thebanishedone said:

Lots of times it was said here that Prince was never interested in programing his synths and he was always a preset kind of synth player who is satisfied with the fabric type of sounds on his synth.So do you think that is true? Prince did like fabric preset sounds on his Roland d50 and Korg M1 but what about the early 80s? Prince did program crazy portamento slides going on his Oberheim on The Beautiful Ones and he did very nice modulation on the lead line on Delirios.So is Prince just a boring preset kind of synth player or is he a wicked synth programer?

SOTT the song is just the presets. Along the way Prince got bored with synths (and so did most people who were part of the early synth scene, not to mention a lot of people who came of age back then).

controversy99 said:

Weren't the synths Rick James nicked from him painstakingly programmed by Prince beforehand? I figure he just had an idea that he wanted things to sound 'good' and sometimes he had to go looking, other times the presets worked for him.

Yeah, the Rick James story strongly suggests he crafted the sounds himself in the early days. Nobody can blame him for not programming units like the DX7 or the D50 though. Very few working musicians did that themselves due to it being so time-consuming. I believe in the mid-90s he had custom-made ROMpler batches done to him by the guy that's listed in the credits for TGE.

I have no trouble believing his gotten more into customizing his own sounds with units like the Virus or the Nords. You know all it takes to completely change a patch sometimes is just to alter the cutoff knob, right?

thebanishedone said:

You think Prince uses Virus?

I don't know what he's used himself. We've seen some Nords and Viruses used live on stage by Renato and the other players during the 2000-10 era, right? I've just assumed that's what's on albums like 3121. At least in the past what was used live was usually on the records as well. The units are usually owned by Prince.

At some point they seem to have made the switch to that Open Labs stuff though.

Let me just say that Prince's pallet of synth sounds that he used during the 80s was not gigantic.

He got signature sounds from the Oberheim which he used accross albums and tours.

When the Yamaha DX7 came out, which was known for being notoriously difficult to program, Prince used the factory presets on that exclusively, right up through Sign O' the Times.

d

[Edited 12/7/15 14:37pm]