It’s part of Prince’s mythology that he was prolific, and that his vaults are brimming with recordings, but in addition to burnishing his image, his tremendous output served other purposes. Most every other record I’ve ever worked on since then has had a committee of people who want to weigh in on what it should or shouldn’t be and he was spared that as an artist." He had the autonomy to push his way through. He has an idea and he moves forward with it. Prince also was able to accomplish something few other artists have been able to achieve: creative control. When you have the vocal mic multied across many tracks, he could pop into any track at any point, at a vocal line here or there, he had it all mapped out in his head." You can leave.’ In a half hour, he’d call me back and he’d have cut the backing vocals and all the verses were done. All that dynamic range and all that focus - How many vocalists run back and forth between the studio and control room to readjust something? It just drains the attention of the artist. Every vocal you’ve ever heard on every Prince record was cut sitting in a chair at the console. He’d grab that mic - with the console and the tape machine remote in front of him - and cut all the vocals from the engineer’s chair. "He always had a mic on a boom stand over the console for vocals. Zwicky has been a recording professional for decades and says that Prince’s approach to recording vocals was unique. Prince also became quickly adept with using the studio. He just worked 10 times harder than anybody I’ve ever known in my life." "If people could see the amount of effort and diligence it took to be Prince, they would get jobs in banks," says Chuck Zwicky, who worked as a Paisley Park recording engineer from 1987 through ‘89. What was not visible to most people is the seriousness with which Prince took his career since its very earliest days. Reverb spoke with Paisley Park Studios recording engineers Chuck Zwicky and Scott LeGere, as well as Matthew "Doctor" Fink, who played keyboards on Dirty Mind, Controversy, Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade, Sign "O" the Times, The Black Album, Lovesexy and others, to find out what it was like to create music with the man, the myth, the legend: Prince.Ĭhuck Zwicky, Paisley Park Engineer, 1987 through ‘89 So, what was it like to work with Prince? He was the master and commander of his business empire, and the number of people with a view into his creative and recording processes was very limited. It has been alternately described as a museum and a jail, with few windows and a chainlink fence perimeter.Īccording to the those who knew him, Prince was intensely private and controlling. Paisley Park Studios, the factory-sized bunker where Prince recorded 30 of his own and many other albums is a 65,000 square-foot, $10 million complex that housed recording suites, sound stages, ballrooms and more. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives / Stringer / Getty Images
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