![]() I remember doing that.’ They insisted on having a light on the front to tell them what mode the amp was in. ![]() ![]() “When I took this amp out of the cabinet and put it on the bench I went, ‘Oh, there’s an LED drilled into the front panel. So Prince ended up with three C+ heads – one original and two converted. I carried one of the 300 series Mark IIBs home with me, updated it to a C+, and sent it back. "You should have seen the smiles on the crew! Prince liked the C+ better, because it had a lot more punch and headroom in the preamp. “We rewired the new cabinets, fixed the footswitch problem, they went through a rehearsal, and everybody breathed a sign of relief when Prince played a 15-minute solo on ‘Purple Rain.’ They had 180 watts of clean headroom, and it was a big, loud sound onstage. The reason they didn’t have a problem before is because Don Batts – who had been Prince’s guitar tech for the 1999 tour – had rewired the speaker cabinets in series, so you had two of them running in series-parallel for an 8Ω load, and it all worked great. "The amp was only putting out 100 watts, and it was all hard and packed down. They were plugging these two 4Ω boxes into the amp, which meant they had a 2Ω load on it.Įverybody breathed a sign of relief when Prince played a 15-minute solo on ‘Purple Rain.’ “So I flew back there, and within a couple of minutes, I saw they had two brand new Bag End speaker cabinets with JBLs, and they were wired the stock way in parallel for 4Ω. If I don’t get this stuff working in the next couple of days, they’ll be on guitar tech number seven.’ “JD called me back a couple of days later and said, ‘It’s still not working, and I’m guitar tech number six. "Now, when you plug a Mark IIB footswitch into the Lead/Rhythm jack on a IIC+, it turns the lead mode on about halfway, so there’s still no clean sound – which was what Prince wanted, because he mainly got his lead tones from pedals. But when they got it, they plugged it into the same setup – including the footswitch cable – which was hooked up to a footswitch for a Mark IIB. “For a couple of days, I went back and forth with JD, and, finally, I just sent out a new 300 series IIC+ head for them to try out. There’s no power or headroom and Prince isn’t happy.’ Paul Civic Auditorium, and JD said, ‘We’ve got the same two Mark IIB heads that we’ve been using, but something isn’t working right with them. In 1984, when Prince started the Purple Rain tour, I got a call from his guitar tech, JD. They’re all dated 1981, and Prince had them by the time he did the 1999 tour. “The original two were Mark IIBs, and this is one of them. “There were three of these 300 series amps,” says Bendinelli. I was able to confirm that it indeed was one of the IIC+ heads used by Prince.”ĭavison sent the amp to Mesa for servicing, where it landed on the bench of Mike Bendinelli, the same Mesa engineer who had his hands on it back in 1984. "I posted the photos on the Mesa forum, and everything took off from there. I was going to post some images of the chassis and circuit board, and it was then that I spotted ‘Prince 2’ written in Sharpie under the power-tube retainer clips. The only other option left was the Internet. Paul – and they did their best to figure out what it was, but to no avail. “I took it directly to Capitol Guitars – the local Mesa dealer in St.
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