The guitars used by Prince on Purple Rain
Prince is one of the most important artists of his era, and a guitar player with few peers. He was also an artist that worked a pace that very few could hope to keep up with him, and with a tendency to chop and change his gear whenever the mood struck. This means that it’s proved fiendishly tricky to exactly pinpoint the exact gear he was using on a song – just because he was pictured using a certain guitar or amp in one studio moment doesn’t mean that he didn’t switch it up a few minutes later to get the immortal take. As a result we’re reliant on the memories of the musicians and engineers who worked with him through his often herculean sessions.
All this is to say that we’re doing our very best to track down the gear that was most likely used on this most iconic Prince album, Purple Rain, but saying any of this stuff with 100% certainty is almost impossible 40 years later.
READ MORE: The story of Prince’s original Cloud Guitar, as told by the man who built it
Purple Rain the album was more of a soundtrack to the film that accompanied it. According to director Albert Magnoli, Prince confronted his manager at the time, Robert Cavallo, and told him he would not renew his contract with him unless he got to star in a studio film. But every studio they pitched the idea to turned him down, so Cavallo decided to produce the film himself. Allegedly Warner Bros showed some interest, but only if they replace Prince with John Travolta in the film.
The film’s soundtrack ended up being Prince’s sixth studio album, released in 1984. It was recorded between July 1983 and March 1984 at four studios: two in Minnesota, one in New York, and one in Los Angeles. Three songs on the record, I Would Die 4 U, Baby I’m A Star and the title track were recorded at the historic local music venue First Avenue in Minneapolis. Of course, overdubs were done on all three songs afterward.
Prince performing with a Cloud Guitar during the Purple Rain Tour in Michigan, 1984. Image: Ross Marino/Getty Images
The Cloud Guitars
Prince was a unique artist, and he used unique instruments, often custom-made throughout his career. The first and most iconic of them is the Cloud Guitar he was seen playing in the film during the performance of Purple Rain. The Cloud Guitar was built by a local luthier named Dave Rusan, who was working at Knut-Koupee Music in Minneapolis. In fact, he built three for the film and ensuing tour.
These guitars were beautifully ornate with hand-carved scrolls. The design was loosely based on a bass guitar that Prince acquired in 1976 from a New York luthier named Jeff Levin. But the guitar was much more than just a movie prop; it had to perform as well.
Other than the bass, Rusan received little help in the design process. As he told Guitar.com in 2021, the guidance from Prince was pretty basic:
“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.”
The guitar was made of rock maple and featured a neck-through construction. As Prince instructed, it was painted in white nitrocellulose by a budding boutique guitar company called Schecter. It features a Gibson-scale [24.75 inches] with a 13-degree angle on the headstock, a 12-inch fretboard radius, a brass nut, a Schaller 457 Bridge, and the EMG pickups that Prince preferred: an SA model in the neck, and an 81 humbucker in the bridge.
The original three Cloud Guitars went through several re-paintings. One resides in the Smithsonian (now finished in yellow), and one now resides at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, another was sold at auction for $800,000 back in June. Following Prince’s death, the Paisley Park estate licensed Schecter to make a production version of the Cloud Guitar, and got into a legal dispute with Rusan over the hand-made replicas of the iconic design that he produced at his shop in Minneapolis. Thankfully that situation is now resolved and Rusan continues to produce his Cloud replicas to this day.
Prince performing with a Hohner Madcat during the Purple Rain Tour in Michigan, 1984. Image: Ross Marino/Getty Images
Hohner MadCat
Another guitar that saw use on Purple Rain was Prince’s trusty Hohner MadCat, which was a high-quality Telecaster copy made by the German company Hohner in Japan. He got the guitar sometime in the late 70s. The pickups have been swapped out a few times over the years but were most likely stock at the time of the recording. The MadCat is probably the guitar associated with Prince the most (aside from the Cloud, of course).
Famed luthier Roger Sadowsky made six copies of the MadCat for the Purple Rain Tour which began in November of 1984. Two of the copies featured some unique features, as Sadowsky explained in a 2020 Ultimate Guitar interview:
“In the Purple Rain movie, there is a scene where he climbs to the top of a huge mountain of speakers, grabs a guitar and masturbates the neck until the guitar ejaculates onto the audience. The guitar was a prop and connected to a tank of Ivory Liquid off-stage. Prince wanted a fully playable guitar that could also ejaculate. I ran copper tubing along the side of the truss rod, and it terminated at the tip of the headstock. On the body side, it terminated in a compartment we routed in the back so they could install their solenoid valve that connected to the tank of Ivory Liquid. I called these two guitars the Ejacucasters!”
Prince and Wendy Melvoin performing. Image: Ross Marino/Getty Images
Other guitars and gear
Of course, Prince wasn’t the only person playing guitar on Purple Rain; the album also featured the guitar work of Wendy Melvoin, who had joined the band The Revolution after the departure of Dez Dickerson after the 1999 tour – she was only 19 at the time but a fantastically talented guitarist in the scene. According to guitarcloud.org, Wendy used a Rickenbacker 330 and one of Sadowsky’s MadCat copies for the Purple Rain Tour.
Both Wendy and Prince were playing through Mesa Boogie Mark II amplifiers and Bag End D12-M Cabinets at the time of Purple Rain and those are the amplifiers that most likely comprised the basis for amp tones on the record. Prince was said to have been using BOSS effects almost exclusively during that era, including the VB-2 Vibrato, OC-2 Octave, BF-2 Flanger, DM-2 Delay, and SD-1 Super Overdrive, along with a Dunlop Crybaby Wah. Melvoin was said to have been using a BOSS CS-1 Compressor, a TC Electronic Booster+, and MXR Micro Amp, a CE-1 Chorus, and a DM-2 Delay, along with a Dunlop Crybaby Wah.
The legacy of Purple Rain is unquestionable. It has gone platinum thirteen times (so far) and as we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the album there are various limited editions of the film and album on the shelves, and even a Broadway adaptation coming in 2025.
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