Best: Purple Rain

Worst: Musicology

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[Edited 4/24/17 0:22am]

Eye also was noticing the production on Gold Experience.

Its just different than on a lot of them.

Best: Batman ...for some reason it sounds fresher to me than most of the 90's stuff that followed it.

Worst: Emancipation.....dull, toothless production

best might be the Symbol album or the Gold Experience
worst might be...1999
I love the songs, performances, style, but the sound is like a step back from Controversy and not nearly as good as Purple Rain.
I also think Musicology's production is uneven.

As a producer and student of audio engineering myself, I have to violently disagree that Musicology is badly produced. It has some very lush production.

If you're looking for a bad production job, check out Dirty Mind, which is obviously sounding like that because it was never taken beyond the demo stage, but it is one of my favourite all time albums.

The Gold Experience is a very nice production job, as is Chaos and Disorder, but also very "wet" sounding with the reverb and as many have said, veers towards being overproduced.

The Rainbow Children is a beautiful production job.

Prince, the album, is another crappy sounding production, especially on the drums, due to it's late 70s aesthetics (yes I know it was made in the early eighties).

Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic suffers from some really high levels. Listen especially to the distortion in Gwen Stefani's vocals on So Far, So Pleased. Most of the album suffers slightly from this...but it DOES give it a unique sound.

Worst: Emancipation, it's lifeless and plastic sounding

Best: Purple Rain and The Rainbow Children

rainbowchild said:

Spot on The best is Purple Rain or Batman
Worst is none other than Musicology

Best production: The Gold Experience and Come because they sounded raw and "real". Don´t know how to describe it.

Worst production: Emancipation, Graffiti Bridge and Musicology (especially the guitar-based tracks with the exception of Reflection.My favorite track from Musicology). They all sound very artificial to me without real emotion.

theplejades said:

BEST: 1999, PURPLE RAIN, and, from the perspective that "production" does not necessarily mean studio tinkering, DIRTY MIND

WORST: EMANCIPATION and NPS. Moving knobs to drain the funk.

Judging purely by production and sound quality, i would definately say

BEST: The Symbol Album.....this sounds great even now, it is better produced than Mcology.

If you dont believe me, listen to The Morning Papers full blast.

WORST: Musicology / New Power Soul

The sound quality has a flat, muted quality to it which detracts from the enjoyment, it lacks all the echoey effects that Prince usually puts on an album . You can notice this particularly on Musicology and on the New Power Soul tracks.

Btw, i am not judging the albums, just the quality. I think Mcology is good.

Notice also that the sound quality on the Time albums tends to be much better, for some unknown reason.
[This message was edited Sun May 30 10:05:52 2004 by TheFreakerFantastic]

best = hard 2 pick dirty mind,prince,atwiad,emancipation,!!!

worst = now this is easy ,... graffiti bridge !!!

Best: TRC
Worst: Musicology for inconsistency. A million days is a complete mess, you can't even hear individual instruments, the drums are muffled (Prince is just not hittin' em hard enough which makes it impossible to sound good when recorded). And then again, some songs on second half of album sound great.

Best: Come. Too bad the songs weren't better.

Worst: Graffiti Bridge - way overproduced and thin sounding. Terrible keyboard sounds.

This thread just goes to show how subjective record producing really is.

BEST: "Sign O' the Times"...all his albums before and after are conceptual/gimmicky, while this album focused on the the songs by stripping them down and giving each there own "feel". That was awesome considering it's a double disk, contains a "live" track, and is the "final result" of several different albums from 1985-1986. He didn't really do anything "new", but that's what makes it so cool!

WORST:"Emancipation"...because it really does contain some great songs that got lost because of the dullness of the production.