”

What inspires your techniques and phrasing?

“When I slide up to a note or bend to it, it's emulating a singer, because they usually don't hit notes right on. The hammer-ons and trills pertain to vocal vibrato, but I also use them because the fretted bass doesn't sustain as well, so I'll add a hammer-on to keep the note going. Plus, it gives the line attitude.

“I think playing other instruments helps me, too, as does the fact that I've worked with phrasing masters like Miles, Luther Vandross, and Roberta Flack. The bottom line is: phrasing is everything. It's what gives music its character. Once you've learned your scales and techniques, you have to come out the other side and realize it's all a tool, and now you have to find a way to reach people.”

Judging by the many solo bass CDs we receive, you're competing with Jaco and Victor Wooten as the most copied bass stylist.

“That's one step in all of our developments, like the kid in high-school who sounded just like so-and-so. It's a good thing at that point, but eventually it's best to move on. What helped me in high school were friends like Omar Hakim and Kenny Washington, who didn't want to sound like anyone but themselves.

“It was an ethic when I started playing the clubs in Jamaica, Queens: the only thing that mattered was whether people could tell who you were in the first three notes! Tom Browne was a master at that.

“I joined Lenny White's band at age 17, and I remember asking him, ‘How do you get your own sound?’ He said, ‘By playing in as many different environments as possible.’ Sure enough, when I got into Miles' band in 1981, playing like my idols – Jaco, Stanley, and Larry Graham – wasn't going to work in that musical setting, so I had to dig and find something else.”

“It was the same thing playing with Luther Vandross. Now you've got cats who are making their own environments with computers, and there's not a whole lot of other musicians involved in their development. They need to find other musicians to play with in order to find themselves, if that's what they value.”

When you’ve got Rhonda Smith’s killer combination of Larry Graham-like funk chops, a full-on fusion background, the ability to play just about any kind of bass instrument imaginable, and sheer stage energy, word gets around.

For more than a decade, Smith was on call with Prince, but during the Purple One's 2010 sabbatical, she got a call from Jeff Beck drummer Narada Michael Walden. Unsure of Prince's future plans, Smith went with Beck, and had to tell his purple majesty she was busy when he got his mojo working again.

“They're both amazing guitar players,” Smith told Bass Player. “Prince was aware of everything; he could play everything, and had control over everything, so the bass needs to play a supportive role all the time, but Jeff let you take liberties. That was more of a rock and fusion gig, so there's room to expand.

“It doesn't mean I couldn’t go crazy. If I was screwing up, he would tell me, but he really trusted the people that he picked.”

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia and raised in Montréal, Rhonda Smith first encountered the bass clef in elementary school, where she played the tuba-like euphonium.

At age 12, her older brother brought home a Sears bass guitar, and soon she was playing along with rock records by Yes, Rush, and Mahogany Rush. A year later, she was exploring fusion through the basslines and solos of Stanley Clarke's Rocks, Pebbles and Sand.

“Stanley was a huge influence because he had his own sound and was upfront in the music. Alain Caron and his band UZEB made fusion popular in Canada at the time, and of course, Jaco had a big impact on me.”

Our interview from the Bass Player archives took place in February 2012, with Smith having recently returned from a world tour with Jeff Beck.

Jeff Beck is one of the most technically gifted guitarists of all time. How do you relate to him in a performance?

“I can really relate to Jeff's playing because he doesn't use a pick, and neither do I. I'm a big believer in the sound of skin on strings. But the guy is so bad [in a good way] that I'll admit at times I have to not listen to his solos when we play live, because I'll lose my concentration. I prefer to study him at home in my studio.

“I listen to tapes of rehearsals when we're just blowing over stuff, looking at what dimension he's coming from as a soloist.”

What bass do you use as the workhorse with Jeff Beck?

“I do most of the show with the same kind of bass I used with Prince – a 4-string Fender American Deluxe Jazz Bass. I wanted to respect what had been laid down before me, and I knew Jeff would respect that. I use it in active mode with both pickups engaged, volume pegged, and just a bit of bass boosted.

“I love to play 5-string, but I haven't incorporated it yet because of my experience with Prince and Lenny Kravitz – they're not lovers of 5- or 6-string basses. I think some guitar players simply want you to play a 4 because they don't want all that other stuff in the way.

“I play my Vektor Electric Bassett electric upright on the few ballads, such as Over the Rainbow and Nessun Dorma – anything that's got room for people to hear the wood and the vibrato – in order to bring something more tender to the table. It's the same one I took on tour with Prince.”

Are you playing any fretless?

“I played some a couple of tours ago. I still have a fretless Deluxe Jazz on tour, but the songs I used it on, which are still in the set, have changed in such a way that I don't really need it anymore. I just roll back my tone knob and use the bridge pickup on the fretted Fender to cop somewhat of a Jaco-style sound.”

On Freeway Jam, you alternate between fingerstyle and some serious double thumbing. How do you apply that technique within your overall plucking-hand concept?

“I probably would be better off if my thumb was curved like a real bass player's thumb, but mine is very straight. So I've developed what I call a ‘top and bottom’ approach, where I strike down on the top of the string with tip of my thumb, and then I strike the bottom of the string on the way back up from underneath. Then I might incorporate some muted hammer-on notes with my left hand.

“I might add more action by plucking a higher string with my index finger – sometimes I use my first two fingers. And sometimes I'll thumb up and down on a string while I keep the plucking going on a higher string. Sometimes I'll even add a flamenco-like flick of all of my right-hand fingers on the G string.”

How has Prince influenced your bass playing?

“I don't think I could have had a better teacher. Canada was light on R&B and funk in the clubs and on the radio. From the outset he schooled me on a lot of music – guys like Larry Graham, James Jamerson, and Chuck Rainey.

“Plus, he's a phenomenal bassist – if he wants you to reproduce a feel, he comes over and plays it for you, so you need to be able do it on the spot!

“It's not something you can cop immediately, but by watching him over the years and being in such a funky environment, I've been able to assimilate some of his style. I think I play less and with more taste now, and I'm much more confident.”

From his ’80s heyday with Weather Report and Steps Ahead through his mid-’90s run with Madonna, two tours of duty with the Joe Zawinul Syndicate, and his stint in the Bill Evans/Randy Brecker Soulbop Band, the late Victor Bailey earned his stripes as a reliable groovemeister and consummate accompanist.

He stepped out from that supportive role on a few rare occasions, notably his four recordings as a leader – 1989's Bottom's Up, 1999's Low Blow, 2001's That's Right and his fourth and final solo outing, 2009’s Slippin' N' Trippin’.

Bailey's big production number on Slippin' N' Trippin' was an audacious cover of Prince's Kiss, on which he methodically layered 12 separate tracks of bass guitar.

“That's all bass,” Bailey told Bass Player back in November 2009. “The backbeat is me knocking on the wood with my knuckle, the kick drum is me turning the preamp on the bass all the way up and hitting the bass with my palm, and to make the snare sound I used a Shure SM57 mic to record the sound of me slapping the actual wood of the bass.”

“The solo is false harmonics going through the distortion effect on the Zoom 607 bass pedal with just a touch of envelope filter added in. I haven't heard anybody do anything with false harmonics since Jaco did Birdland.”

The Zoom 607 is a multi-effects pedal that figures prominently throughout Slippin' N' Trippin' for all the distortion tones and envelope filter sounds that Bailey generated. “I was never an effects guy myself, mainly because when I went to Berklee every bass player there stepped on a chorus pedal for solos in order to sound like Jaco. And I said, ‘No, I can't be like everybody else.’

“So I avoided pedals for a long time. But this Zoom pedal was the first one I heard that didn't sound like any other effects out there. Zoom discontinued that pedal because nobody bought it – but whenever I play live, bass players are always coming up to me after the gig wanting to know how I got those sounds.”

Elsewhere on the album, on a startlingly accurate rendition of John Coltrane's chops-busting Countdown, Bailey burns with sax-like fluidity while simultaneously scatting Trane's blistering lines. Meanwhile, Ron Carter walks furiously underneath on upright bass.

“I transcribed a ton of Trane solos when I went to Berklee, and that was one of them. I always thought it was such a beautiful piece of music, even though it's an improvisation. I used to walk around Berklee just singing it. People who had heard me play would ever have the idea that I could play a John Coltrane solo note-for-note, let alone scat along with it.”

Another side of Bailey's musicality comes out on an intricate four-part vocal harmony showcase on Like a Horn, an adaptation of a song that his sax-playing father Morris Bailey Jr. wrote back in the '50s. “I'm not a great singer, but I can take a tune like that and get the story across.

“A few years ago I was at my father's house in Philadelphia and had asked him for a tune for this record. Just as I was posing the question, I noticed the chart for Like a Horn sitting on his couch. I thought it looked interesting, so I brought it home not knowing what I was going to do with it. I ended up adapting the lyric, so it was a chance to record my vocals and do all the background harmonies.”

On an uncommonly lyrical reading of the timeless Burt Bacharach ballad Alfie, Bailey turned in a rare performance on fretless bass. “I'd hardly played fretless on anything before. There were two songs with Weather Report – What's Going On' from Sportin' Life and Swamp Cabbage from Domino Theory. Other than that, I've never been that interested in fretless.

“I hear so many people play it out of tune, which is one of the worst sounds there is in all of music. But for those particular tunes it just worked. I was surprised how good it sounded on Alfie. I worked on the phrasing a little to get a certain expressiveness that you just can't get with the fretted bass.”

