Prince

Along with his love of Boss effects, Prince is a regular user of the Digitech Whammy, Dunlop Crybaby Wah (though he has been known to use a Colorsound Wah as well), and Line 6 MM4 modulation modeler.

Prince is known to use the Dunlop JD-4S Rotovibe, along with the Roland GP-16 and Zoom 9030, on his pedalboard, as noted in the Proguitarshop article "Prince: The Unsung Guitar Hero."

Starting at about 1:53, Prince can be seen playing a custom purple (a dark bordeaux like purple) Taylor T5. If you go frame by frame through that section, very briefly you can see the headstock clear enough to recognize the Taylor logo. And then there's the tell tale cat's eye soundholes and the three unique control buttons on the upper part of the guitar.

Simon "Gus" Farmer, from Heathfield, began working on the guitar nine years ago. It was only at the beginning of March that Prince received it before showing it off on stage. He apparently liked it so much he ordered a bass guitar. Prince performed with Simon Farmer's guitar in early April 2016.

In a photo taken in his personal studio, Prince is seen using the Akai MPC60II.

Prince played an Epiphone Emperor Thinline from 1986 to 1996.

The Sardonyx Bass was bought by Prince for Andre Cymone in 1978. It remained in Prince's collection after he left the band. The custom Cloud Guitar was based on this bass.

In this photo, Prince can be seen playing a Warwick Alien Fretless Bass.

In a video of Prince & The NPG's Gold Experience Tour aftershow in Brussels on March 28, 1995, Prince can be seen using a Marshall JCM 900 4500 guitar amplifier head.

An absolutely huge guitar amp with a crazy 180 watts of headroom, Prince owned three Mesa Mark IIC+ heads around the recording of Purple Rain, and the amp was seen in his touring rig up until the 1999 Tour. Apparently, one of the heads somehow ended up in a music shop in Minneapolis, where it was purchased by an unsuspecting fan who later discovered it was Prince's backup head - not bad for a cheeky second-hand purchase.

we see the instrument, at prince's home studio in paisley park

In a 1990 interview on prince.org, Dr. Fink mentioned that the only remaining Oberheim keyboard Prince used was the OB-8.

In an interview with Dr. Fink and Rosie Gaines, when talking the gear use to use Dr. Fink said “The Oberheim was the main synthesizer he used in the studio back then. He used the Yamaha CP-80 electric grand too, but for synths, the Ober-heim was the main axe”.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with Dr. Fink and Rosie “ What is the bands using for piano squnds? Fink: I've been using'the [Roland] MKS-20. It works really. well, We, do our own patches and EQ them to taste, so they sound more realistic. On the last tour, I was using the MKS-20 and the Emax II grand piano sample. Sometimes I mixed them together; other times I used them separately, depending on what we needed. Did Prince play any keyboards in the most recent show? Fink: Yes, as a matter of fact. He did a .. whole section by himself, just playing piano and singing. A real piano? Fink: No, but it looks like one. [Pause.] I don't know if I should be announcing this. Oh, go ahead. Fink:: Well, this was my idea, actually. About three years ago, we had a real Yamaha grand. We put Barcus-Berrys and other pick-ups in there. They sounded okay, but they picked up a lot of ambient noise. And Prince used to get up on the piano and dance, so forget that. Anyway, the sound man came to me, because he didn't want to bug Prince, and said, "Matt, I got this problem with the sound in the piano. What do you think we can do?" I said, "There's this new MKS-20 thing. I think we should try that out, and put the Forte MIDI mod in the piano." So we put that in to trigger the MKS-20. I tried it out, and it sounded really good. Prince showed up for rehearsal a couple of days leter. He had no idea that we had modified anything in the piano. He sat down at the piano and started playing, not saying anything. I walked over to him and said, "So what do you think of your piano sounds" He said, "Sounds really great! What did you do?" I told him what we had done because of the ambient noise prob-lem. He said, "Wow! Good idea. Thanks a lot."”

From Guitar Player Magazine

What guitars are you playing on the Musicology tour?

