Prince was 25 years old when he made Purple Rain. It’s my favorite album of all time. He was a virtuosic musician who trained from a very early age, but he was entirely self-taught as engineer who produced his own records. Without formal training, he broke many rules that made his music the best.
Here are my top 3.
1. He recorded the title track live in a club
The version of "Purple Rain" you know was cut live on August 3, 1983, at a benefit show at First Avenue in Minneapolis. It was the first time Prince played the song for an audience, and Wendy Melvoin's first show with the Revolution. A remote truck sat outside, and the basic tracks for "I Would Die 4 U" and "Baby I'm a Star" came from the same night.
In the studio engineer David Z has said the wireless bass didn't record cleanly, so Prince replaced it later at Sunset Sound, along with vocal and guitar overdubs, and trimmed the song from roughly fourteen minutes to nine.
The crowd, it turns out made no sound whatsoever, and the cheering you hear in the film was reportedly borrowed from a Vikings game.
The lesson: if you want more energy, capture a live performance, then fix what needs fixing later. I like using limitations in mixing, and forcing yourself to get it all in one take is a great way to do that.
2. He treated the drum machine like a cymbal
The Linn LM-1 is all over this record. It created what I believe is a signature sound for Price, the knock. Prince took a LM-1 rim shot sample and detuned it beyond the point of recognition. You can hear this most obviously on “When Doves Cry.”
The lesson: you can use presets anywhere you want, but it’s more fun to warp them and put them in places they shouldn’t go.
3. He took whole instruments, like the bass, out of the song in post-production
"When Doves Cry" was written late, after the rest of the album was finished, and cut at Sunset Sound in one long session in early March 1984. Prince played everything. On the last night of mixing, as engineer Peggy McCreary tells it, he started stripping parts away. The final move was muting the bass, which he'd already recorded.
Prince later explained that with bass the song sounded too conventional. Without it, the drums, synths and that stacked vocal suddenly had room to be odd. It became his first number one.
The lesson: when a mix is boring, don’t add - subtract.
The thread
My takeaways from Prince all stem from the same place, a willingness to step outside the rules and mix with his ears. I apply this practically by resisting the urge to give up on sounds that I feel like I “shouldn’t” use. I also love to bite the Linn Drum approach every chance I get.