lemoncrush19 said:

well ...

https://www.facebook.com/...378697142/

Thank you – this is great and really illustrates the point that I was trying to make earlier. It was pretty clear to me that the photos only show a fraction of the tapes in detail, with entire aisles excluded. These are police investigation photos afterall. Most of the shelves shown are at the periphery of the room (against walls etc). Couple this with Troy Carter’s recent interview (see comment #14), and it’s clear that we have a lot to look forward to.

You have to admire how lemoncrush19 (may his avatar b praised through the ages)
adjusted the size of the green circles, depicting how much of the shelves rack
has actually been covered by the picture taken.

Unless I'm mistaken.

[Edited 4/29/18 8:16am]

bonatoc said:

You have to admire how lemoncrush19 (may his avatar b praised through the ages)
adjusted the size of the green circles, depicting how much of the shelves rack
has actually been covered by the picture taken.

Unless I'm mistaken.

[Edited 4/29/18 8:16am]

Sorry bonatoc, are you suggesting that the photos cover more than the diagram suggests? In any case, wouldn't the point regarding the central aisles still stand?

soladeo1 said:

The amazing and ongoing, crowd-sourced Google doc confirms my growing suspicians...

Unless there are other, un-photographed sections of tapes and reels there's not much in The Vault that Piers and the various Purple Archivists haven't noted already...especially the Golden age 80s material...

I was hoping that weird, bizarre, completely surprising song titles would pop out...

But it's all the stuff we've known about for years (and have been collecting)...

Thoughts guys?

I wouldn't go by photos alone. My husband is a musician, and whereas he (until recently ) kept 3 shelves of hard copies (of various forms) of his work in a storage chamber, the digitized versions of everything he has worked on in his entire life numbers in hundreds of files. Beyond that in a case of a composer as prolific as Prince, most musicians who have ever worked with Prince will be able to tell you that for the period of their tenure, they will have worked on hundreds if not 1000+ songs. Outside of touring, their jobs were to record day in and day out. There's more, alright.

I admit it.
To answer the Great Late James Brown, we've seen nothin' yet.

I worry. Some orgers seem to have turn into junkies for the new (sad pun intended).
"Say man, any more new shit? What! So little left? Much money I done spent in this nasty joint?"

Should I recall the court that Prince doesn't owe us shit, to speak MichaelBlandly?

I just looked at the shelves in circulation (I can't convince myself to get the whole dropbox, it's like it's contaminated — I wish there was a .zip already purged of professional eyes only stuff, kind souls). Some are poetry,

you have "All My Dreams" outtakes,

"Hello" outtakes,

there's an 1985 shelf I'll sell the bike shop on the spot for,

and — Orgasm! — there's a lot a 24 tracks,
which always make me fantasize about Web Audio and Web Midi capabilities.
If properly encrypted, you can serve the tracks to any modern web browser,
and mute them / solo them as will.

I think I also need a pair of new baggies.
I shouldn't think of things like that.
I mean, if I can play, say, the "Vanity 6" album ("in instrumental!", shouted the vulgars)
soloing the bass and the Linn, the synth lines... I mean...
I get it, somehow who wants to give a Prince bassline out in the blue?
Some clever kid could turn it into a hit without the estate (or us) noticing it.

Hey, I can dream.
Why? Because, because, because, because.

I mean doggies: "admit" my skinny white ass,
and don't ever make me talk like that again,
some resent such a fatphobic racist comment.

Threads like these spread valuable info away from a single thread.

Especially with such clickbait titles.

It's a loss of time, the only thing there is is to catalogue all of this. Then we'll talk.

And if to you, having the multitrack tapes of Crystal Ball, Camille, The Dream Factory
is still "very little" news, well I say 2 U good night Good Sir, you're outre blasé.
It means you don't care for a remixed deluxe 24/192 SOTT (if they call anyone but Susan R. anf Bernie G. I'll go mad).

[Edited 4/29/18 10:57am]

fen said:

bonatoc said:

You have to admire how lemoncrush19 (may his avatar b praised through the ages)
adjusted the size of the green circles, depicting how much of the shelves rack
has actually been covered by the picture taken.

Unless I'm mistaken.

[Edited 4/29/18 8:16am]

Sorry bonatoc, are you suggesting that the photos cover more than the diagram suggests? In any case, wouldn't the point regarding the central aisles still stand?

Nope, I was stating that in some cases, the picture shows only a vertical fraction of the shelves (1 or 2 of 4 shelves).
Unless I didn't get what the green circles size stands for.