I’m using a Gretsch 6120N New Nashville, a Hamer Monaco III, and a Taylor acoustic. I run the electrics though a Genz-Benz El Diablo amp with a Genz-Benz 2x12 cabinet, and my onstage effects consist of Line 6 DS-4 and DM-4 pedals, a Fulltone Fat Boost overdrive, an EBS BassIQ envelope filter, and a Dunlop Cry Baby 535.

Prince played a Sigma SE-19 on the Sign O The Times and Lovesexy tours.

Prince played an Alembic Spoiler bass live and in the studio in the mid to late 1980s. source The photo is of Prince playing Brownmark's Alembic during the Purple Rain tour.

Prince used this wah for his bass pedalboard and can be seen used by a list of his bass players. He also used it on his guitar pedalboard too and can be spot in a performance at the Brit Awards in 2007.

Prince used an Orr Guitar in the late 1970s. One appears in the Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad video.

The image titled "Prince_Pedalboard_01.jpg" on reverb.com shows Prince's use of the Boss VB-2 Vibrato pedal. The article from Pro Guitar Shop highlights Prince's affinity for Boss effects, alongside other pedals like the Digitech Whammy and Dunlop Crybaby Wah.

"The Artist plays bass on nearly all of the Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic tracks. (Rhonda S. appears on two songs.) For most of his parts The Artist used Graham’s Moon bass with Bartolini pickups; when the Moon was unavailable he used the Warwick Eye Bass."

In this photo, Prince is seen playing a Warwick Thumb NT 4.

Prince can be seen playing a Fender Jazz Bass in this photo.

The LM-1 was elite gear. Only 525 machines were ever made, and inventor Roger Linn managed to flog them by dragging around a little cardboard-box prototype to showbiz parties. Notching up pre-orders with Peter Gabriel, Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Wonder, the Drum Computer became a bourgeois must-have object, and was quickly put to use in hit records from the Human League, Gary Numan, and, most notably, Prince.

Prince playing Yamaha RBX4 A2 on stage with Ida Nielsen.

SL8000G, *not E! * If you can please fix that! Sorry!

Quote from SSL: "Nestling amongst VAT recepits and deserted spiders webs in our filing cabinets we found a folder titled “Paisley Park”, and we just couldn’t resist a peek. In the folder were all of the details, specs, and designs for the 2 consoles that we have sold Prince – one a SL6000E with 48 mono channels and 8 stereo channels (in 1985), and the other an 80 input SL8000G(in 1993)."

Shit!! It should be the SL8000G, *not E! * If you can please fix that! Sorry!

The Builder of this Custom Instruments speaks about his clients, in which he explains that prince ordered once a guitar.

“This is a very rock-oriented record, so we worked a little harder on the distortion tones,” says Buff, when asked about the guitar-recording process for Rave. “There were a couple of tracks where we just plugged straight into an amp—typically a Peavey Delta Blues 1x15 or a Tech 21 Trademark 60—but The Artist also had his complete guitar system in the studio so that he could use all his pedals. I’d often mic the [Dutch-made, Celestion Vintage 30 loaded] Koch 4x12 or Peavey 5150 4x12 cabinets with a Shure SM57 and an Audix D2 placed on two different speaker cones. Sometimes we used a room mic to capture some depth—usually something fancy like an AKG C12A, a Neumann U67, or a Neumann U47 FET."

In the interview with Dr. Fink and Rosie Gaines, Dr. Fink said “ I know that for the Batman album and for Graffiti ! Bridge, he pretty much used a [Roland] D-50 and the old Emax 12-bit CD-ROM library for a lot of sounds”.

From Guitar Player Magazine

What guitars are you playing on the Musicology tour?

I’m using a Gretsch 6120N New Nashville, a Hamer Monaco III, and a Taylor acoustic. I run the electrics though a Genz-Benz El Diablo amp with a Genz-Benz 2x12 cabinet, and my onstage effects consist of Line 6 DS-4 and DM-4 pedals, a Fulltone Fat Boost overdrive, an EBS BassIQ envelope filter, and a Dunlop Cry Baby 535.