The Mesa/Boogie Mark II is a guitar amplifier used by Prince from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. It was used live and in the studio and appears on many of his most famous recordings.
He used it on his first tour in 1979, paired with a Marshall 1960a 4x12" cabinet. Both the head and cabinet were covered in fake fur. . His early Mark II amplifiers were the “B” version. For the 1999 tour, he acquired a Mark IIC+ Colosseum model and his IIBs were upgraded to the same specifications. These were paired with Bag End D-12M cabinets.
There are claims that Prince ran his Mark IIs clean and used his Boss pedals for distortion. However, he usually had a channel switcher onstage and later ran separate clean and dirty amplifiers. He also used the low-gain Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive. This would not produce the kind of high-gain distortion Prince was known for but was commonly used in hard rock and metal to boost an already-overdriven amplifier.
