I often wonder if Prince has used a "Ghost Writer" in the past to create some of his classic music. When I say "Ghost Writer", I mean somebody we has helped to create some of his music that never got credit for their work. His music has changed so much over the past 5-6 years. I thought maybe he had a Ghost Writer or a Music Engineer that he had parted ways with recently. I thought this maybe a possibility why his music has changed so much.

Forget all that Bullshit about him finding himself musically and spiritually and all that shit! The music just isn't the same.

You could be a great music writer but if you have a shitty music engineer, your music is still going to be shitty!

Has he always worked with the same Music Engineers throughout his Career?

Any comments from the org?

oke, I do'nt know if he had a music engineer. I thought he always write down his own words.What I do know is that in 2002 it was the last time he played in Europa and sinds that time he's changed.

People often only think about performers, writers, and producers. I think a good music engineer in the studio is an important aspect of the musician's music.

Question:I would assume that most Producers are not Music engineers?

Prince has produced his own music from day one and ultimately the sound is defined by him. Occasionally he has worked with others and not been properly forthcoming about their contributions; but in the vast size of his catalogue those occasions are relatively small. His sound has changed over the years because he's changed and constantly challenged himself. I would say that in recent years a lot of his studio tracks have a similar sound, as though he has finally settled on a 'safe' set-up and way of working, and actually I wish someone would go in and shake up his recording process a bit and force him to become experimental like he used to be.

Prince has had many music engineers throughout his career. Whether or not they have actually influenced Prince's sound through those times is arguable. The most famous was Susan Rogers who worked with him through 83-88. Her comments from an interview over at Housequake provide an interesting insight into what being a sound engineer for Prince entails:

In 1983, I heard that Prince was looking for an audio technician to maintain his home studio and I immediately contacted his management for an interview. Prince was my favorite artist ever since the "For You" album and the opportunity was a dream come true. His management hired me and in August, 1983, I moved to Minnesota and got started by installing a new console in his home studio (his purple house on Kiowa Trail), and did some repairs on his tape machine. Next thing I knew, I was in the engineering chair.

Prince needed an all-around engineer, one who could repair and use his equipment. I had to learn very quickly what sounds he liked but I was helped by a member of The Time, Jesse Johnson, who taught me how Prince liked the kick drum to sound, what reverb he liked on his vocal, what mics he used, etc. By the time Prince came home from LA (he was working on the Purple Rain movie), I knew enough to be of great use to him in the studio.

I was not a producer at that time. Prince produced and engineered his own albums, and I assisted him by setting everything up and keeping the equipment working. I would prepare the session by having the console and tape machine and his musical instruments ready to go, so all he had to do was sit down and record. I set the reverbs and outboard gear to the settings he preferred and recorded his band members when he asked me to.

I was also responsible for doing many of the live recordings we did on tour at that time as well as moving his recording equipment to new rehearsal spaces (we recorded his band rehearsals) and providing audio technical assistance on movies and videos. I also helped the design team of Paisley Park Studios and made decisions on the purchase of new recording gear.

Q:The albums with The Revolution (Purple Rain, Around The World In A Day and Parade) were presented as group efforts. Was it really that way or was most of the work done by Prince himself?

Well, they were not group efforts in the writing or arrangements but each band member contributed his own sound on many of the tracks. Some were performed entirely by Prince while others were recorded at rehearsals, with Prince leading the direction and each musician adding his own part. Prince would include what he liked of their ideas. In nearly every case, Wendy and Lisa were around to provide backing vocals and input.

Another engineer giving an insight into working with Prince is David Z:

In 1986, Prince was working at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. Engineer David Z, a staffer at Prince's Paisley Park Studios in Minneapolis, remembers getting a call from Prince, asking him to come out for a weekend of work. “I packed three days' worth of clothes and went,” recalls Z. “When I got there, I went in and saw Prince in Studio C, and he told me I would be working in Studio B to produce a new group he had signed [to his Paisley Park label] called Maserati. Then he says, ‘You'll probably be here about a month.’ So I went out and bought more clothes.”