Bailey explained that it was his experience of playing in a power trio setting with guitarist Larry Coryell and drummer Lenny White – resulting in 2005’s Electric and 2006's Traffic – that liberated him to really stretch out on the bass.

“That trio really opened up a lot of things for me. A lot of the stuff that I do – the tapping, the chordal stuff and the triplet thumb thing – doesn't fit in most situations. But with Larry and Lenny I was able to do those things on a gig, and I have to credit Larry for encouraging me to put it all out there.”

Duff McKagan has seen it all, done it all and survived it all – by the slightest of margins. The stories of his escapades as the bassist of Guns N’ Roses, a band whose members practically had their humanity ground out of them by sheer fame and debauchery, are legend.

Fortunately, Duff was in control of his intake during the band’s glory years, resulting in the classic Appetite For Destruction and Use Your Illusion double albums, on which the bass playing is a thing of rock ’n’ roll beauty. “My drinking never got in the way of writing bass parts,” Duff told Bass Player. ‘I was writing music with other drunks at the time! So we were all on the same playing field.”

Like his bandmates, the hell-raising stories about McKagan are numerous. And yet these frankly unnerving escapades seem worlds away from the now 60-year-old bassist who’s spent the last few years touring with the reformed Guns N’ Roses alongside guitarist Slash and singer Axl Rose.

“Axl was never a drunk, but he was never around for the writing of the music. He would come in once something was done. On Appetite we didn’t have a PA in our rehearsal room, so he couldn’t sing stuff even if he wanted to. But Slash and I have been songwriting partners for the major part of my career.”

We could fill pages with bullet-pointed lists of the mad things that Duff did before 1994, when a brush with death caused him to clean up, sober up, get ridiculously fit and go on to a very productive post-GNR career.

In a YouTube interview for Beneath The Bassline, Duff recalled the time his belt buckle gave him a problem during a Guns N’ Roses show.

“I had this killer Chrome Hearts belt that I wore for every gig. And we had this grated stage that we would take all around the world with us, but if it got wet out then that stage would get slick. One show I slipped and the belt got stuck in the floor. We were in the middle of a song!

“I had roadies help me to take the belt off, but it was like that moment in the film where the mini Stonehenge comes down.”

The interview also finds McKagan looking back on the band’s appearance at London’s Live 8 event in 2005, and in particular, meeting Paul McCartney.

“There was a lot going on backstage. There was the Who, Madonna, and Pink Floyd were going to play. We hit the stage, and there’s Paul McCartney. He looks at me and he says, ‘Hey, Duff.’ You only play three songs, so there’s no time to warm up and you’ve got to hit your nut real quick, but all I can think is, ‘Paul McCartney knows my name. How the hell did that happen?!’”

While McKagan's punk-rock roots are well documented, his childhood musical education actually has its foundation in R&B heavyweights like Sly and the Family Stone. At the same time as he discovered punk, he also discovered Prince.

“Meeting Prince was the most freaked out I've been. He was on the Diamonds and Pearls tour in Berlin, and we had a night off, so we went and saw him. Suddenly some big dude says, ‘You can come back and say hi.’”

“I only started playing bass when Guns N’ Roses started, and at first it was more like Prince’s bass playing,” McKagan told Bass Player. “He played bass on his first four records and he had a high-end to his sound. I incorporated that into my sound in Guns N' Roses, which you can hear as early as Appetite for Destruction.

“It's all there, and you can hear the nice round bottom, like a full bottom, but very pronounced. I was at that age when I played drums, guitar and bass, and this guy was only six years older than me, making his own records and playing everything. I was completely enamoured by him.”

She’s worked with Queen Latifah, Erykah Badu, Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak and very briefly with Prince – but Grammy-winning guitarist Ella Feingold is most proud of overcoming the challenges it took to be herself.

One of the biggest challenges was that she’d had much of her success under her deadname, left behind when she transitioned four years ago.

“I learned that by being me, I unintentionally held up a mirror to everyone,” Feingold tells Guitar World.

“Sometimes they’d see: ‘Ella’s jumped off a cliff without a parachute!’ They’d be awoken; and that’s when trans people can be beautiful to others. But sometimes you show a mirror to someone and it terrifies them. They’re usually the people who hate us.

“It’s like, ‘Who are you beyond who you’ve been told to be?’ Transgender people smash that mirror of expectation. We color outside the lines and live life on our terms to be happy.”

Feingold admits: “I thought the reaction was going to be people being weirded out and being hateful. I wasn’t prepared for my DMs to be flooded with confessions from people who’d been awoken – just them spilling their guts because they felt safe. I’m so comfortable being myself. It makes other people comfortable being themselves and exploring who they are around me.”

Where did your love of R&B and funk guitar come from?

“It started with my dad raising me on black American music and always playing Motown in the car. Then I studied with a guy named Spanky Alford, who played for D’Angelo. I don't love using the term ‘neo-soul,’ but he’s the godfather of that style that a lot of people emulate.”

When do you feel you’d found yourself as a guitarist?

“I’ve been playing for 30 years and a lot of cool stuff happened, but I don’t think I really found my voice until about three or four years ago. As a trans girl I just stopped caring about what people thought. I stopped trying to sound like other people and my sound emerged. It was literally timed with my transition – it’s not a coincidence.”

“Before I transitioned I knew I wasn’t me; I was living as someone else. How could I sound like me when I didn’t know who I was?”

Any specific nuances you’ve discovered?

“Listening a lot more. When I’m releasing a note, I’m very conscious of how I get off the note. A lot of people focus on the front end of the note and don’t pay attention to the back end. I became very aware of the nuances of articulation and note duration.”

Prince once said you were “too funky” on guitar. What’s the story there?

“He asked me to audition for his band around 2005. I went to his house in the Hollywood Hills and auditioned for a few days. I was just playing something, and he gave me the stank face, saying, ‘Oh, that’s too funky’ – not in a good way.

“I was thinking, ‘What does that mean?’ He said, ‘Think more Elton John.’ I was like, ‘Is he clowning – is he trolling me?’ I realized what he meant was to have more of a heavy left hand, like on a piano, which translated to more power chord stuff.

“That was his way of saying what he wanted rather than saying, ‘Just play power chords.’ I got it; he wanted a big, heavy kind of sound. I got to play his Mad Cat Tele and all of his guitars. It was a life highlight – something I’ll never forget.”

How did you like playing the Mad Cat Tele?

“I remember the guitar strap being incredibly worn down. It had to have been the original strap. The action was very low, and the neck felt very comfortable and road-worn after a lifetime of playing. It felt amazing. I picked a few others up, but with that one I was like, ‘Oh wow, this is special.’”

What was your biggest takeaway?

“Prince didn’t talk a lot. I needed to read body language. I know with other people he’d be like, ‘No, play the fifth to the third.’ With me, it was more of a test – trying to see where my instincts were; just seeing where I’d take it naturally. He was notorious for doing things like that.”

You also worked with Queen Latifah, which led to your work with Erykah Badu.

“Queen Latifah was the first major tour I did. I was 22; I’m 43 now, so a long time ago! That was my first experience of touring and having a guitar tech, and there were a lot of ‘pinch me’ moments. Erykah was on that tour, and she liked the way I played; that’s how I got the gig with her.

“That tour is how I got the Prince audition. He’d come to see us a couple of times. On the last night of the tour Erykah threw an after-party at the Key Club on Sunset. It was meant to be a jam session just to let loose.

“Prince was up in the balcony, which I didn’t know. He heard me playing all night. When I got the call to audition for him I hung up – I was like, ‘Man, who the fuck is this? There’s no way Prince’s manager is calling me!’ They called back and said, ‘Don’t hang up – Prince was at the Key Club…’ I was like, ‘Oh, shit…’”

You’re still playing with Erykah. What have you learned from that experience?

“One of the most important things in her music is the pauses and spaces. Each time the music stops, it comes back in re-energized. She’s very generous; she doesn’t care if it doesn’t sound exactly like the record. We reinvent ourselves sometimes in the music.”

More recently, you've worked with Bruno Mars, who gave you one of his signature Strats.

“He sure did. When we initially talked on the phone he didn’t tell me what he was working on. He asked me to listen to records and give my opinion of what I thought they used for amps, strings and picks.

“I’m nuts about that stuff; I’ve done my homework. He’d send me records and I’d send him records. Then eventually he asked, ‘Would you want to play on a song?’ I said, ‘Of course!’

Is working with Bruno very different from working with Prince?

“Very different – Bruno knew what he wanted. I don’t mean Prince didn’t know; he was being cryptic on purpose. Bruno had ideas of what he was looking for, and I had my own. I got all his ideas done, gave him extra tracks of things I heard, and let him comp however he wanted.

“It was an honor to be on An Evening with Silk Sonic because I transitioned during the making of it. That’ll always be a special album because it was the first one that had my name, Ella, on it, rather than my previous name.”

Given the amount of success you had before transitioning, it must have been difficult to make that change.

“It was absolutely something I had to consider. I was on hormones for nine months before coming out publicly, while making the Silk Sonic album. What transitioning taught me is that you don’t know how people will respond and react. You can guess, but you really don’t know.

“I was concerned that if I had come out during the making of an album, I might have been replaced. So I waited to come out right at the end of making the Silk Sonic album – I almost had the album come out with my deadname. I remember talking to my friend, a trans girl, who like, ‘You can’t do that. It’s got to come out under your own name.’ I was like, ‘But what if I get fired?’

“I’m not saying that Bruno or anyone I work for is transphobic. It’s on me, and just not knowing how people would respond. Even four years ago was a different time than it is now. So I waited for a while. But the feeling of driving to Walmart when they opened, buying the Silk Sonic CD and seeing ‘Ella Feingold’ in the credits… I just fucking wept in the car. I felt like I’d arrived.”

