Prince

• Wah parked at varying positions acts as an EQ filter on funk comping — not a sweep effect
• Muted 16th-note funk strumming: dead strings on even 16ths, ring out on rhythmic hits
• Clean Strat or Tele-style pickup for funk: bridge or middle, treble up, bass down
• Hard rock lead tone: switch to neck or middle humbucker equivalent, turn up amp gain
• Prince's vibrato is fast and narrow for sustained leads — less wide than blues players
• Learn both funk rhythm (16th-note muting) and pentatonic lead playing — he switches mid-song
• Thumb-over-neck technique for the low E string adds a warm, rounded bass note tone
• Dynamics: Prince went from almost inaudible to full-volume screaming within single bars
• Study the "Purple Rain" solo and "Let's Go Crazy" outro for the rock side of his tone
• The "Purple Rain" solo requires mastering bent notes held for several beats with controlled, fast vibrato — Prince holds bends at the peak of pitch for much longer than most rock players, adding vibrato only after the bend has settled, which creates the aching, sustained quality of the solo
• Listen to "When Doves Cry" carefully — it has no bass guitar whatsoever, with the bass role filled by the bass drum and synth. Prince's guitar part on this track is in fact a sparse, funky rhythm guitar playing in a frequency range above where a bass would normally sit; understanding this arrangement context changes how you approach the guitar part
• For the rhythm side of Prince's style, practise funk ghost-notes at 16th-note resolution on a single string before adding chord changes — the ghost notes (dead-string mutes on every 16th) are the foundation, with the actual notes and chords as punctuation within that constant 16th-note framework

Prince is the most complete guitar player in pop music history — rhythm, lead, funk, blues and rock all coexisted in his playing with equal mastery. His custom Cloud guitar through a clean-to-dirty amp, with a wah pedal as a rhythmic tool, created tones from funk-clean precision to explosive rock lead.

Prince treated the guitar as a secondary instrument publicly but privately regarded it as his deepest voice — his tone shifted from funk-pop clarity in the early '80s to searing stadium rock on Purple Rain, then to an idiosyncratic mix of jazz-inflected clean tones and violent wah-drenched leads in his later career.