Given Prince's guitar skills, one has to think he has dabbled with slide guitar at some point; however, i can't think of where I have ever heard it. Slide guitar is an interesting mix of technical skill and artistic touch, and I can't imagine what he would sound like.

(I've checked the forum history and the word "slide" shows up more times than I can sift through. So sorry if this has been discussed before. And by the way, some people here talk about the Electric Slide way more than I would expect " />)

kidsherriff said:

Come on from New Power Soul has a slide guitar motif that is played by either Kat Dyson or Mike Scott on it ,who were with the band at the time. Its almost dischordant and really cool to be fair but I think thats about it.I don't think Prince himself plays slide guitar as it usually uses alternate tunings and he has never really experimented with that sort of thing. To be honest his guitar style hasn't really evolved an awful lot over the years other than the use of effects. A big departure though was when he started using the whammy bar around 2001 which he over used massively and with little finesse. He has his trick bag and he generally sticks to it.

That slide is Mike Scott.

There's some pretty messy acoustic slide guitar on 'Dionne' from The Truth album. More for effect than anything, I reckon.

kidsherriff said:

Prince still plays primarliy pentatonic to this day. He does slip in and out of some different modes but genrally its pentatonic. As far as being cleaner is concerned I think thats more to do with not going quite as heavy on the effects like in the purple rain days. If you look at the really early stuff its very clean. He is more accurate now, for sure but thats years of experience showing, but there isn't a great deal of innnovation in his chops. Thats not to say that the songs aren't innovative. Thats a whole other thing.As for the whammy bar, I've always thought it a bit of a cop out when he ran out of ideas. Some of it was cool but just as a flourish rather than a centre theme which is something that I'm pleased to say he seems to have grown out of.

Fully agree with what you said. At this stage, Prince's guitar skills are very well honed FOR how he plays. And as far as flashy AND melodic lead goes, IMHO Prince is up there Carlos Santana and and Jimmy Page. With that said, he clearly sticks to what he knows best. I think that's why I posed this question, because I'd love to see Prince's guitar work in a different approach. For some reason I keep thinking of something like Lindsey Buckingham live performance of "Big Love" on the Fleetwood Mac album "The Dance." Not slide guitar (the topic) but what an amazing performance that was! I can't imagine how Prince's showmanship, guitar skills, etc. would come together in that style of song and performance.

on a related note...when i was a member of the npgmc, i asked on the forums if prince used alternate tunings... one of the mods responded that he only plays in standard tuning, which i thought was interesting (and a bit of a shame really)