I was listening to One Night Alone... Live! again today, and thinking about how much Raspberry Beret just doesn't work without those strings.

Then I got to thinking, "wouldn't it be cool if Prince did a stripped-down, unplugged tour that included a string quartet?" Please understand that when I say 'unplugged' I'm not talking about a drum-less, let's-all-sit-down-and-have-a-latte-and-polish-our-spectacles sort of show, but rather, a full band on acoustic instruments, with the quartet added in.

It's hard to imagine a classical arranger being able to deal with Prince's whims, and it's hard to imagine Prince having the patience to deal with the non-improvisational nature of a string quartet (there's a reason he and Claire Fischer never met!). But still, I think such a show, concentrating on his rock/folk type stuff, could be pretty good!

Thoughts?

Highly unlikely - although I love them too, if Prince felt comfortable with strings he wouldn't have hired Clare Fisher to do them for him. Not many people realise Prince did not compose the string arrangments in his songs, he just gave the base tracks to Clare Fisher to compose strings on top of and then he sent them back to Prince for his approval, as far as I'm aware he never rejected his work and they had a lot of mutual respect.

[Edited 6/17/13 15:46pm]

that would be very nice to see/hear. or an album like this, where he re-arranged his

old songs into this format. like joni mitchell did a while back.

TheFreakerFantastic said:

Highly unlikely - although I love them too, if Prince felt comfortable with strings he wouldn't have hired Clare Fisher to do them for him. Not many people realise Prince did not compose the string arrangments in his songs, he just gave the base tracks to Clare Fisher to compose strings on top of and then he sent them back to Prince for his approval, as far as I'm aware he never rejected his work and they had a lot of mutual respect.

[Edited 6/17/13 15:46pm]

Lisa and Wendy also did string arrangements, composed them too for songs especially for PR era albums:Glamorous Life, the Time, Purple Rain, the song Purple Rain, and ATWIAD and prts of Parade

^ Yes that's true, thanks, but again, they did them, not Prince, indicating it's not his area.

OldFriends4Sale said:

Lisa and Wendy also did string arrangements, composed them too for songs especially for PR era albums:Glamorous Life, the Time, Purple Rain, the song Purple Rain, and ATWIAD and prts of Parade

I thought about that, too. What if Wendy and Lisa aranged the strings, like they did on Pop Life (among others)? Prince could enjoy the collaboration, without actually collaborating with them. Vocals, acoustic guitar, piano, upright bass, drums, some horns, and a string quartet. A few potential songs:

• Purple Rain
• Take Me with U
• Paisley Park (doesn't work without electric guitar)
• Condition of the Heart
• Raspberry Beret
• Pop Life
• The Ladder
• Venus De Milo
• Sometimes it Snows in April
• Slow Love
• Forever in My Life (turn the backup vox into a string thing)
• When 2 R in Love
• Scandalous

I love everything about that idea!

TheFreakerFantastic said:

OldFriends4Sale said:

TheFreakerFantastic said:

Highly unlikely - although I love them too, if Prince felt comfortable with strings he wouldn't have hired Clare Fisher to do them for him. Not many people realise Prince did not compose the string arrangments in his songs, he just gave the base tracks to Clare Fisher to compose strings on top of and then he sent them back to Prince for his approval, as far as I'm aware he never rejected his work and they had a lot of mutual respect.

[Edited 6/17/13 15:46pm]

Lisa and Wendy also did string arrangements, composed them too for songs especially for PR era albums:Glamorous Life, the Time, Purple Rain, the song Purple Rain, and ATWIAD and prts of Parade

Really? Thought that was all Fisher.

For which song on GL and the Time did W&L compose strings?

TheFreakerFantastic said:

Highly unlikely - although I love them too, if Prince felt comfortable with strings he wouldn't have hired Clare Fisher to do them for him. Not many people realise Prince did not compose the string arrangments in his songs, he just gave the base tracks to Clare Fisher to compose strings on top of and then he sent them back to Prince for his approval, as far as I'm aware he never rejected his work and they had a lot of mutual respect.

