The best guitar solo ever recorded

The best guitar solo ever recorded is in Prince’s 1986 classic “Kiss.” Don’t be fooled by Wendy Melvoin’s mimed guitar playing in the video; Prince himself played the solo.

It might seem unfair that one of the best singers, songwriters, dancers, bandleaders and producers in history should also have played history’s best guitar solo, but, well, facts are facts.

“Kiss” seems like a conventional funk/blues song on paper, but it’s an exceedingly strange track when you listen to it closely. It also had an unusual journey from conception to completion. Prince wrote the song for a band called Mazarati, who he had signed to his new record label. Here’s the demo he recorded for them, backed by his acoustic guitar:

And here’s the version that Mazarati recorded. It is… not too good. I do like their look though.

Prince rightly felt that Mazarati wasn’t doing his song any justice, so he decided to reclaim it for himself. He removed the lead vocals and guitar, but he kept the drum machine, the backing vocals, and the synth marimba part played on DX7. Engineer and producer David Z says that this part was copied from Bo Diddley’s “Hey, Man.”

Prince also notably removed the bassline and didn’t replace it. (There are quite a few iconic Prince songs with no bassline.) He sang a new lead vocal on a Sennheiser 441 in the control room, recorded a couple of new guitar parts, and that was that. “Kiss” only has nine tracks total! To put that in perspective, a typical 80s pop song would have more like forty-eight tracks, and current pop songs often have a hundred or more. In their book Digital Signatures: The Impact of Digitization on Popular Music Sound, Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Anne Danielsen give this listing of the tracks:

1. Kick drum with reversed reverb
2. “Other drums” (which I assume means the snare(s))
3. Hi-hat with delay
4. Acoustic guitar gated by the hi-hat
5. Electric guitar “hook” (presumably the strumming part of the solo)
6. Wah-wah guitar (with a little tape delay)
7. DX7 (marimba preset)
8. Mazarati’s original backing vocals
9. Prince’s lead vocal

In a Sound on Sound interview, David Z explains:

As for the lack of bass guitar, we always ran the kick drum through an [AMS] RMX16 and put it on the Reverse 2 setting to extend the tail of the reverb. That served as a kick drum and a bass, and it was a signature sound that we used all the time with Prince. We didn’t need a real bass. And there was no reverb on anything else; just the kick. The guitar was dry and gated, and everything else sounded kind of different to the corporate rock that was on the radio at that time.

He gives more details in Mix Magazine:

I ran the hat through a delay unit, set about 150 milliseconds, printed that to tape and printed the original hat to another track and then alternated between ‘source’ and ‘blend’ on the delay unit, recording those passes. It created a pretty cool rhythm that was constantly changing in tone and complexity but was still steady. Then I played some guitar chords and gated them through a Kepex unit and used that to trigger various combinations of the hi-hat tracks. That gave us the basic rhythm groove for the song.

What he means is that he played a single strum on acoustic guitar on the downbeat of each bar, and that the sound is muted except when the hi-hat is playing. He says that the mixing session took all of five minutes, which may not be a joke. Susan Rogers has said that Prince was a big fan of quick-and-dirty mixes.

Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen explain how the unorthodox and minimalist production of “Kiss” creates such a compelling groove.

[T]he timbre and intensity of the hi-hat/acoustic guitar pattern vary constantly, producing a distinct microrhythm that contributes to the characteristically machinelike yet nevertheless dynamic feel of this groove. This aspect of the microrhythm of the groove cannot be captured by notation, because it derives from sound-related aspects of the hi-hat strokes rather than their temporal placement and timing (p. 53).

In addition to the sparse use of instruments and the absence of fillers in the sound, the production is strikingly dry, especially if we take into consideration the generous use of digital reverb in mainstream pop in the first half of the 1980s. This dryness is a significant aspect of the sound of “Kiss.” It is perhaps most clearly expressed in the production of the lead vocal, which is extremely up front in the sound box and leaves the listener with the impression that it originates almost outside of the loudspeaker. According to David Z, the lead vocal was left completely dry, which was—and is—absolutely unconventional (pp. 55-56).