Your success and openness about what you went through are so important.

“It’s hard being in certain spaces. On Instagram I have a fair amount of followers, and I feel very admired and respected; people are very grateful for what I do. Unfortunately, any guitar space can attract a lot of transphobia. Sometimes I get placed into a space like I’m the Joan of Arc of funk – I get crucified and burnt alive. It’s really horrible.”

Does that impact your artistry or guitar playing?

“One of the best spinoffs of transitioning is that, when I play my instrument, it now comes from a place of urgency and authenticity. You can feel my pain like I’m crying or screaming through my fingers. It’s not because I play loud or angry – there’s just an urgency.

“I can’t compare my life experience to someone else’s, but I can say there are certain genres of music where people are oppressed, and you can feel it through the rawness and realness. It’s not about modes, scales or chords; it’s about playing from a life experience that you’re living.

“Transitioning has given me that gift in my playing. It speaks to people. Not because I’m authentic – though that’s part of it – but because of the oppression I have to face: being misunderstood, hated, objectified and dehumanized. It’s given me an urgency in my playing.”

• Follow Feingold on Instagram.

From performing with a huge array of big-name artists – including Janet Jackson, Jay-Z, Erykah Badu, Queen Latifah, Nas, Destiny's Child, and George Clinton, to name but a few – to auditioning for Prince, session ace Ella Feingold has done it all, and proven herself to be the one A-listers call when they need an R&B and funk electric guitar player.

Feingold was recently honored with a Grammy for her performance on 2021’s An Evening with Silk Sonic by Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak – a truly well-deserved win, considering the album’s cultural impact and her smooth, groove-driven guitar contributions. So, how did the award-winning collaboration come about?

“Bruno hit me up,” she reveals in an upcoming interview with Guitar World. “And when we initially talked on the phone, he didn't tell me what he was working on. He asked me to listen to records and get my opinion of what I thought they used for amps, strings, and picks. I'm nuts about that stuff; I've done my homework.

“We had a series of conversations; he would send me records, and I would send him records. Then, eventually, he asked, ‘Would you want to play on a song?’ I said, ‘Of course!’ I didn't want to invite myself onto someone’s record, but I hoped he would ask me to be on it.”

Working with Mars and his team proved to be a very different experience from auditioning for Prince, which Feingold did in 2005.

“Bruno was different from Prince. He knew what he wanted,” she recalls. Feingold clarifies that this doesn't mean Prince didn’t know what he wanted – rather, he was testing her.

“He was being cryptic on purpose. Bruno was different; he had ideas of what he was looking for, and I certainly had ideas. I got all his ideas done, gave him extra tracks of things I heard, and let him comp however he wanted.”

At the 2022 Grammys, An Evening with Silk Sonic won a total of four awards: Best R&B Song, Song of the Year, Best R&B Performance (a tie with Jazmine Sullivan), and Record of the Year.

Guitar World's full interview with Ella Feingold will be published later this month.

Session ace Ella Feingold has recalled the time she auditioned to join Prince's band – and the Purple Rain legend joked her playing was “too funky”.

The Prince guitar gig was widely known to be a grueling experience. Ida Nielsen, for example, once recalled how “it wasn’t like a normal bass gig where you have 30 songs: I had to learn 300!”

Several ex-guitarists have also spoken to Guitar Player about their stints in Prince's band. Each player was unanimous in talking about how demanding – but educational – their time alongside him was.

Few players, though, can say their playing was simply too funky for the seven-time Grammy winner. In a new interview with Guitar World, Feingold – who won a Grammy herself for her role on Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s 2021 album, An Evening with Silk Sonic – has recalled having that exact experience.

“He asked me to audition for his band around 2005,” she remembers. “I went over to his house in the Hollywood Hills and auditioned for a few days.

“I was just playing something, and he gave me the stank face, saying, ‘Oh, that's too funky,’ but not in a good way. He was like, ‘No, no, no, that's too funky.’ I was thinking, ‘What does that mean? Too funky?’”

Prince, of course, is a funk-pop master, and Feingold’s deft rhythms had earned her the audition. Understandably, such an exclamation had caught her off guard.

She continues: “He was like, ‘Think more Elton John.’ I was like, ‘Is he clowning? Is he trolling me?’” Feingold continues. “He’s asking me to play his music more like Elton John? I realized what he meant was to have more of a heavy left hand, like on a piano, which translated to more power chord stuff.”

While she may not have ended up joining Prince – who ultimately decided to play the guitar himself for his upcoming project – it still proved to be an experience to savor for Feingold.

“I got to play his Mad Cat Tele and all of his guitars,” Feingold extends. “It was a life highlight and something I'll never forget.”

Prince’s Hohner Mad Cat Tele – recognized by its flamed maple top and leopard skin pickguard – is a fabled instrument. It deviates from the traditional Telecaster mold via Strat-style single-coils, a Strat-style hardtail bridge, and a maple body. That gave the guitar an aggressive bite, from which Prince’s lust-worthy tones originated.

“I remember the guitar strap being incredibly worn down,” Feingold details. “It had to have been an original strap. The action was very low, and the neck felt very comfortable and road-worn after a lifetime of playing it.

“It felt amazing. I picked a few others up, but with that one, I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is special.’”

The missed opportunity didn’t harm Feingold's career. After the audition, she would go on to play on Jay-Z’s Kingdom Come LP, and worked with The Roots, Justin Bieber, and Kelly Rowland, before landing the Grammy-winning Bruno Mars gig.

Prince's iconic custom-made Sadowsky T-type electric guitar – which saw action during the Parade tour in 1986 – is expected to sell for up to $400,000 at auction.

Julien's upcoming “Played, Worn, and Torn II” event will take place at Nashville's Musician’s Hall of Fame later this month, and Prince's all-purple Sadowsky build is set to be one of the highlight lots.

Renowned luthier Roger Sadowsky launched his namesake brand in 1979 and would go on to build guitars for Prince, Jason Newsted and Paul Simon, among others. In 1985, he pieced together this striking Tele-styled guitar to commemorate the end of Prince's Purple Rain tour that year.

Its metallic purple finish is decorated with floral artwork created by reggae artist Wayne Jarrett. After making its way to Prince, the guitar later featured in the music video for America, and was used onstage during the 1986 Parade tour.

The 25.5" scale length guitar with serial number #179 is one of six Sadowsky Telecaster builds for Prince, each of which were based on the Hohner “MadCat” he had become synonymous with.

Two were straight-up MadCat copies; two featured copper tubing that, erm, ran up the neck to spew out soapy liquid; and the final two were pink and purple floral creations.

The eye-catching instrument pairs an alder body with a maple neck, with its 24-fret fingerboard flashing some floral cosmetic flourishes. Jarrett has also signed and dated his artwork on the guitar's lower bout.

Specs include Gotoh sealed tuners, a chrome DiMarzio hardtail bridge, and a graphite nut. There's also a cavity in the guitar's rear carved out to house Prince's wireless guitar system that was routed into the guitar before it was finished.

Sadowsky had originally wired a pair of Seymour Duncan vintage-style staggered pole Stratocaster pickups into the guitar. However, its bridge pickup was later swapped for a Hot Rail single-coil, with Julien’s theorizing the move was made to help the guitar go toe-to-toe with the boosted output of his EMG-equipped Cloud guitars.

Prince’s yellow Cloud 3 guitar had sold for less than $10,000 in 2005, but its second trip to the auction block earlier this year saw it raise $900,000 and smash world records.

This purple axe isn’t expected to go for quite as much, but has still been estimated to fetch upwards of $400,000.

“Out of all six guitars Sadowsky made for Prince, the purple floral one saw the most use, and is the same guitar featured on the cover of Duane Tudahl's book,” says Prince guitar historian John Woodland.

The latest Julien’s event takes place on November 20 and 21, with plenty of interesting items on offer. George Harrison's Futurama guitar, which played a key role in the Beatles' early history, and a special Canadian-flag emblazoned Van Halen guitar are also set to go under the hammer.

Head to Julien’s Auctions to peruse the full collection.

Judith Hill spent many years as a backing singer to Prince, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder before deciding to front her own band. Hill’s vocal chops were a given, but what came as a surprise was her guitar playing.

She uncannily mixes incisive, visceral, blues-drenched solos with economical, “Jimmy Nolen meets Nile Rodgers” funk-rhythm grooves. Hill’s new album, her fifth, Letters from a Black Widow, is a career-defining statement that serves as the perfect introduction to her unique talents.

You seem to have found a way to incorporate blues guitar into music that exists way beyond the boundaries of the genre. Was that a conscious effort?

“It comes out of me naturally. I was raised on so many different traditions of music that are very authentic to who I am – gospel, soul, blues, rock, funk and jazz. When I write, I really allow myself to express myself in its entirety. That’s why the final product comes out as such a mix of so many different things.”

What inspired you to take up the guitar?

“Starting out as a singer, I realized the guitar was the closest instrument to the human voice in terms of expression. It gave me an opportunity to extend the way in which I could express myself. It’s a really special thing to have that dialog between voice and guitar.

“As for particular guitarists, initially Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and then Eric Gales and Derek Trucks would be key figures for me. I also really love funk rhythm guitar. I used to play a Strat, though these days I’m mostly using an SG, which I love for the warmth of its tone.”

Working with your parents – Robert Lee Hill on bass and Michiko Hill on keyboards – must make for some special musical ESP.