[Edited 6/17/13 15:46pm]

Prince didn't use everything Fisher composed/arranged. Indeed for much of the Parade album he only used bits and pieces of Fishers arrangements. I therefore think it's fair to say that prince co-arranged those strings.

eyewishuheaven said:

OldFriends4Sale said:

Lisa and Wendy also did string arrangements, composed them too for songs especially for PR era albums:Glamorous Life, the Time, Purple Rain, the song Purple Rain, and ATWIAD and prts of Parade

I thought about that, too. What if Wendy and Lisa aranged the strings, like they did on Pop Life (among others)? Prince could enjoy the collaboration, without actually collaborating with them. Vocals, acoustic guitar, piano, upright bass, drums, some horns, and a string quartet.

But they're not particulary good at it. Wendy, I think, can't compose arrangements for strings at all. That was always Lisa's job. That is until Prince needed someone professional and he handed the job over to Fisher. Lisa has said in an interview that she felt let down by that decision.

eyewishuheaven said:

I was listening to One Night Alone... Live! again today, and thinking about how much Raspberry Beret just doesn't work without those strings.

Then I got to thinking, "wouldn't it be cool if Prince did a stripped-down, unplugged tour that included a string quartet?" Please understand that when I say 'unplugged' I'm not talking about a drum-less, let's-all-sit-down-and-have-a-latte-and-polish-our-spectacles sort of show, but rather, a full band on acoustic instruments, with the quartet added in.

It's hard to imagine a classical arranger being able to deal with Prince's whims, and it's hard to imagine Prince having the patience to deal with the non-improvisational nature of a string quartet (there's a reason he and Claire Fischer never met!). But still, I think such a show, concentrating on his rock/folk type stuff, could be pretty good!

Thoughts?

I've seen Prince live a few times and at least in the tours I've seen I don't recall seeing anything close to improvisation, (aside from solos of a pre-determined length and piano medleys) at the main shows and almost nothing BUT improvisational at the aftershows. Obviously he HAS and his tours can be quite different from each other, but for the most part the main shows have set arrangements.

Therefore I think such an idea would work out quite well. Now Prince might want to change set-lists and tweak arrangements as the tour progressed, but a good classically-trained arranger should have no problems writing what Prince wants on paper and having competent classical people perform it. Hell, classical performers are nothing BUT data-entry clerks in most cases, (looking at "data" on the page and "entering" on their instruments). Keeping up with Prince shouldn't be much of a problem for soeone with an education. He could sit down at a keyboard and as long as I know the first note he plays I can write down a line as he plays it, while he plays it, just as easily as I could sit with a pencil and write down sentences as someone spoke them to me. This type of behavior is difficult only for pop folks without an education in notation. Pop musicians who cannot read and write music are just like smart folks who can speak well but have never learned to read or write. It's no different. Hell, Socrates was illiterate like so many in those days, yet I can assure you that he had no problems expressing himself quite well. It took Plato to keep track of it all and write it down. If it wasn't for Plato we likely wouldn't even know about Socrates. Creating music might seem magical, but writing it down and performing it is quite within the grasp of nearly every human with an decent education on the nuts and bolts thereof.

Long story short, it would work and be pretty cool, too. Completely do-able as long as he doesn't expect solo improvisation from his classical peeps. I'd love to do some string quartet arranging of Prince tunes. There's so much he implies by what is left out that I think there's plenty of stuff for a string quartet to do while leaving loads for the rest of the non-classical folks.

[Edited 6/18/13 8:10am]

[Edited 6/18/13 8:15am]

GoldenParachute said:

Thats a great idea! It could initiate a "new era" after his "3rdeyegirl era". What would he call it?