[Edited 4/29/18 9:38am]

bonatoc said:

You have to admire how lemoncrush19 (may his avatar b praised through the ages)
adjusted the size of the green circles, depicting how much of the shelves rack
has actually been covered by the picture taken.

Unless I'm mistaken.

[Edited 4/29/18 8:16am]

I did nothing but find this diagram with all the infos on fb and repost it here - including the link to the source ... which y'all really should follow since it evolved meanwhile!!!

sorry, I thought this was clear (especially since the google doc which has been shared here before seems to be the work of the same person) ... wasn't my intension to adorn myself with borrowed plumes

concerning the different sizes of the green ovals:
"The smaller green ovals mean that we can only identify a small number of tapes on those shelves."

I think lemoncrush's diagram pretty much shuts down the OP's idea on this one.

theres 100 purpl rain songs and sheila said they recorded at least 100 songs and the 5 albums from 2010-2015 etc etc ....yeah theres nothing left

The diagram is really useful, but it doesn't give us an answer.

If you extrapolate the number of unreleased songs on the photographed shelves, verses the remaining space, then look at the amount of unreleased already out in the wild, it doesn't suggest a treasure trove of unknown.

Sure, the later digital stuff isn't in this mix, but for the hey day material, I not expecting too many surprises. I hope I'm 100% wrong.

SquirrelMeat said:

SquirrelMeat said:

The diagram is really useful, but it doesn't give us an answer.

If you extrapolate the number of unreleased songs on the photographed shelves, verses the remaining space, then look at the amount of unreleased already out in the wild, it doesn't suggest a treasure trove of unknown.

Sure, the later digital stuff isn't in this mix, but for the hey day material, I not expecting too many surprises. I hope I'm 100% wrong.

Yes, your logic is sound – if there was a wealth of unknown material you’d expect that any given sample would yield new things at a consistent rate. That said, we just don’t know how it was arranged – there may be sections of material that Prince considered complete, others consisting of “unfinished” work, tracks earmarked for use by other artists, thematic sections (musical ideas that he wanted to return to) etc. Of course, there’s a strong psychological desire to believe that there’s much more in there.

I just don’t know how we’d account for the remaining space as illustrated by the diagram, or Susan’s past comments and other’s regarding Prince’s recording rate. Personally, I’d probably be equally happy if the remainder was largely live recordings and rehearsals from that period, but there seems to be a lot of space unaccounted for.

It is a bit complicated because a) we do not know when/if Prince started recording music digitally straight to hard drive. Many studios still use tape (DAT) although DAT machines are no longer produced (Sony stopped making them in 2005) and they are hard to get serviced these days. Prince may well have recoded in digital early on (when PP was built?) but he would still have required DAT to record to until at least the late 90s(?) when large capacity hard drives were available. DAT requires a shelf in which to be stored on so would have to be in the vault (or destroyed).

Anyway, there are roughly 1330 songs on PrinceVault. I think PV have done a pretty thorough job of recording info on everything that is known - released and unreleased. Here is how those numbers break down
607 were recorded prior to 1990

818 were recorded prior to 1994

967 were recorded prior to 1999

Let's presume Prince recorded to DAT until 1999. After that he recored to hard drive.

Then at a MINIMUM there should be 967 songs in the vault recorded to tape. Someone with a keener eye than mine can probably estimate roughly how many songs sit on one shelf by looking at the photos. From that you can very roughly estimate how many shelves would be needed for 967 songs. Any space left on that diagram after taking all that into account may indicate how much stuff remains that is not known to PV prior to 1999 (the year not the album).

Of course, this could also be a pointless exersize and is nothing but bullshit because how could we possibly know how many live shows are in there on tape?

I asked around during one of the Celebrations as to the Vault. I beleive they said 40 unreleased albums were completed to the point artwork was done. Of course this was likely a ballpark estimate that Prince said. At that time Prince was not recording much but going through the Vault and trying to configure albums as he had too many songs that did not belong on albums. I would believe this was around the time Mayte had P in "studio rehab" and I wonder if it was after the incident she wrote about? She wanted him to slow down and take care of self.

I also guess he would shift songs from one part of vault to another if older song was being used on a tracklist. It's like the amount of material that we know about that is not there too.

They also stressed at PP that all the live shows etc were recorded and in the vault.

The Vault diagram is interesting. I would believe that if Crystal Ball 2 was configured many of the 80s songs are on it. That is if it was ever completed.

Rebeljuice said:

Of course, this could also be a pointless exersize and is nothing but bullshit because how could we possibly know how many live shows are in there on tape?

Why don't you consult PV to see how many live shows he did in his entire career and then reduce the number with 11% and add some for good measure?