So, that’s the production. Now let’s talk about the best guitar solo in recorded history! “Kiss” is simple in its basic structure: a cut-time variant on twelve-bar blues in A. Prince plays the solo over the first sixteen bars of the form: eight bars on A7, four bars on D7, and four more bars on A7. The solo is divided neatly into four-bar phrases:

1. A funky sixteenth-note strumming pattern on Am7 and Am6.
2. The same funky strumming pattern repeated exactly.
3. A few licks in the A blues scale played with a wah-wah pedal.
4. A rhythmically complex strumming pattern on and around Am, with the wah-wah slowly opening over the course of each bar.

Below you can see my transcription. Music notation is laughably inadequate; it doesn’t convey the pitch or timing nuances, the wah-wah pedal, or the subtleties of tone and attack and decay. But at least it gives you an idea of what notes Prince is playing.

And here it is in guitar tab (you’re on your own for the wah-wah pedal):

Prince plays his strumming riff over an implied A7 in the harmony. (The acoustic guitar is playing power chords, but the vocals fill out the thirds and sevenths.) The Am7 on top of A7 implies A7#9, and the Am6 on top of A7 implies A13#9. That last chord is spicy! Not only are there tritones between C-sharp and G, and between C and F-sharp, but there’s also a major seventh between C-sharp and C. When I learned the “Kiss” solo on guitar, I noticed that the fingering for the Am6 looked like a version of D7. The two chords share the same active ingredient, the C/F-sharp tritone. It’s like Prince is playing D7 on top of A7, which is pure concentrated blues essence.

It’s conventional to say that A13#9 is “dissonant”, but I don’t think that’s the right word. The chord sounds fantastic! It’s a different flavor from a simple A major triad for sure, but “dissonant” implies that there’s tension that needs to be resolved, and Prince’s A13#9 chord is the resolution. “Spicy” is a more accurate word for the quality of this chord. It’s not easy or simple, but there’s nothing actually “unresolved” about it.

Anyway, it’s interesting to contemplate the solo’s formal content, but that doesn’t explain why it’s so sublimely excellent. Some of it is just Prince’s execution. To see how difficult it is to sound like him, listen to any “Kiss” cover or YouTube guitar tutorial. The solo is not difficult to learn and play, but no one ever gets the feel right. I was in a band that covered “Kiss”, and I played the solo many times. Fortunately, no recorded evidence exists; though I was trying my best to feel the funk, I shudder to imagine how awkward I sounded.

One detail that’s hard to get right is the solo’s rhythmic dissonance. Prince plays with light but definite sixteenth-note swing, which rubs against the perfectly straight sixteenth notes on the hi-hat and synth. The solo would still sound great if he played it with stiffer sixteenth notes, in a pop rather than funk style. And the groove would work fine if the drum machine had a little more swing to it. But keeping the guitar swing in tension with the straight drum groove is real Jedi-master musicianship. Right before the solo starts, Prince sings, “Ahhh, think I wanna dance,” and that is exactly what it sounds like his fingers are doing.

Let’s talk about the wah-wah pedal. It’s a resonant bandpass filter, which means that it makes certain overtones louder and makes the rest of them quieter. You control which overtones are cut or boosted by opening and closing the pedal. This may sound like a technical abstraction, but you use your mouth as a resonant bandpass filter every time you speak. Load up this online spectrogram, click the microphone icon, and say the words “wah-wah” very slowly. When you say “ooo”, your mouth filters the higher frequencies out of your voice and boosts the lower ones. When you say “ahh”, your mouth opens wider and lets more high frequencies through, and also boosts the mids. Transitioning quickly between the two vowels makes the “wah” sound.

You can also achieve a wah-wah effect by cupping your hands around your phone speakers while music is playing. Wah-wah filtering with your hands is a key blues harmonica technique. Trumpet and trombone players achieve the same effect with mutes.

The point of the wah-wah pedal is to make the guitar speak (or, at least, to make it speak two specific vowels.) What is Prince’s guitar trying to tell us? I don’t think a literal English translation is possible, but we can speculate.