Prince and the G Strings, (all songs would have to be transposed to the key of GM/m, of course, so he can claim everyone else has a dirty mind for thinking he named the group for a thong).

xpertluva said:

I love everything about that idea!

Me too, except the fact that the songs listed above are all from the 80's. This is 2013!

steakfinger said:

a good classically-trained arranger should have no problems writing what Prince wants on paper and having competent classical people perform it.

That's for sure. He could even synthesize the parts he'd written, give them to Prince for approval, make any necessary changes, and then the musicians would have the music on their stands on Day One of rehearsal... no muss, no fuss. Then the only question would be which songs were in or out on any given night.

I think a show like this would be pretty warmly embraced. (The majority of) Prince's fans are getting older every year too, and the days of him taking off his shirt and crawling around on a piano are long gone. A real 'music-centric' show like this would be like an iced tea on a hot day.

I could see him not wanting to be stuck in that kind of a show for too long, but hell, do two nights each in a handful of major cities, film it, and sell it to us on blu-ray!

Databank: Guilty as charged! I was in a rush when I wrote that post, and just listed the songs that sprang immediately to mind. I definitely agree such a show should span his whole career. What are some good recent tunes that could work nice with a quartet? 'Better With Time' springs to mind...

errant said:

eyewishuheaven said:

steakfinger said:

a good classically-trained arranger should have no problems writing what Prince wants on paper and having competent classical people perform it.

That's for sure. He could even synthesize the parts he'd written, give them to Prince for approval, make any necessary changes, and then the musicians would have the music on their stands on Day One of rehearsal... no muss, no fuss. Then the only question would be which songs were in or out on any given night.

I think a show like this would be pretty warmly embraced. (The majority of) Prince's fans are getting older every year too, and the days of him taking off his shirt and crawling around on a piano are long gone. A real 'music-centric' show like this would be like an iced tea on a hot day.

I could see him not wanting to be stuck in that kind of a show for too long, but hell, do two nights each in a handful of major cities, film it, and sell it to us on blu-ray!

Databank: Guilty as charged! I was in a rush when I wrote that post, and just listed the songs that sprang immediately to mind. I definitely agree such a show should span his whole career. What are some good recent tunes that could work nice with a quartet? 'Better With Time' springs to mind...

ur gonna c me. alexa de paris(maybe he could break out the electric guitar on this one to close the show). te amo corazon. future soul song. the dance. love like jazz. pink cashmere.

errant said:

TheFreakerFantastic said:

^ Yes that's true, thanks, but again, they did them, not Prince, indicating it's not his area.

Why would that stop him from having them on a tour? Horns aren't his area either, but that doesn't stop him from having them on stage.

Horns is not his area, but it would be wrong to think that Prince didn't have nothing to do with the arrangements of horns and strings. Eric Leeds wrote most of the horn parts in his 80s songs, but he also admitted that Prince was often giving some directions for him to work on. And we all know from albums like 1999 and The Time albums that Prince has a great sense of arranging horns with his synth. I don't see how he is not capable of doing the same with strings.

luv2tha99s said:

alexa de paris(maybe he could break out the electric guitar on this one to close the show)... pink cashmere.

Alexa De Paris! Pink Cashmere!

Those two titles alone have caused me to rethink this strategy. It would be criminal to deprive Prince (and us) of his electric guitar (and it's hard to imagine him obeying an arbitrary 'unplugged' mandate anyway), so how about this:

Act I: fully acoustic set ('7', 'Baby', and 'Mountains' are tunes that might also be fun to include here).

Then P takes a little break while we watch a video or listen to the band jam or something, and then:

Act II: Prince returns to the stage, and in a cloud of guitar fuzz, launches into 'Paisley Park'. The rest of the show he's on electric, while another player continues on acoustic rhythm guitar (this guy will have been in the first half too, to fill up the sound).

This kind of show, with a string quartet? I'm ready to line up for tickets right now, in the hope that it might one day happen.