The unique way that Prince approached musical arrangement
It’s undoubted that Prince was one of the most talented people to ever pick up an instrument. The music icon could merely touch a string or caress a key, and true magic would come out. It’s hard to define Prince, but one word that has always seemed suitable is genius.
However, Prince’s records wouldn’t be half as good if it were not for Susan Rogers, who is best known for being Prince’s principal staff engineer between 1983 and 1987, meaning she worked on Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade, Sign o’ the Times and The Black Album.
Prince’s studio engineer once explained the unique way that Prince used to work. “His favourite way to work was to have everything set up and routed so that he could work silently,” she said. “He didn’t like small talk; it interrupted that flow, that river, that Niagra Falls of ideas that was coming through his brain. It interrupted that flow if he had to have a conversation.”
Rogers went on to explain that by having everything already set up, Prince was “happy” and would write or call ahead to tell Rogers exactly what he wanted for a specific session. “You’d come in and try to get as much routed for him,” she said, “get his bass tuned, his guitars tuned before handing them to him so that he could move from one instrument to the other.”
Prince, the genius multi-instrumentalist, “would stand at the drum machine, get his sound up” and run several effects pedals through it, “flanger, delay, chorus, distortion, all the effects he liked”. Rogers said, “He’d put them through his drum machine, and we’d roll tape.
It was Prince’s unique understanding of arrangement that made his records so effortlessly amazing, according to Rogers. “He had a watchmaker’s knack for understanding how to complete an arrangement with the limitations of 24 tracks,” she said. “When you have fewer ingredients, each ingredient has to carry more weight, has to be more pure. It’s flavour has to be independent of the other flavours.”
The Minnesota-born music icon once told Rogers why he approached a mix in the way he did. “He once said to me, ‘In theory, any instrument in the mix should be capable of being the loudest thing in the mix. Nothing should be in the background.’ That applied to his arrangement style,” Rogers said. “You could move your spotlight of attention pretty much anywhere on most Prince records, focus on any instrument you want and get a treat. No instrument was dependent necessarily on any other.”
Rogers then noted the kind of mind that Prince had and why it separated him from his contemporaries. “He had that musical mind that was almost like a kaleidoscope where you could rotate your perspective on the record, and it would work,” she added. “That’s how he thought musically.” A genius in every sense of the word, then.