It’s a cliche to talk about the wah-wah pedal as making a “crying” sound; thus the Dunlop Cry Baby pedal. “Kiss” is not a sad song, quite the opposite, but it is still blues, and it wouldn’t have the same depth without the undercurrent of pain. The other big wah-wah cliche, of course, is porn. It’s a silly association; wah-wah shows up in all kinds of non-porn contexts from gospel to metal, and meanwhile porn soundtracks use whatever kind of music is popular. In the 1970s, that meant funk, and funk is an undeniably sensual music, but it’s simplistic to reflexively equate funk with porn movies. And a wee bit racist.

To be clear, Prince would have had no problem with anyone equating his guitar sound with sexuality, but his sexuality was complicated. Guitar solos are a standard trope of masculine swagger, and Prince could out-shred any guitar hero. But he sings “Kiss” in falsetto, and does the video in makeup, a crop top and heels. There’s a lot of unresolved tension there.

In her book Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, Susan McClary writes:

In his song “Kiss,” for instance, the Artist takes on the blues, with its baggage of unassailable masculinity that inspired British rockers to adopt this African American genre in the 1960s. But it is precisely rock’s image of the masculine that he seeks to dislocate in the course of the song. The most obvious risk he takes is to sing in a weirdly vulnerable falsetto, similar to the one honed by Claude Jeter… This is not the effortless head voice the Artist uses so effectively elsewhere but a sound that is deliberately pinched, as though it is being dammed up for more intense pleasure than that afforded by simple release. It continually threatens to crack downward into normal adult male range, and it is only through the utmost strain, apparently, that he manages to extend this erotic high (pp. 153-154).

[T]he Artist feigns “losing it” in the final refrain. On the words “Ain’t no particular sign,” he pushes his already-pinched falsetto up into a kind of white-noise screech, leading to a dramatic deflation. It is as if the discipline involved in maintaining that stoic high finally proves too difficult, and the pent-up energy explodes without his willing it. Yet the suspension of animation is what constitutes the erotic in this song—not the release. At the last moment, the Artist utters “kiss” in a normal speaking voice—stripped, that is, of the tense artifice that has characterized this song—followed by a couple of measures of instrumental fade—out. He thus produces a gap between the persona who sings, who appears to have been overwhelmed at the end of the refrain, and the puppeteer who teasingly stands behind the enactment (p. 155).

Prince’s gender presentation is not the only source of tension in the “Kiss” solo. It has harmonic tension too, though like I said, it isn’t really dissonant; the blues aesthetic turns Western tonal theory’s concept of dissonance into an alternative version of consonance. The biggest tension is between Prince’s uninhibited animalistic wailing and his samurai-sword precision. In his book Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk, Tony Bolden talks about Prince’s rival Michael Jackson:

[T]he Moonwalk can be read as a choreographic narrative of political economy, revealing the contradictions between black vernacular creativity and the alienation and marginalization of black workers under American capitalism. To put it differently, the Moonwalk (choreo)graphs the increasing amounts of labor that blacks must produce in exchange for decreasing amounts of dollars and benefits amid deteriorating working conditions and declining job security. Jackson (re)presents the black artist-laborer as an everyman who personifies coolness and panache. He is the expressive embodiment of the Blackbyrds’ 1975 jazz-funk hit “Walking in Rhythm.” Indeed, the King of Pop dances so fluidly that he creates the illusion of effortlessness—this despite the fact that the dance is the result of countless hours of practicing (p. 15).

Prince’s effortless-seeming grace and precision are also the result of fanatically disciplined practice. He was a notorious obsessive (except about mixing), and while this particular guitar solo may have been conceived and executed quickly, it is also the result of uncountably many hours of hard practice. That’s why I think this is the best guitar solo ever recorded: it’s dirty music, played immaculately, using strict discipline to create a natural and intuitive soundtrack for dancing.

Update: Wenatchee the Hatchet wrote a great response post this, making many connections I hadn’t thought of 

Further update: Tom Breihan’s column The Number Ones has a great entry about “Kiss”