The above video is my personal tribute to His Purple Greatness. The Prince Drumalong Megamix Experience! It’s the culmination of months of in-depth study and practice. Earlier this year, I finished listening to all 39 Prince official studio albums, plus about 6 discs worth of previously unreleased songs and alternate versions from the 1999, Purple Rain, and Sign O the Times deluxe reissues. All totaling about 550 songs; over 40 hrs. For the good of the Prince-loving community, I have compiled my most significant findings here, with plenty of playlists and links.
☮️ Part One: What is a FUNK QUILT? ☯️
(noun) A groove with many layered, interweaving parts. More specifically, each funky little guitar, bass, keyboard, and/or horn riff usually has a significant amount of space; silence, to make room for other riffs to momentarily pop out. All woven together, it creates a gloriously booty shaking, beautifully simple, yet simultaneously intricate, funk quilt. This is taken straight from the James Brown playbook. (See: “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag”, “Sex Machine”, “Cold Sweat”, etc.) And in some ways, Prince really just wanted to be Mr. Dynamite himself. It’s also apparent in all his ad libs and shouting about what beat to hit on.
As the significance of the funk quilt revealed itself to me in my run through Prince’s catalog, I started to build a playlist. ‘Funk Quilts and Other Bangers’ contains every Prince funk quilt officially released thus far (including a bunch of previously unreleased songs from the 1999, Purple Rain, and Sign ‘O’ the Times deluxe reissues). Bangers are high energy, hard-hitting songs, usually with a rockin guitar riff or some other sort of “heaviness.” They fit well among funk quilts, and a few songs are only sorta funk quilts, but total bangers, so I chose to include them as well.
31 out of Prince’s 39 studio albums are represented here, showing that through all his stylistic changes, the reliable funk quilt arranging technique remained a go-to tool for the purple genius throughout his career.
**Funk Quilts and Other Bangers Playlist**
Apple Music / YouTube / Spotify
☮️ Part Two – Drummer’s Edition 🥁
The Megamix video up top stems from a playlist I made of my 13 favorite Prince songs to play along with. Prince’s approach to rhythm and percussion production was unlike any other major pop star. From listening to his entire discography on headphones, I came to more greatly appreciate his craft in this area.
“Housequake”, in particular, SLAMS. It also provided a really fun new pattern to learn. I added an aux snare for this, as there are two different percussion parts at once, but adapt as you need.
**Prince Drumalong Playlist**
Apple Music / YouTube / Spotify
☮️ Part 3 – Deep Cuts ☯️
Following Prince’s golden period, there is a whole lot of material to sift through to find the gems. Two triple albums, and many other single discs that pass the one hour mark. But there are indeed many gems that exist outside his classic 80s stretch. So I kept track of all the noteworthy songs in his post-80s output (plus previously unreleased songs and alternate versions from the ‘1999’, ‘Purple Rain’, and ‘Sign O the Times’ deluxe reissues), and compiled them into the below playlist.
Special attention to the most amazing, hilarious “joke track” I’ve ever heard: “Cloreen Bacon Skin” This consists of Morris Day (of The Time, the rival band in the movie Purple Rain) on drums, and Prince on bass, doing his best James Brown impression/caricature. That’s it. A 15 min ad-libbed ode to his “first wife, Cloreen Bacon Skin.”
**Weird, Wild, and Wonderful Deep Cuts**
Apple Music / YouTube / Spotify