“Absolutely. There’s an unspoken connection we’ve had since I used to have jam sessions with my folks when I was a kid. I think it’s a really special thing, not just for myself but for others, to see this family unit on the stage. It presents a powerful message.”

You spent a long time working as a backing singer for some major names. Was that an eye-opening experience?

“I learned a lot in those years, especially working with Prince. He taught me about how the system works, and how to be courageous within that system, and also how to maintain your autonomy. School can’t teach the kind of things you learn when you’re working in that environment and see the realities of the business every day.”

Was it always in the game plan to make the transition to fronting your own band?

“It didn’t feel like a transition so much, as I was always writing songs while I was working with other artists. It’s exciting to try to build your own audience, though.

“As the front person now, I’d say I have a whole new appreciation for the people I worked with. It really put everything I remember about those years into perspective. You can really cut them some slack, looking back!”

• Letters From a Black Widow is out now via Regime Music Group.

Dave Rusan had never actually built a guitar before when he found out he’d be making one for a local legend who went by the name of Prince.

The year was 1983 and the funk/soul icon was already well-known to the staff of Knut Koupeé Music in Uptown, Minneapolis – on one occasion speaking with the owner about a custom order for his upcoming Purple Rain movie.

The request was passed down to shop tech and repairman Rusan who, despite the mammoth task ahead of him, took on the project and would soon end up crafting several of the major label superstar’s most recognizable and storied six-strings.

One of them, Cloud 3 – finished in a lemony yellow, fitted with active EMG pickups and Love Symbol position markers – made headlines this summer after parting hands at auction for $910,000.

The guitar had been used extensively over the mid-’80s and early ’90s, most notably on the Purple Rain, Parade, Sign O’ the Times, Lovesexy and Diamonds & Pearls tours, and long-cemented its place in mainstream popular culture.

Here’s a closer look at the iconic Cloud line, from the influences behind those dramatic curves and the double-ended brightness of the right tonewoods with the right pickups to the mission statement behind Rusan’s meticulous modern replicas.

From what you’ve said in the past, Prince liked the horn and swirl on his bassist’s Sardonyx four-string, adopted from Gibson F-style mandolins. How much other input was there on the design of the original?

“The movie [1984’s Purple Rain] had already started and Prince was busy, so I didn’t have much direct contact with him during that process. Which is weird, because when you make a custom guitar, you want to talk about the fret size, neck, weight, all that stuff.

“The owner told me to use the Sardonyx as a starting point and redesign it in white with gold parts. Prince wanted spades on the fingerboard and EMG pickups, which were still quite new. I remember asking if I could talk to him, but nobody would get back to me. I just had to make a guitar I liked and hope for the best. Turns out me and Prince had the same taste.”

Were you surprised by the results?

“We had the tools you’d expect to find at someone’s house. There were a few belt sanders and a Dremel. I spent 10 hours a day for about a month making that guitar, but with tremendous enthusiasm. When you’re put to the test, you might learn you can do more than you thought. I couldn’t have said no. If it didn’t work out, the worst-case scenario would have been a white Strat in the film.”

You had even tried joining his band by this point.

“He’d been coming in for years, since high school, and had a few albums out. Minnesota is cold in the winter; Prince would say that’s why the bands were so good – everybody would be at home working on music. One time he came in and put on a guitar while sitting at a keyboard. He was hammering a melody on the guitar and played the harmony in thirds on the keyboard at the same time.

“We all knew he was going somewhere. He had so much determination. Put that next to the talent, and you had this tremendous thing. Early on, he was so shy. When I tried out for his band, he didn’t really talk that much. He was mysterious and enigmatic; that’s what made him so intriguing and usual. Prince was complicated and contradictory, but always brilliant.”

He then requested two more guitars for the stage.

“That made me think, ‘Well, jeez, I guess he liked it!’ The original was playable, but was thought of more like a movie prop. It was like a co-star, a part of the plot. I almost felt like after the movie he would never touch it again. Knowing he enjoyed the guitar was nice. Thankfully, I had my blueprints [and had] it all broken down into steps to make it less overwhelming.”

What drew you to hard rock maple for the body?

“I made everything but the neck, which were neck-through sections of hard rock maple. It’s actually the same maple the syrup comes from. I was thinking of trying something else like alder, but I realized this guitar would be getting some hard use. It’s not a big guitar, weighing about 8 lbs., less than most Les Pauls.

“It was important that it was rugged. Prince would throw guitars on stage – and his tech might not always catch them. Luckily these were sturdy, though that made them harder to carve. Schaller was top dog at the time, so I used things like the 457 bridge and mini tuners.”

How would you describe the sound and feel of a typical Cloud guitar?

“Two-piece hard rock maple should sound bright. The EMGs add to that in a way that’s clear and detailed rather than tinny. It’s the opposite of Les Pauls, which sound more warm and fuzzy, where the notes blend together.

“My guitars are very revealing with a funky and percussive sound for rhythms. The humbucker has enough sustain and midrange meat for a good lead tone. Maybe the closest thing would be a neck-through Jackson, but everyone seems to agree that the Cloud is iconic in a way that’s totally unique.”

After passing various checks and a CT scan, the third Cloud guitar just sold for close to a million dollars.

“They said it could go up to that. I’d been working with their expert to authenticate it, spending hours in meetings and sharing photos. It needed a look because it had been painted over and over, but most of the time it hadn’t been stripped because they needed everything done quickly.

“Prince was always in a hurry. He’d have ideas [would] and want to move on. The people who worked for him were under pressure because he demanded their best. It was his vision. Maybe he could have been a little more polite at times, but anyone else would have done the same. He was nurturing and warm – but also abrupt and not so warm.”

Is there a mission statement for Rusan Guitarworks?

“I have three goals. The first is to make my reproductions as accurate as possible, which isn’t easy after 40 years. I had EMG do a special run with the old logo. Schaller changed the M6 tuners, so I ended up finding 50 sets in a box that had been sitting around for over 20 years.

“They haven’t made the bridges in eight years. I have people in foreign countries going into stores looking for them. The second goal is to make these guitars play well. And finally it’s the detail you expect from companies like PRS. Even with a magnifying glass, you won’t find imperfections.”

A few years ago there were some disputes about the ownership of the design.

“I’ve been lucky, finding myself in the right place at the right time over and over. But I had a long legal dispute with Paisley Park. Schecter was making the guitars, but my argument wasn’t with them. Nobody had the trademark, not even the guy [Jeff Levin] who made the Sardonyx.

“In 2018 a customer told me to get it to protect myself. I went ahead and placed it in a gold frame, thinking, ‘Boy, I’m safe now!’ Then the estate said, ‘Give us the trademark and stop making the guitars,’ so I had over three years of legal stuff with six different lawyers. In the end we came to an agreement where I could carry on making people happy and honoring Prince’s legacy.”

• Find out more at Rusan Original.

Neo-soul pioneer D'Angelo is, hands down, one of the most elusive artists operating in the industry today. Despite the 14-year hiatus between his second and third albums and sparse releases, his repertoire has immense staying power – not only due to its game-changing innovation but also due to the public's fascination with the mystique surrounding the artist.

This all boils down to the fact that the multi-hyphenate D'Angelo, once dubbed “R&B Jesus,” is obsessed with details and musical nuance, as reflected in his three albums: his 1995 debut Brown Sugar, 2000's Voodoo, and 2014's Black Messiah.

In a recently resurfaced – and extremely rare – video interview with music journalist Nelson George that was filmed before the release of his seminal 2014 album, D'Angelo gives his take on the essence of funk, alongside a snippet of his groove-fueled guitar chops.

“I remember George Clinton said, ‘Rock and roll is like the blues sped up.’ It's like a faster version of the blues. So funk is kind of like – it's not as slow as the blues, so it's right in the middle, you know? But I think the whole concept to me, and what funk really means to me is, it's Black rock and roll,” he says.

Later in the interview, he shows off the pink G&L guitar given to him by his mentor, Jesse Johnson – the prolific guitarist from the original 1981 lineup of Prince's funk-rock group The Time. The guitar, an Invader likely from the mid-'80s to early '90s, had been modified with a pickup selector switch instead of the usual three mini-toggle switches.

D'Angelo also confirms that this is the same guitar that appeared on the cover of Johnson's 1986 Shockadelica album, before showing off his guitar skills with a quick, unaccompanied solo rendition of a Parliament-Funkadelic track.

In a 2014 Red Bull Music interview, the once-in-a-generation artist talked about adding guitar to his multi-instrumental arsenal and how the Prince collaborator and producer was key to his guitar journey.

“It’s a natural progression for me, but honestly, I just feel like that’s where it’s going,” he admits.

“Years and years of crate-digging, listening to old music, you kind of start to connect the dots. I was seeing the thread that was connecting everything together, which is pretty much the blues. Everything soul or funk kind of starts with that; that’s kind of like the nucleus of everything, the thread that holds everything together. It’s kind of just a natural progression.”

Furthermore, D'Angelo discloses that he feels his piano style, his primary instrument, has always sought to emulate the guitar and bass. Therefore, when he began taking the guitar seriously, there was an interplay between wanting to make the keys sound like a guitar, and vice-versa.

“I played a lot of keyboards, but I really wanted to produce the sound that was in my head. It’s like I’m looking at the guitar and bass more like meat and potatoes and keys like coloring over the top of it, you know?”

Speaking about Jesse Johnson, who played a significant role in D'Angelo's nascent guitar journey, D'Angelo says that the two experienced an “instant kinship,” which made the Black Messiah artist feel comfortable exploring this new side of his artistic palette.