He said he recorded every single show (probably not true) so that should give you an idea.

However that is most likely as pointless as the other one

SuperFurryAnimal said:

I asked around during one of the Celebrations as to the Vault. I beleive they said 40 unreleased albums were completed to the point artwork was done. Of course this was likely a ballpark estimate that Prince said. At that time Prince was not recording much but going through the Vault and trying to configure albums as he had too many songs that did not belong on albums. I would believe this was around the time Mayte had P in "studio rehab" and I wonder if it was after the incident she wrote about? She wanted him to slow down and take care of self.

I also guess he would shift songs from one part of vault to another if older song was being used on a tracklist. It's like the amount of material that we know about that is not there too.

They also stressed at PP that all the live shows etc were recorded and in the vault.

The Vault diagram is interesting. I would believe that if Crystal Ball 2 was configured many of the 80s songs are on it. That is if it was ever completed.

that 40 unreleased amount was from th 90's

Hi all,
I've originally posted this to facebook but let me just repost it here as well.

.
I made this drawing of the main Vault so that people can grasp the amount of audio tapes that were in there. (And of course this was only the main vault, there were many mastertapes in other rooms in PP as well as tons of harddisks, potentially full of recordings!)

I did this because I see a lot of people saying things like "there really weren't that many unreleased songs as most of what we see from the photos are familiar titles". Well, WRONG.
.

What we can see clearly on the photos is just a fraction of the Vault, most of it is blurry so we can't identify the tapes. WE HAVE NOT SEEN THE VAST MAJORITY OF TAPES IN THE VAULT.

.

I went through all of the published photos and wrote down every single title on the tape boxes that I could read and so far there are 522 tapes listed with some song titles (and an additional 240 or so without titles) on the spreadsheet that I've published.
https://goo.gl/FPbxLj
Note that some of these tapes weren't even in the Vault but were found elsewhere in the building.

.

But to understand how much more the original Vault contained, have a look at the layout of the room. You can see each shelving unit. There are 68 units, each having 5 shelves, so that's 340 shelves in total.

.

These 340 shelves have the capacity to hold 4080 reels of 2" multitrack tapes, or roughly 10,000 reels of 1/2" tapes, or maybe around 13,000 reels of 1/4" tapes.

.

As the shelves contained a mixture of 2" analog multitracks, 1/2" digital multitracks, 1/2" analog mixdown and 1/4" analog mixdown tapes, and some shelves didn't have any tapes, I'm guessing that there could've been maybe 7-7500 tapes inside the Vault.

.

In addition to these 7-7500 tapes, I'm guessing (based on the photos we've seen) that there could've been perhaps another 500 or so audio tapes scattered in other rooms (there were some in the video vault, some on the floor in the trophy room and some on shelves in the garage storage area). And... in addition to these 8000 audio tapes there were boxes and boxes of hard drives, with only God knows how many original recordings.

.

Of course often there are several tape reels of the same song as first it had to be recorded on a multitrack, then that multitrack was mixed down to a stereo tape, and there are some safety copies as well. But often tapes contain more than one song (a 2500ft tape has a playing time of approx. 16 minutes at 30ips speed), so the bottom line is:

what we can see and identify from the photos is just the tip of the iceberg, ONLY ABOUT 6% OF THE TAPES – and we have absolutely no idea how much more stuff the hard drives contain!

.

So have a look at the Vault room layout: the green ovals show the shelves included in the photos. The smaller green ovals mean that we can only identify a small number of tapes on those shelves.

.

.

By the way: there's a short 1993 video with a peek into the Vault then: it looks like it was already just as full of tapes as it was found 23 year later, while Prince continued to record regularly.
https://goo.gl/iwXu8A

.

And contrary to popular belief, he didn't entirely switch to harddisk-based recording. He has recorded stuff digitally onto 1/2" digital magnetic tapes in the '90s (he had a 48-track Studer D820 DASH-machine that cost a whopping $270,000 in 1990) and I'm sure he used ProTools too later on, but he never stopped using analog – and it seems like from the '00s he's returned to mainly tracking on 2" analog tape. So my numbers above could turn out to be understatements.

.

Rebeljuice said:

It is a bit complicated because a) we do not know when/if Prince started recording music digitally straight to hard drive. Many studios still use tape (DAT) although DAT machines are no longer produced (Sony stopped making them in 2005) and they are hard to get serviced these days. Prince may well have recoded in digital early on (when PP was built?) but he would still have required DAT to record to until at least the late 90s(?) when large capacity hard drives were available. DAT requires a shelf in which to be stored on so would have to be in the vault (or destroyed).
.

