Prince & His Guitars - Part Two

Part Two

The Hohner Telecaster

Prince started using this guitar in 1980. Its unmistakeable funk rhythm sound has graced just about every Prince recording since. Amazing when you take into account the fact that this guitar is just a cheap ‘off the shelf’ model.

Originally made in Germany, Hohner guitars were a cheap alternative to Fenders & Gibsons. Prince fell in love with its quirky looks and honking funk tone and has never let it out of his sight for long. He has several of these guitars, most of which have had the necks replaced over the years due to the fact that he has worn them out!

Even some of the guitars with replaced necks are starting to look worn – a clear indication of just how much Prince loves these guitars.

The Hohner follows the basic Telecaster design: 25 ½” scale length, 2 single coil pickups and a fixed bridge. The funky sound of this guitar owes a lot to the way the body is constructed. The majority of the body, apart from a strip of walnut down the middle is maple. The front and back are made from bookmatched maple (bookmatching is the process of splitting the wood down the middle and opening it up like a book in order to achieve a symmetrical pattern on both pieces) with the maple/walnut/maple sandwich in the middle (sounds delicious, doesn’t it?!).

The guitar had fake tortoiseshell binding on the front & back and two ‘leopard print’ plates on the front – one for the pickguard and a smaller one around the bridge pickup. A standard ‘Fender’ chrome control panel with a 3-way switch, volume & tone control also featured

Maple is a very dense wood and if you have ever played a Hohner Telecaster (or another maple-bodied guitar), you will appreciate just how heavy it can be. Dense wood makes for good tone in the world of guitars – something which the Hohner has in abundance.

In recent years Prince has changed the pickups in his Hohners (more about that later) but for a long, long time the pickups were standard. With the Hohner being a ‘cheap’ guitar, the pickups weren’t exactly quiet. Noisy pickups combined with Prince’s love of ‘Boss’ effects pedals made for a sound engineers nightmare! However, he insisted on playing the guitar, noisy pickups and all.

During the late 1980’s, Hohner re-released the Telecaster under the rather naughty name of ‘TE Prinz’ (TE being Telecaster, Prinz being German for Prince). This version was made in Korea and was not endorsed by Prince in any way. I guess Hohner just clocked the fact that Prince was playing one of their guitars and decided to release their own ‘Signature’ model.

The TE Prinz was pretty much the same as the original to look at. The only real difference was the logo on the headstock. These guitars had the small ‘Hohner Professional’ logo rather than larger, bendy ‘Hohner’ which the original had.

The two scratchplates had also now changed into a fake tortoiseshell material rather than the leopard design of old. The retail price of this guitar was a mere £199 (around $300). If you can find one for less than £1000 these days I would be very surprised. I’ve got one and I wouldn’t part with it for anything.

The TE Prinz was then re-released again in 1994. Sadly they weren’t funky at all. The tele shaped headstock had gone and the workmanship was terrible. The basics were there but this was a long way removed from the original and nowhere near as nice as the first re-issue.

Back to Prince’s Hohners… As mentioned earlier, Prince did eventually change his pickups. He now has Australian made ‘Kinman’ pickups in all of his Hohners.

These Are noiseless pickups but are still passive and retain that ‘vintage’ quality. Anyway who has been to any live shows in the past couple of years or heard any recent recordings will tell you that the Kinman pickups have given the Hohner a whole new lease of life.

Takumi (Prince’s guitar technician) told me that they had a really hard time buying the Kinman’s in the USA and when they did finally arrive, they had white pickup covers. Can you believe that Prince had Takumi take a black Magic Marker and colour the white covers in rather than buying some black ones?!