“We finally met at Raphael’s [Saadiq] studio in Cali, in Blakeslee. He came through and the first thing he did was give me a couple of guitars. Gave me a Minarik, the black Minarik that I play now and he gave me one of his [other] guitars [referring to the G&L Invader].”

Prince was another common link between Johnson and D'Angelo. The former worked closely with the Purple Rain hitmaker for a number of years, while the latter's fascination with Prince is well-documented. Many have compared their shared penchant for a multi-instrumentalist approach to songwriting and for keeping a tight lid on their work.

“I’m sitting with him [referring to Johnson] shredding and, like, we went out and did a couple of shows in Europe. And you know before then, just sitting with him and he’s showing me things, I’m asking him questions, asking him about just everything. Prince," he asserts.

“I mean, you know, it gets a little hairy because the Time and Prince, that feud was very real. But you know there’s no love lost. He still speaks with a high love and respect for Prince,” he said before concluding with: “I’m just like a sponge, you know, just trying to soak everything in.”

In other Prince news, an unreleased Prince documentary claims his iconic While My Guitar Gently Weeps solo at the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony was an “act of revenge” against Rolling Stone.

Dywane Thomas Jr., aka MonoNeon, has risen to the upper echelons of viral bassists. With his penchant for meme-worthy content that still highlights his bass talent, MonoNeon has managed to grab the attention of music industry icons like George Clinton and Mavis Staples, earn the approval of Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea, and perform at prestigious festivals like the Newport Jazz Festival.

However, without a doubt, one of his biggest flexes is playing with Prince.

In a recent interview with Premier Guitar, MonoNeon talks about the way the High Priest of Pop changed his rig. “I started using the Whammy when I was playing with Prince, because I saw how he was using it and stuff, and I just saw his swag with it, so I just kind of adapted it.

“But I've always had one when I was playing with David Fiuczynski. But when I started playing with Prince, he put the Whammy on my pedalboard they built me at Paisley Park, and I just started to embrace it a lot more being around him. So yeah, my use of the Whammy pedal came from David Fiuczynski and Prince.”

Elsewhere in the interview, MonoNeon reveals how he got recruited by Prince in the first place. “I think he saw some of my videos on YouTube. I'm pretty sure he did. And his manager contacted me through email, and told me, ‘Prince wants you to come to Paisley Park.’ And when I first got there, I was hired to play with Judith Hill, one of his proteges.”

MonoNeon then moved on to Prince’s new band, which comprised musicians like Adrian Crutchfield, the last horn man to perform and record with Prince, guitarist Donna Grantis from his backing band 3RDEYEGIRL, and longtime drummer Kirk Johnson.

“It still hurts me that it was so short, because he passed on and I just started playing with him,” MonoNeon adds. “But I'm using that inspiration and that fire and that time with him right now."

In a recent Guitar World interview, MonoNeon referred to his time with Prince as “life-changing” and said it was the reason why he eventually started writing his own music.

A documentary that may never be released has shed new light on Prince’s famous While My Guitar Gently Weeps guitar solo from the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, which was reportedly performed in part to spite Rolling Stone magazine.

Prince’s legendary career was filled with plenty of iconic onstage electric guitar moments, but the night he was finally inducted into the Hall of Fame is especially notable.

On that night, Prince joined Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison for a cover of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, during which he ripped through a powerfully moving solo.

It was long seen as an exemplary display of Prince’s guitar prowess, and while that still holds true, it seems there is slightly more to the solo. In a feature recently published by The New York Times Magazine, which focuses on Ezra Edelman's new nine-hour Prince documentary, that night is cast in a new light.

As the documentary reports, Prince’s solo was “an act of revenge” designed to spite Rolling Stone, who had left the musician off its 100 Greatest Guitar Players Of All Time list the year before his RRHOF induction.

His response to being omitted from the list? Unleash a guitar solo so epic that it would forever live on in the memory of music fans, and cap it off by launching his guitar in the air. It would become one of Prince’s enduring guitar legacies.

As The New York Times Magazine reports, “On its face, it’s a supreme expression of Prince’s superiority and bravura. But the film gives it a new context. Questlove, on the screen, talks about his disbelief, the previous year, when Rolling Stone made a list of the 100 greatest guitar players of all time, and Prince was left off it.

“Prince nursed these kinds of slights, and his commandeering of the stage – at an event associated with [founder] Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone – was, in part, an act of revenge. There’s spite and aggression in the performance. But there’s also pain – in his wincing face, his apartness: a small, soigné Black man onstage with these rumpled white rockers.”

Those who shared the stage with Prince that night knew they were witnessing history.

In 2016, following Prince’s death, Petty told The New York Times, “You see me nodding at him, to say, ‘Go on, go on.’ He just burned it up. You could feel the electricity of ‘something really big’s going down here.'”

Prince’s solo clearly made quite the impression, and Rolling Stone avoided making the same mistake when it came to assembling its recently updated list of the 250 Greatest Guitarists Of All Time.

Published last year, that list put Prince in 14th place – a huge improvement after being completely left off the lineup two decades ago. That new list wasn’t without its own controversies, though, and was called out for having omitted a number of indisputable game-changers.

The release of Edelman's nine-hour Prince documentary is currently in doubt. As The New York Times Magazine reports, the artist's estate is attempting to block it, worried it will tarnish Paisley Park's reputation.

Central to bassist Esperanza Spalding’s bedazzling career has been her flair for the unexpected. Born in Portland, Oregon on October 18, 1984, Spalding, along with her brother, was raised in the working-class King section by her single mom. She credits seeing Yo-Yo Ma perform on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood when she was just four as her initial attraction to music.

A year later she began playing violin, spending the next decade with the Chamber Music Society of Oregon. At age 14, while attending the Northwest Academy performing arts high school on a scholarship, she ventured into a music room and began messing around with an acoustic bass.

She went on to enrol at Portland State University and studied classical music for a year before switching to Boston's Berklee College of Music on a full scholarship. There, she immersed herself in jazz, drawing from such key influences as Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, and her Berklee teacher, Joe Lovano.

On the performance side, Spalding toured with Patti Austin and Lovano, and released the collaborative trio effort, Junjo, under her own name in 2006. Her critically acclaimed 2008 disc Esperanza topped the Billboard Contemporary Jazz chart, remaining on it for well over a year.

Live appearances for President Obama at the 2009 White House Poetry Jam and Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies, at BET's 2010 Prince Tribute, and in her own 2010 set on Austin City Limits (after which she became the most searched person on Google for the ensuing 24 hours) further raised her profile, as did guest vocal slots with Stanley Clarke, Fourplay, and Mike Stern.

The summer 2010 release of her Billboard Jazz chart-topping third disc, Chamber Music Society, set the stage for her unprecedented 2011 Grammy win for Best New Artist (in the stunning upset of presumed winner Justin Bieber), and a whole new level of recognition.

“I actually met him after the Grammys,” Spalding told Bass Player. “We were both raised by single moms, so we just talked a little bit about that and how our moms are proud of us. It was cool!”

We spoke with Spalding in April 2012 following the release of her fourth studio album, Radio Music Society, to get the lowdown on the album's fantastic frequencies.

What was your concept for Radio Music Society, and how does it relate to Chamber Music Society?

“My original concept was to make a double album, one half an intimate chamber approach to interpreting the songs, the other half a jazz ensemble with horns interpreting the songs with elements of improvisation, but formatted for the extroverted medium of radio.

“I quickly saw how much work that would entail, and I also came to realize the material and the corresponding colors couldn't live in the same project, so I split them into two distinct packages.”

Did you make any considerations for the material's accessibility?

“No, that never crosses my mind. What we're doing is using the time-tested tools – the forms, arrangements, and sonic qualities of the instrumentation – to make the songs sound like they could be played on the radio. What I do consider is the value of having these awesome musicians on a record that might have more mainstream appeal.”

What led you to play electric bass for most of the album?

“It was the sound I heard in my head for most of the songs, especially a song like Let Her. I mean, anything is possible on upright, but that song just seemed texturally like it needed electric bass, and it set the tone.

“I’ve been playing the electric for a few years without focusing on it as a primary instrument, so it's new in a way. Part of the premise of this album and band was to have a reason to play and explore the electric.

“On upright I have more comfort and better access to be able to play whatever I might hear in my head, but I want to get to that place on electric bass where I don't have to think about it; if I want to find something I can just go there. Being on the road and playing it every night will go a long way toward that goal.”

Who are the main influences on your electric bass playing?

“The left-hand bass playing of Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock has had a big impact. I love Anthony Jackson, Pino Palladino, Willie Weeks, and Derrick Hodge.

“Jaco and Stevie are the two I've transcribed; I haven't yet studied early masters like James Jamerson or Chuck Rainey. There are records I've heard where I don't know who the bassists are, but I've probably absorbed their playing by osmosis.”

Why did you choose to play fretless bass, and what are your thoughts regarding intonation and tone, coming from the acoustic bass?

“In 2008 I was checking out SWR amps, and Fender sent me a fretless Jazz Bass. It sounded real good, and it has been my main electric ever since, so that was the bass I used when I recorded Radio Music Society.

“With regard to intonation, I come from violin, so instrument or neck size has no bearing for me; it's just a matter of modifying to the given space. That's where François Rabbath's upright bass method books have influenced my approach. Rather than mentally trying to play in tune, he feels it's all about your hand learning the distance between specific pitches and knowing how to get there.

“He has exercises where you close your eyes and reach out and repeatedly grab an object in front of you. You're basically training your hand where to go. Then you move the object around and attempt to grab it on the first try. I'll still mess up on my fretless fingerboard, but it feels like familiar territory now.

