Who is the only musician to play every instrument on a platinum album?
There’s a not-so-subtle difference between being talented and being a showoff – people will admire you for being humble about your prowess far more than they will if you go swinging it around the place in search of attention. Throughout the history of rock and pop music, there have been a lot of people whose opinions of themselves have been far greater than what they’ve actually proven to be capable of, and on the other end of the spectrum, there’s people who know they’re good and won’t ever shut up about it.
That said, sometimes it’s necessary to be a showoff, and while not everyone is going to approve of your actions, if you do choose to parade around all of your talents at once, you’ve got to pull out all the stops if you really want to get noticed. If someone is so good that they can’t be ignored, can you really blame them for putting on a display of extreme bravado to prove that?
In Prince’s case, he was undoubtedly one of the most talented musicians to have ever lived, and the emphasis there should be on musician. Prince wasn’t just an exceptional vocalist nor just a great guitarist – he could do it all. Prince had every right to be a showoff and chose to do that right from the beginning of his career.
On his debut album, For You, released in 1978, Prince recorded every instrument heard on the album himself. He repeated this trick for his self-titled follow-up in 1979 as well, and while For You was not a major success, Prince was the record that propelled him into the spotlight, with hits such as ‘I Wanna Be Your Love’ and ‘I Feel For You’ pushing the album into the top 40 in the US.
Over time, Prince gained even more popularity, leading to his sophomore record achieving Platinum status with upwards of one million sales in the US. This would mean that Prince was the first album to reach Platinum status where one musician played every single instrument – and in fairness, that’s something you’d rightfully want to show off about.
How many instruments did Prince play?
In the liner notes for For You, Prince is credited as having played 27 different instruments, which is a greater number than the amount on Prince, which lists just 14. However, on his second album, things are categorised to a greater extent, with percussion not being split into every different percussive instrument, so there’s no way to determine without closer examination whether there are fewer instruments heard on the LP.
On most of his albums, Prince would record between 10-20 different instruments himself and was often unable to keep track of exactly how many he played during a recording session. In the liner notes for his 1988 album, Lovesexy, he credits himself as having played ‘whatever’, essentially being so blasé about the fact that he could play virtually every instrument.
That being said, these 27 instruments aren’t all that different, and Prince lists various different synth models and similar percussion instruments as being separate. When it comes to knowing how to play piano, claiming you can also play keyboards is cheating a little bit, considering they have identical layouts and only differ in the range of sounds they’re capable of producing. The skills between one are transferrable to most other keyboard instruments, so if we’re being pedantic, Prince would have played far fewer than 27.
On the other hand, despite many places reporting the number of 27 as the number of instruments that Prince was capable of playing, if we’re to split hairs like he would and choose to differentiate between congas and bongos despite them not really requiring different skills to play, then the likely number is much higher than 27.
During his very first television appearance on VH1 show American Bandstand in 1979, when asked about the fact that he played every instrument on his albums by host Dick Clark, Prince coyly claimed that he was capable of playing 1000 instruments before reducing this to “a lot” after Clark expressed his disbelief. It will be hard to ever know exactly how many instruments he was truly capable of playing, but “a lot” does seem to cover it pretty well.