“Kiss” was originally intended for Maserati and came into the studio in the form of one verse and a chorus, on a cassette tape, written, sung and played on an acoustic guitar by Prince, who assured Z that the rest of the song would be forthcoming. It wasn't an auspicious start. “The song sounded like a folk song that Stephen Stills might have done,” Z recalls. “I didn't quite know what to do with it and neither did the group.”

Z began in his usual manner by creating a beat on a Linn 9000 drum machine. “The groove began to get complex, especially the hi-hat pattern,” he says. “I ran the hat through a delay unit, set about 150 milliseconds, printed that to tape and printed the original hat to another track and then alternated between ‘source’ and ‘blend’ on the delay unit, recording those passes. It created a pretty cool rhythm that was constantly changing in tone and complexity but was still steady. Then I played some guitar chords and gated them through a Kepex unit and used that to trigger various combinations of the hi-hat tracks. That gave us the basic rhythm groove for the song.”

Session bassist Mark Brown laid down a bass part, and one of the members of Maserati recorded a piano part that Z says he copped from an old Bo Diddley song called “Hey, Man.” The group's singer put down a lead vocal track an octave lower than Prince's original tenor, and some background vocal parts were invented, based on some ideas Z says he remembered from Brenda Lee's “Sweet Nothings.” “This is what we had at the end of the first couple of days,” Z says with a sigh. “We were trying to build a song out of nothing, piece by piece. It was just a collection of ideas built around the idea of a song that wasn't finished yet. We didn't know where it was going. We were getting a little frustrated, we were exhausted, so we all went home for the night.”

That, however, would prove to be enough. At least for Prince. When Z returned to the studio the next day, he found Prince waiting for him. Sometime that morning, The Artist had apparently come into the studio, asked an assistant to put the track up and then recorded his own vocal and electric guitar part. Z was stunned.

“I asked him what was going on. He said to me, ‘This is too good for you guys. I'm taking it back.’” From that moment on, “Kiss” became a Prince record. Z remained with him in the studio as Prince took what sparse elements there already were on the track and made it even more minimalist. “He said, ‘We don't need this,’ and pulled the bass off,” Z says. The low end was filled up instead by using a classic Prince trick: running the kick drum through an AMS 16 reverb unit's reverse tube program. “It fills up the bottom so much you really don't miss the bass part, especially if you only use it on the first downbeat,” says Z. The hi-hat track was similarly dispatched, leaving only nine tracks of instruments and vocals on the record, which certainly made it easier to mix. Z recalls, only half jokingly, that the mix, which was done on an API console, took about five minutes.

Prince's vocals had been recorded using a Sennheiser 441 microphone. According to Z, Prince's preference for that particular mic stems from a conversation he had with singer Stevie Nicks, who had suggested it to him. “There's a roll-off on that microphone that actually ends up boosting the high end, spiking it around 3 kHz,” Z explains. “It also has good directionality; Prince liked to sing in the control room, so he would set it up on a stand right by the console. When he wanted to sing, he would just put on headphones. He also liked doing his own punches, too.”

The track was left as ambiently dry as it was elementally sparse. In the mix, Z says the starkness of the track actually made him a little uneasy. “I reached over and snuck in a little bit of the piano back in,” he says. A small amount of tape delay was also put on the guitar track. “Otherwise, the mix was just a matter of Prince pulling back and turning off faders. It's more than the bass that you're not hearing on that track.”

Z says he recalls being alternately fascinated and excited by this turn of events. Maserati was to be his first full production for Prince's company. (Z had recorded parts of records for Prince in the past, as well as having recorded his original demos in Minneapolis and being the engineer at the live benefit recording that ultimately became Purple Rain.) In the course of an evening, while he had been sleeping, he was now Prince's co-producer for at least one track. In addition, the deletion of the bass was stirring. It added an element of danger, a frisson to the record-making process.

oo, ooo,
I got it, I got it....
how about this.....?

And if de-elevator tries to bring u down,
go crazy....punch a higher floor!

^
good one!