“When it comes to tone on the fretless, I don't really make the connection from upright. What I do feel – on both acoustic and electric – is that most of my tone ultimately comes from my hands and my touch, much more so than what happens electronically from cable to amp. That's true of any string player.”

Your overall bass concept seems to be tied into singing and playing, where the two voices function in counterpoint to each other.

“Absolutely. You can think of it like a piano player's two hands: they generally move independently, and the combination of the two gives you the sound of the chord changes. Singing and playing allows you to be like a pianist in that you're aware of how the line of your voice and the line of your bass together form a counterpoint that implies the harmony.

“The key to creating a good bassline is to remember what was already played and is still hanging in the air. If I play a B in a G chord and I'm going to a C7 next, then I want to go back to the B and resolve it up to C because that B is still in the listener's ear. You have to control how your line resolves into the next harmonic sound; notes are not separate incidents.

“Great bass players are really in touch with that – knowing what they just outlined and what was left unanswered. They only have a single line, but with it they try to weave through all of the important notes in the progression.”

Do you transfer techniques between acoustic and electric?

“Probably more than I consciously realize. I was rehearsing in an acoustic trio with pianist Gerri Allen and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, and from playing more electric I'd become very aware of the rhythm of muted strings and ghosted notes – where certain notes are more important than others in a line.

“I had never really thought about doing that on upright, but we were playing a sort of drum-and-bass groove where some notes needed to be long and others needed to be percussive, so I added some left-hand muted open-string plucks.

“On electric, I've just started to get into slapping and popping. Someone told me you can't slap on a fretless, but when we were jamming with Prince he picked up my fretless and slapped the heck out of it!”

The ballad Vague Suspicions has an interesting sonic texture.

“I started that song on bass. I was warming up playing the 4ths you hear in the guitar line, and the melody came to me. Not long afterward, I heard the Charles Mingus recording Blue Tide, and I liked the sound of the vocal and the way the chords are voiced and resolve, so I adapted some of that. I asked Jack DeJohnette to play drums on it, and he really brought it all together.”

What led you to cover Stevie Wonder's I Can't Help It and Wayne Shorter's Endangered Species?

“Gretchen Parlato and I shared some double bills, and hearing her sing I Can't Help It led me to start playing it live. I did it when we opened for Prince with Joe Lovano and Jeff Lee Johnson in the band, and they sounded so good on it I asked them to record it with me; Gretchen is on the track, too.

“Endangered Species comes from one of my favorite records, Wayne Shorter's Atlantis. We would listen and sing along with it in the van, and pianist Leo Genovese said, ‘Why don't we try Endangered Species?’

“We learned our parts on the fly, and the first night was pretty sketchy, but we got better. I asked Wayne if I could put lyrics to it, and he said yes. I wanted to do it a little differently, so Lalah Hathaway sings the soprano sax part and we have a trumpet solo.”

What was Q-Tip's role on Crowned & Kissed and City of Roses?

"He co-produced both tracks; he offered cool suggestions for the bass sound and drum sound on Crowned & Kissed. I had an older recording of it with a jazz kit sound on drums, and he suggested a tighter; more contemporary sound. He played the same role on City of Roses and added vocals and glockenspiel.”

How did you write and record the songs for Radio Music Society?

“Most were written on piano, although a few were written or started on bass. When I write, I often hear two lines, which usually end up being the melody and bassline. Or I might hear a bassline first and it will give me a melody; that's what happened on Radio Song, which I wrote on electric bass.”

As hip-hop continues to influence styles ranging from R&B to heavy metal and beyond, the musician-meets-machine concept is being played out in various ways. Few of these approaches are more cutting-edge than that of Raphael Saadiq, who merged hip-hop's programmed approach with his old-school R&B roots to create a whole new rhythm section style.

Offers Glenn Standridge, one half of Saadiq's production team: “When we're creating tracks, everyone sort of plays to their own beat, with everything revolving around Raphael's bass guitar – so it has that loose, hip-hop quality of samples layered together. The result is a best-of-both-worlds scenario that creates a feel all its own.”

Probably the best-known examples of Saadiq's postmodern potion are his groove-breaking collaborations with neo-soul crooner D'Angelo, and Lucy Pearl.

Guitar was actually the first instrument Saadiq (born Raphael Wiggins) played in his native Oakland, California. After hearing James Jamerson's upright on Marvin Gaye's How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You), he asked for an Orlando Jazz Bass copy at age seven. With a quick ear, he soon graduated from jamming with family and friends to having his pals ask if he could sit in with them at clubs.

Paying gigs soon followed, with days spent playing trombone in the junior high school jazz band and bass in U.C. Berkeley's Youth Music Program. “I was constantly playing in all kinds of settings,” Saadiq told Bass Player. “I'd go into coffee houses and just improvise grooves behind rappers or poetry readings.”

In the mid 1980s, while the 18-year-old Saadiq was putting together demos with his brother D'wayne Wiggins and cousin Timothy Christian Riley (for what would eventually become Tony! Toni! Toné!), a friend called to tell him Sheila E. was coming to the Bay Area to audition singing bassists for her touring band. Saadiq beat out 40 other hopefuls, and a month later he was opening for Prince.

In 1988, the “Tonys” were signed, and Saadiq began his own musical quest.

Saadiq’s prized 1962 Fender Precision put the vintage in his 2002 solo debut, Instant Vintage, which also featured hip-hop heroes D'Angelo, Angie Stone, and the Tower Of Power Horns.

“I've never heard another bass guitar like it,” marveled Glenn Standridge, who with partner Bobby Ozuna makes up Saadiq’s production team of Jake & the Phatman. “Between the foam under the bridge cover and the old Rotosound strings, it's so dead you can't even play it live.

“We tried at one soundcheck – you couldn't even hear a tone, and there was no pop at all. But in the studio, with Raphael's touch, it's a killer!”

Elsewhere, Saadiq played his '90s Fender Jazz, an '80s Ibanez Musician on Charlie Ray, and his Ransom 5-string “flag bass” on Be Here.

His studio amp was an SWR Silverado Special combo. His outboard effects included a Big Briar MF-101 Moogerfooger Lowpass Filter, a ProCo Rat distortion pedal, and a Dunlop Cry Baby Bass Wah.

The following interview from the Bass Player archives took place in 2002.

What are your reflections on Lucy Pearl?

“That project got me back in touch with my goals after having taken a long break from music. But it was a group situation, and sometimes when you pass the ball to people they don't finish the shot, so you realise you should have taken the shot in the first place. In retrospect, it was a helpful step toward going solo and recording Instant Vintage, which is something I should have done sooner.”

One of your trademarks is a super-laid-back-feel.

“I don't have a name for it; it's sort of like ghosting or shadowing the snare drum. I'm locking with the drums, but a step behind, kind of sneaking up on them. You hear the snare hit and then I ghost or echo that. But for it to work, the drummer has to be aware of what I'm doing, and stay right in the middle of the beat, to keep that rubber-band-like tension.”

“It's hard to learn, especially for people who always play on top, but you could practice it by setting up a drum loop with a two and four snare. First play a quarter-note or eighth-note pattern that locks with the loop, and then gradually pull back until you're ghosting the snare by playing a split-second after it hits.”

Does this approach have hip-hop roots?

“It came about when D'Angelo and I first played together. We just started doing it, and the more we laid back, the more we'd laugh. That's the way D sings and plays, but it's something we both felt naturally; I don't think he did it with anyone else. When he got his road band together, he found Pino Palladino and Ahmir Thompson who could do it well, but they're some of the few who can.”

On Charlie Ray you apply what you call “the grease.” What is that?

“I get it with my thumb plucks; it's when I don't play any real pitches – just dead notes with a lot of percolating in between rhythms. I use it on other tracks, but it's hard to hear at times. It's sort of like what Larry Graham and Prince do on bass. People think Larry used left-hand pats, but he pretty much did everything with his thumb, using up- and downstrokes.”

What was your concept for Instant Vintage?

“I wanted to have a record that entertains, and would appeal to a wide array of listeners without losing the integrity of what I learned as a musician. I tried to make every song a bit different from the next, and I wanted each one to feel like a single – along the lines of what Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones did with Off the Wall, where every song had an impact.”

Throughout the album, your bass is the main voice.

“It's the centerpiece. When I record, I almost always put down the drums and guitar first and then the bass. I like doing the bass and vocals together because they feed off each other; I get my vocal part from the bass and vice versa. I'll give the bass its own space and then sing around that, like on Body Parts, so each one stands out as a melody or they call and answer with each other.”

Jake & the Phatman say your “independent parts” approach is a key to your hybrid sound.

“I play a lot of everything on the record – bass, some guitar, a bit of keyboards, plus the vocals – so as a kind of one-man band I have to do it that way. When we put it all together, it can sound like everything is sampled because my parts aren't in perfect time.

“I also enjoy playing in a different pocket space than the drums, like on Skyy, Can You Feel Me. Raymon Murray came up with a drum groove, and then I added a bass part that's completely counter to it.”

Sonically, you tend to EQ and place the bass differently from track to track.

“How it sounds and where it sits is a big part of the feel, aside from notes and phrasing. Sometimes I pan the bass front and center, and sometimes it's to the left. Likewise, at times I'll go for rumbling, earthy lows, or if I'm doing a lot of muting we'll have less lows and more mids. It's always different.”

Can you describe your techniques?

