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Topic subjectPrince engineer talks about Controversy era, the Revolution, more (SWIPE)
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=18&topic_id=204548&mesg_id=204672
204672, Prince engineer talks about Controversy era, the Revolution, more (SWIPE)
Posted by murph71, Fri May-06-16 04:48 PM


Cubby Colby was an engineer with Prince throughout most of the '80s...THIS story I'm posting basically confirms everything u ever heard/read about Prince---Dude is/was the most gifted musician of his era...Like, it's not even close....

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Cubby Colby on the Controversy sessions:

“Controversy was an outstanding time period. He already had that Minnesota funk sound going. The first time I spent time with him, he came in late after I set up the entire PA. Everybody else had left the building, and he walked in. He had said he’d like to play the instruments onstage, so it was him and me. He sat at the Linn drum machine and programmed a beat. I bought that up in the drum wedge. He turned around at the Simmons electronic drum set, with a real snare, hat and cymbals, and started playing to the Linn drum machine. We dialed that in. Then he walked over to the keyboard.

I sent the Linn drum machine over there, and he talked into the microphone to me, played the keyboards, then went to Lisa’s keyboard position and did the same thing. I tried to stay ahead of him as he went from one mix to another. He put the bass on and jumped down.

Prior to him playing the bass he’d been playing bass lines with his left hand and playing horn punches and swells and pads with his right hand.I thought, ‘look at this guy go.’ Three-handed music, but there’s only two hands on the guy. Then he put the guitar on, and he had a moving keyboard that he rolled out. I dialed that in. He was playing keyboard bass lines with his right hand and playing lead lines with the other hand on his guitar neck, his Hohner guitar. That is the greatest-sounding clean guitar that I’ve heard, until this day, 40 years later. We started at 11 o’clock at night.

We got done and I looked at my wristwatch: it was about 3:30 in the morning, and it felt like it had been 15 minutes. Unbelievable. This was my first day. I was ready to go home at 11 o’clock. I didn’t know who he was, but it didn’t take long to figure it out: this guy is unbelievable.”

link: http://www.prosoundnetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=46040