.
I keep seeing people talking about DATs in regards to Prince's Vault. Please understand that DAT is not a professional format, it was designed (but ultimately failed) to be a consumer product. (Unfortunately it has found its way into studios too but only as a format used to cheaply, conveniently share COPIES of digital recordings with radio stations, for example.)
.
No self-respecting recording studio ever recorded directly to DAT. First of all: DAT is 2-track (so cannot be used for multitracking), relatively low resolution (originally 16bit/48kHz, though later a 20bit version was developed too), but more importantly: it is unreliable, uses a ridiculously thin and fragile tape, and it's very sensitive to the slightest head-misalignments. It is neither suitable for professional recording nor for archiving. It's OK for less important recordings, such as rehearsals or simple 2-track recordings of live gigs.
.
The professional format for digital tape recording was DASH (it was reel-to-reel, 48 channels on a 1/2" tape) and that's what Prince used from 1990 for awhile. (Probably until he started using ProTools sometimes towards the end of the '90s.)
.

dance4me3121 said:

some engineers might have some songs too.The "Deliverance" EP surfaced last year and one of prince's engineers brought that to light

.
Engineers shouldn't have anything. 'Deliverance' was released illegally from a COPY that the engineer shouldn've kept (and let's not even go into his ridiculously false claims again). I'm sure the original multitrack recording (minus the few things the engineer added to it after Prince's death) for 'Deliverance' is in Prince's vault.
.

Kares said:

dance4me3121 said:

some engineers might have some songs too.The "Deliverance" EP surfaced last year and one of prince's engineers brought that to light

.
Engineers shouldn't have anything. 'Deliverance' was released illegally from a COPY that the engineer shouldn've kept (and let's not even go into his ridiculously false claims again). I'm sure the original multitrack recording (minus the few things the engineer added to it after Prince's death) for 'Deliverance' is in Prince's vault.
.

the tapes to 'the man-opera' were actually photographed by police in the ante-room to the vault

IstenSzek said:

Kares said:

.
Engineers shouldn't have anything. 'Deliverance' was released illegally from a COPY that the engineer shouldn've kept (and let's not even go into his ridiculously false claims again). I'm sure the original multitrack recording (minus the few things the engineer added to it after Prince's death) for 'Deliverance' is in Prince's vault.
.

the tapes to 'the man-opera' were actually photographed by police in the ante-room to the vault

.
Can point me to the photo that you were able to read it from please? I don't think I've added that to my catalog yet. Or you can open the spreadsheet and leave a comment there, if you prefer, and I'll update it. Cheers.
.

Photos confirm nothing.

Kares said:

IstenSzek said:

the tapes to 'the man-opera' were actually photographed by police in the ante-room to the vault

.
Can point me to the photo that you were able to read it from please? I don't think I've added that to my catalog yet. Or you can open the spreadsheet and leave a comment there, if you prefer, and I'll update it. Cheers.
.

ok, i had a look and managed to find it (thought i'd dreamt it for a while there )
it's in the 5-10-2016 folder, pic DSC_0252.JPG.

it's labeled 'Prince 1)The 1 U Wanna C 2)Man Opera (vocal)

it's next to the one labeled '1 NPG BRIA' etc. just to the right of the enviro-bubble box.

IstenSzek said:

Kares said:

Can point me to the photo that you were able to read it from please? I don't think I've added that to my catalog yet. Or you can open the spreadsheet and leave a comment there, if you prefer, and I'll update it. Cheers.

ok, i had a look and managed to find it (thought i'd dreamt it for a while there )
it's in the 5-10-2016 folder, pic DSC_0252.JPG.

it's labeled 'Prince 1)The 1 U Wanna C 2)Man Opera (vocal)
it's next to the one labeled '1 NPG BRIA' etc. just to the right of the enviro-bubble box.

.
Thanks – now added to the list! Looks like I've missed that photo, there's quite a few on there that I'll need to add.

Interesting to note that on a photo taken on 10 May 2016 (DSC_0252.jpg) you can see a 2" analog multitrack tape labeled as , with a date of 3 March 1998 (I can't read the song titles though), so that proves that Prince continued to record on analog tape at least occasionally during the '90s too, before reverting to using analog primarily from the early '00s.
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Guitarhero said:

Photos confirm nothing.

.

The photos actually confirm that there must be a LOT of unreleased material, quite the opposite of what the title of this thread says.

.

Anyone doubting me just please read my long post above (#76) and you'll understand that what we see on the photos taken in 2016 is actually how the Vault already looked in 1993 as proven by the brief video recorded back then.

.