“I learned to slap first, because as a kid I didn't have the forearm strength to finger-pluck. I don't slap much anymore because it's not the thing right now. I do a lot of what I call thumb-plucking: holding my thumb parallel to the strings, I use the meat of my thumb on the downstroke and top side of my nail on the upstroke. I can mute to varying degrees with my fingers or palm.”

What did you learn while playing live with Prince?

“Mainly, how to play all night long, and also the power of simplicity. One night we were playing funk in E, and he went over and picked up my bass – but it was tuned to Eb, so he just found one note that worked, and he stayed on it the entire song and drove the groove home.”

Prince's Vox HDC-77 has become the latest guitar from the Purple Rain hitmaker's sizable collection to make its way to auction. The “blackburst”-finished guitar is expected to fetch up to £300,000 ($383,000), just months after Prince's iconic Cloud 3 sold for an eye-watering $910,000.

The VOX HDC-77 was extensively stage-played, most famously during Prince's HitNRun tour across the UK, US & Canada in 2014 and 2015 – it would be his final electric tour (its followup, the Piano & a Microphone Tour, ended shortly before he passed away in April 2016).

His last documented use of the semi-hollow guitar was during his performance for Barack Obama at the White House in June 2015.

During this time, Prince was touring with 3rdeyegirl, comprising Donna Grantis (guitar), Ida Nielsen (bass), and Hannah Welton (drums), who served as his backing band.

His former bandmates are inextricably linked to this guitar's story. In 2019, Nielson confirmed that she was the one who convinced Prince to try Vox guitars, tweeting, “I bought one for me, and then he liked it so much that I got one for him too.”

Moreover, until this year, it was part of Grantis' private collection, and according to Sotheby's, the instrument “hasn't been played since Prince last performed with it.”

In an interview with Guitar World, Grantis talked about her experience gigging with Prince. “He taught me about the funk vocabulary. He taught me about sounds,” she said.

“He taught me about articulation and attitude and power and tones. Prince was an incredible inspiration. Whether we were jamming at Paisley Park or playing onstage at the Superdome, I would just be blown away all the time.”

The blackburst is not the only HDC-77 Prince used during this era. He also owned an ivory/white version with a custom psychedelic pattern on the body, which matched the ’70s funk rock-inspired music he was exploring during that time.

Launched in 2010, the HDC-77 features a distinctive contoured body, while a three-position switch allows its CoAxe pickups to produce single-coil, P-90 or humbucker tones.

This electric guitar joins Sotheby's inaugural Pop Culture auction, which aims to bring together iconic artifacts from the music, film, and entertainment worlds. A trio of Noel Gallagher’s guitars and a Steinway grand piano that sat in Studio 3 at Abbey Road Studios are also part of the auction.

Online bidding takes place between August 29 and September 12, with a dedicated in-person exhibition at London's New Bond Street galleries starting on September 9. For more information about the Prince guitar and Pop Culture, visit Sotheby's.

Prince's iconic Cloud 3 electric guitar has returned to auction after it was last sold almost 20 years ago. The yellow Cloud 3 was one of Prince's centerpiece instruments, after being used on stage at the height of his stardom in the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, including during the Purple Rain, Parade, Sign of the Times, Lovesexy, and Diamonds & Pearls tours.

Christie previously sold Prince's Cloud 3 for £4,200 (around $8,114 at the time) in 2005 and on eBay for less than its original listing of £59,000 (approx $113,983). The main reason for this low price, however, was that it was not yet verified as Prince's original instrument.

Auction house Julien’s verified Cloud 3’s authenticity by conducting a CT scan and interviewing Dave Rusan, the luthier who created the guitar. Cloud 3 is now expected to fetch between $400,000 and $600,000 at the upcoming auction this May.

Julien's was previously responsible for selling some of Prince's most prized Cloud guitars, including his yellow Cloud ($225,000), his “Blue Angel” Cloud 2 ($563,500), and his blue teal Cloud, which set the world record for the most expensive Prince guitar sold at auction when it went for an eye-watering $700,000.

“Julien’s Auctions has laid the groundwork for the return of Prince’s Cloud 3 guitar, exemplified by our longstanding commitment to honoring his legacy,” said David Goodman, CEO of Julien’s Auctions.

“Our company proudly stands by our proven track record in sourcing and presenting instruments of unparalleled historical significance, and Prince’s Cloud 3 now joins this esteemed category.”

In an interview with Guitar.com, luthier Dave Rusan explained the process of creating the iconic Cloud guitars for The Artist:

“He said to take the bass as a starting point. It’s got to be white, it has to have gold parts, he already knew he liked EMG pickups, so it had to have those, he said it had to have spades on the fingerboard. A lot of people think they’re dots, but they’re actually little spades. He wanted one on the truss rod cover.

“Prince was a guy who had to have guitars that would perform well for him, but it was all part of his big plan – his image was a big deal. He’s not a guy who would sit around and polish his guitars or even think that much about them – they were tools. He was so multi-faceted – he was much more than just a guitar hero.”

Prince's Cloud 3 joins the Music Icons exhibition tour of iconic guitars. It includes Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson's “Workhorse” 1965 Fender Telecaster, John Lennon's Framus 12-string Hootenanny acoustic guitar, Randy Bachman's collection, and Bono's “Irish Falcon” Gretsch G6136i.

The exhibition is open to the public between May 15 and 18 at the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, and May 22-28 at Times Square’s Hard Rock Cafe. The auction will then take place on May 29 and 30.

For more information about Music Icons, visit Julien's.

Ask Ida Nielsen how she got started on the bass guitar and it’s the usual story – up to a point, anyway. “I grew up in the countryside in Denmark,” she told BP. “I played with a bunch of bands and in 2008 I released my first solo album, Marmalade: a funk album with a lot of bass guitar on it. That brought me a lot of attention, so I started doing a lot of clinics and I started working with TC Electronic. I recorded a lot of videos for them, which went on YouTube around 2010 – and that was how Prince found me.”

Prince, eh? Fans of the great man, and there are millions, will not be surprised to hear that on receiving a phone call from Minneapolis, Nielsen thought it was a prank. “I got a call from his manager, but I couldn’t really hear what she was saying. I did hear her say the name Prince, but I thought it was a joke! She invited me to Paisley Park for a jam and I said ‘Sure!’ I didn’t hear anything for two weeks, so I thought that was it until I finally got another call – and three months later I was on tour with Prince.”

“There was a lot of stuff to remember, because he liked to change things up and not always stick to what’s on the set list, so I had a lot of different songs to learn in a short time, that was the hardest part of it. It wasn’t like a normal bass gig where you have 30 songs: I had to learn 300! That took a lot of time.” We must have our hearing checked: we thought she said 300 songs… “It was actually more than 300 songs, because I was learning more as we went along.”

Back up a moment. When you show up at Prince’s near-mythical studio, Paisley Park, clutching a bass guitar, you presumably also do some homework beforehand. Did Prince ask Nielsen to learn some tunes before coming over? “I got an email the night before I left for Minneapolis, with two songs that I had to learn. They were Dreamer and Funk, which I’m not sure are album tracks. I knew other songs too, of course, because I’ve always loved Prince: I listened to a bunch of stuff to really prepare for that first time.”

What was it actually like, standing right there with Prince, jamming the funk? “He was super sweet when I first got there, because I was nervous. He asked me which kind of basses I had and stuff liked that, to help me relax and get into nerd mode. After a few minutes it was cool and we started jamming.”

What gear did Nielsen use to deliver the bass notes? “I played a Sandberg Masterpiece. And I only played one bass with Prince because there’s no time to change between songs. I basically play standard tuning, but occasionally I’ll drop the E string to a D.” And the rest of the chain? “I used a Crybaby bass wah, an envelope filter, two octavers that each play an octave up and an octave down. TC Electronic’s Polytune and a bass booster.”

The music on Prince’s albums with Nielsen, and indeed in his previous releases going as far back as the late 1970s, is heavily funk-indebted – nirvana for a bass player, we reckon. Nielsen agrees: “I love playing funk bass, but it depends who you’re playing with and what kind of music it is. You have to adapt your playing. There are so many great players who can do that, and I admire each of them for their different thing. There’s Marcus Miller, Larry Graham, Meshell Ndegeocello, Bootsy Collins, Victor Wooten – all those guys. And there’s Prince too!”

Finally, where does Nielsen go from here? Once you’ve been Prince’s bass player, there’s no higher place to go we reckon. “Well, Prince was number one on the list of people I wanted to play with, so it was amazing being with him. He gave his whole heart and soul to the music, which made you want to do that too. No concert was the same, because he always switched up the set list. Playing with him gave me an amazing feeling that I’ve never felt with any other musician. With Prince, you were always in the moment.”

Having held the bass chair with Prince for five years, Josh Dunham needs no introduction as one of the bass guitar world’s top groove players.  “Playing your part was important,’ said Dunham of his role with Prince, “and having the chops and stuff was cool, but with the Prince gig you really had to lay a groove and play in the pocket.”

It was while playing with Prince that Dunham learnt a valuable lesson regarding when to play and when not to play: “Prince was very specific about what he wanted, especially on his hit songs, but everyone got a chance to shine. He would turn around, point to you and say, ‘Go!’”

Dunham’s role with Prince ranged from working with him on new material to learning his huge catalog of songs. “I once asked him if he would show me some stuff on bass, and he said no! He just walked out! But then he would come to rehearsal and say, ‘Let me see the bass,’ and that would be his way of sharing his approach to playing those basslines. One time he showed me this groove where he was playing one note, with his thumb. It was so funky. Just that one note!”

