Prince’s Cloud Guitar
One of the most remarkable guitars used by Prince is his cloud guitar. Not as exotic as the symbol or … guitar, but also not as plain as his Hohner telecaster.
The first cloud guitar was originally built in 1983 by David Husain, luthier at Knut Koupee music store in Minneapolis. The design was based on a bass guitar Prince used in the video for “Why you Wanna Treat me so bad”. The first cloud was white an played an important role in the Purple Rain movie.
The cloud guitar features all maple construction and has a thru-neck. It is built using Gibson’s 24.75” scale length and has 22 medium/jumbo frets with a 12” radius on the fretboard. It is equipped with EMG active pickups (an 81 humbucker at the bridge and an SA single coil in the neck position) and Schaller hardware – a tunomatic style ‘457’ bridge/tailpiece and M6 machine heads. It has one volume control, one tone control and a 3-way switch. The fretboard is also painted (except for one black cloud that has appeared with a blank maple fretboard) . The fret markers are black dots, only the first white cloud has ‘symbol’ (spade) fret markers. Other hardware: Jim Dunlop strap locks and a brass nut. The truss rod cover is also made from brass. All hardware is gold plated.
From what I found on the net, the neck appears to be very thin (thinner than a Ibanez wizard neck, with extreme low action). Also important to mention is that the bridge pick up has a little distance from the bridge, the Schecter copies have the pick up almost placed against the bridge.
A great reference site is the Cloud guitar blogspot. This site contains a lot of info and links on the cloud guitar.
In short, it is known that Prince at least owned and used 4 cloud guitars, all called to a cardinal direction: north, east, south and west. The guitars have been modified and resprayed over the years to it’s hard to tell how many guitars Prince has used.
Duplicates have been made by:
- Schecter
- Knut Koupee (the original luthier)
- countless other people
So I am going to make one myself as well. What do we need:
- Create a templates for the body, neck, headstock, neck pocket cavity, pick-up cavities and electronic cavity from MDF or cardboard.
- Pick wood for the neck and body
- Roughly cut the body from the wood
- Route the body
- Route the neck pocket
- Shape the body
- Make the neck (angled headstock)
- Route the neck
- Shape the neck
- Route the pick up cavities and electronic cavities
- Put the neck and body together and install electronics for testing