Josh’s interest in music started when he was 12 years old. “I played drums at the church where my dad was a deacon, but there was always a constant rotation between the other drummers, which didn’t give me much playing time, so my attention shifted to the bass. I spent a lot of time practising with Eric Elder, Chris Black and Jerlando Johnson and listening to players like Barry Jackson, Andrew Gouche, Jimmy Neuble and Jaco Pastorius. I would sit on the porch and play for my friends or just practise with VHS videos and cassette tapes.”

So what five albums does Dunham chart among those that shaped his bass style?

1. Thomas Whitfield - Alive And Satisfied (1992)

"Growing up in church exposed me to a lot of gospel music. Because my dad was a deacon, he was very strict about my two brothers and I only listening to gospel music. I would sneak in the Alive And Satisfied album and play along with it all day. It made me more aware of the importance of each instrument." 

2. The Canton Spirituals - Live In Memphis (1993)

"I love the Canton Spirituals because of the ‘hump’ that their music has. When I heard it I couldn’t sit still because of the way the bass and drums would lock together and sound like one movement. That was my first time I had heard a piece of music build before someone saying, ‘Break it down!’ I thought it was so cool the way they would use the dynamics."

3. Al Green - Tokyo Live (1981)

"Al Green’s music has more of a laid-back and relaxed style. It’s groovy but still soulful. I could hear all his energy and intensity, and that really made me focus on playing the basslines with more purpose to really complement the style regardless of the tempo. He always had the audience’s attention and such a command over the band. A certain movement or body gesture could signal the horns or the singers to come in. To me, he was the epitome of music."

4. Jaco Pastorius - Jaco Pastorius (1976)

"Wow! When I heard Jaco I was amazed. I had never heard anyone approach the bass the way he did. His style was more staccato and his rhythmic concepts seemed endless. He was the first person that I heard on a fretless bass that had a mid-range tone. Even now I'm inspired by how well he knew his instrument."

5. Maceo Parker - Made By Maceo (2003)

"Before I got this album, I actually heard Maceo play this song Off The Hook live, and man it was funky! The band grooved so hard and it was just so cool. I actually got a chance to play it with him on a show with Prince, and Maceo had such a command over the audience. You could see the influence of James Brown. It was just great."

Dunham's 2010 solo album, Reinvigorate, is available to buy on Amazon.

In this lesson, we’re looking at pop-funk. Generally seen as popular, radio-friendly music, pop-funk is a pretty wide sub-genre, ranging from classic Michael Jackson to the output of modern players such as Cory Wong – part of a new breed of guitarists who skilfully blend old-school funk with other genres such as hip-hop, gospel and jazz. So here we’ll look at ideas from seven pop-funk players. 

David Williams is one of the most important funk guitarists, yet remains largely unknown. His  intricate lines have graced some of the biggest ever hits, including Rock With You, Billie Jean and Thriller.

During an era filled with hair-metal and shred, Williams extolled the virtues of the ‘rhythm solo’, as exemplified in his short lead break in Billie Jean. This characteristic style saw him as the most sought-after session guitarists of the ’80s and ’90s.

The other guitarists here surely drew inspiration from Williams’ playing, so here’s where we’ll start our lesson.

Example 1. David Williams

In this Williams-style riff,  precise syncopation and picking technique are required throughout, with a couple of phrases that start on the offbeat 1/16th upstroke. This B major based riff uses an Em7 chord borrowed from the parallel key of B minor.

When jumping between non diatonic chords, you need to use the appropriate notes. Here it means a slight tweak in Bar 4; we’re using a D note derived from B natural minor (B-C#-D-E-F#-G-A) for the Em7 section.

Example 2. Paul Jackson Jr.

Paul Jackson Jnr was one of the most prolific LA session guitarists of the ’70s-’90s, performing alongside Michael Jackson, The Temptations, Luther Vandross, Bobby Womack, The Pointer Sisters, Chicago and Whitney Houston.

His credits are truly astonishing, and extend beyond the classic session player era into the modern day with artists such as Daft Punk and The Weeknd. 

This example centres around an Am11 shape that’s played with the third and fourth fingers (the fourth finger should be barred over the top two strings).

This shape is derived from a concept known as quartal harmony, where 4ths are stacked on top of each other to create a slightly ambiguous, suspended sound that’s great for improvising in many styles including funk.

Example 3. Prince

Prince is one of the world’s most iconic artists who shouldn’t need any introduction. He helped to pioneer the Minneapolis Sound in the late ’70s, a funk-rock sub-genre that mixed in elements of new wave and synth pop. Even through the artistic changes in his career, there’s an identifiable funk undercurrent on every single album. 

The minor 11 shape used in the previous riff features heavily in this example. Most of the ideas are based around the closed A minor pentatonic shape in 5th position, but the extra major 6th (F#) provides that classic Prince twist, especially at the end of bar 4.

Example 4. John Frusciante

The Red Hot Chili Peppers emerged from the funk-rock revival of the ’90s, blending funk with aggressive rock to produce a punk-funk-rock sound. Unlike most of the guitarists here, John Frusciante wasn’t well-schooled in the ways of funk before joining the band. 

Although he was a fan of P-funk’s Eddie Hazel, his main influences were Page, Beck, Hendrix and Zappa. He learned most of his groove and funk style from emulating the playing the Chilis’ late guitarist, Hillel Slovak. 

This groove is based on a simple I-V7 (Em-B7) chord progression, but uses a D#dim7 chord as a great substitute for B7. This jazzy diminished 7th substitution is built on the 3rd degree of the V7 chord and creates a B7b9 sound. The D# also helps the chord resolve really well to the following one.

Example 5. Adam Smirnoff (Lettuce)

Lettuce have been at the forefront of modern, largely instrumental funk ever since their debut album Outta Here in 2002, with guitarists Adam Smirnoff and Eric Krasno providing the backbone to the Boston funk collective. 

Smirnoff effortlessly blends gospel, soul and dub ideas in his funk playing, and this groove features all these styles in quick succession. 

The palm-muted triplet in bar 4 is a typical reggae/dub style rhythm and sounds great against the straight eighth rhythm in the background. It should create the feeling of ‘putting on the brakes’ and is an excellent way to create rhythmic interest. 

Example 6. Mark Lettieri (Snarky Puppy)

Mark Lettieri started out in the R&B and gospel scene of the Dallas, Fort Worth area of Texas, which eventually led to him joining the instrumental jazz funk group Snarky Puppy. In 2018, Lettieri joined up with The Fearless Flyers, featuring Cory Wong and Joe Dart of Vulfpeck on guitar and bass. Lettieri often uses dextrous fingerstyle, combined with gospel chord chops. 

This groove borrows the slap technique of bass and converts it to the more guitar-orientated rest slap denoted by ‘RS’. The picking hand naturally comes to rest on the strings, rather than executing an overt bass-style slap. 

All of the ghost notes (shown by an X in brackets) and rest slap indications use this technique with varying degrees of force, and adding the thumb will accentuate the percussive sound.

Example 7. Cory Wong

Cory Wong, from the Vulfpeck and Fearless Flyers stable, has released several solo albums and collaborated with Dirty Loops. His early influences include David Williams, Paul Jackson Jnr, and Nile Rodgers, which can be seen in his particularly rubbery, loose picking hand wrist. 

This riff uses the bass guitar ‘pat’ technique (lightly patting the fretting-hand fingers on the strings, as opposed to slapping them, but without fretting specific notes, and is best executed with several flat fingers to avoid this). 

It also intersperses some traditional funk chord fragments with improvised double-stops. The lick in bar 4 can be viewed through the lens of a basic E major pentatonic scale shape, slightly tweaked to include the D note from E Mixolydian for a funky E7 sound.

It would be fair to say that the majority of bass guitar greats have all used a 4-string for their entire career without ever touching a 5-string. “I guess there’s a place for five strings, but not in what I do,” Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan told us. “Four strings is gonna keep me busy for the rest of my life, you know?” 

Some might well argue that four strings is all you need, but those people clearly haven't experienced the sheer joy of being able to hit those super low notes. Just ask Larry Graham, who’s thumb-thumping basslines once anchored the rhythm section with Sly & The Family Stone, expanding on the possibilities for bass players with his new-fangled slap-bass technique. 

Despite rarely straying far from his 4-string Moon bass, nicknamed Sunshine, Graham also has a matching 5-string, Moonshine. “I actually love using a 5-string bass,” he says. “Not for live shows, but I've used it on records and playing with other artists like Prince or Chaka Khan."

"When I play live I’m on autopilot," he says. "My bass is just another extension of my body – but I’m not thinking about it. I’m thinking more of the crowd, entertaining, singing and doing a few moves here and there. If you add the 5th string, I would have to think more about what I’m doing, and then I’m not just focussed on entertaining. So it really depends on what hat I’m wearing.”

When Larry designed his Moon Jazz bass, what refinements did he incorporate into the design? “Mostly the DI clip, the forward-angled pickup and the original wireless setup,” he tells us. “When I first went to Moon, their representative showed me the different things they were capable of building. I had things in my head that I liked from Jazz Basses and MusicMan and G&L Basses, so I mixed up all of that, and that’s what we came up with.”

Okay, Larry – what was it actually like on the inside of Sly & the Family Stone? “It was like a ‘family affair’, really. We did a lot of the same things together. We bought motorcycles together. We had the tallest, the meanest, the fastest Harleys. We got into cars together. We had ’55 and ’57 Thunderbirds, real classics. It was like a family, and I think that carried over into the feel of the music and of the times.”

Visit larrygraham.com for more info. If you are thinking about getting yourself a 4-string or a 5-string bass guitar, check out our buyer’s guide.