It’s pouring rain (purple or otherwise) at the Super Bowl, but the halftime show goes on. Why is no one getting electrocuted?
Lip synch and pre-recorded music?
More likely, just good isolation of audio signals from mains electricity. This can be done easily and quite fancily with battery-powered analog to digital converters that take in signals from mics and guitars and shoots them off via optical fiber. Or just plain old isolation transformers.
Here at my house we looked carefully and nobody could see any wires/cables coming from Prince’s guitar.
-Joe
On top of it, I figure those five inch high platform boots Prince wears are neato insulators.
Fresh water (e.g. rain) is not an especially good conductor.
Merijeek
Could be he was using a wireless guitar. (that is to say a radio transmitter going to a receiver elsewhere. NO contact at all between player and amp).
I’m not convinced. Water has more in it than just H20, otherwise it would not leave a residue on cars nor would it be slighly to mildly acidic. Since it is known to pick up some nasties from the air on the way down, aren’t these solutes good electrolytes neecssary for conduction?
What’s more likely in that situation - a wireless guitar or a lip-sync?
-Joe
Because we are not THAT lucky.
God is pissed at the U.S.A. but he/she isn’t quite ready to kill the Super Bowl.
Even the small 200-person-crowd bands now use wireless units for their instruments (Nady is a big brand, IIRC). The only person I’ve seen use a corded mic or instrument in the past 15 years is Roger Daltry of The Who, and that’s because he wants to swing the mic in big dramatic arcs by using a long cord.
As I understand it, rain on powered equipment doesn’t mean you’ll get shocked, if it’s grounded correctly. You have to make sure that the shortest path to a completed circuit is not through the performer, and then there has to be enough volts and amps to matter to the person (which I think a lot of that equipment has). Plus, I think Prince was wearing thick soled shoes, which means it would need a lot of power to jump to the ground through him, making the correct path the shortest circuit for the electricity.
Oh, and that was either live, or the single best lipsynch EVA. Those weren’t the studio standard renditions of those songs, so the simplest explanation is that it was live. I think with his decades of experience, he can pull off an actual live performance.
It was live. When he knocked over the mic at the end, it made a pretty loud crash.
But back on topic, did anyone else notice the rubber pad he was standing on for most of the performance? I’m sure it was there for traction, but perhaps a secondary concern for electrical safety? Would a rubber pad make any difference in such a situation?
The singing was certainly live, but I don’t think the guitar was. To my eye, what I was seeing and hearing did not go together at all. I don’t see how a stringed instrument would work well in the rain, anyway. It seems to me that the added weight of the water droplets on the string would adversly affect the pitch and timbre of the instrument.
I watched pretty closely, and it looked like he was playing live guitar to me. It’s also possible that the whole thing was pre-recorded as well as being played live, and then the sound person selected live when acceptable and switched to recorded as needed. I’ve never been in such a situation, but I’ve heard they do that for the big TV extravaganzas.
People at my house were sure the guitar was faked because he had his strumming hand away from the guitar while was playing. I had to explain left hand tapping techniques a few times, and I’m not sure that everyone got it.
I thought about left hand technique, but wouldn’t the rain water still have been an issue?
No thanks, I just ate.
It was there because Prince isn’t quite housebroken yet. They may have to crate him, I hear.
I’ve been playing guitar for over 40 years and IMEO Prince was playing it live. He’s actually a pretty good guitar player for a guy whose main claim to fame is singing, songwriting and showmanship. He was definitely using a lot of hammers and pulls and (harder to say about taps) in the left hand, which can be pretty showy. He was doing a lot of other stuff too that is next to impossible to sync.
He also had a wireless transmitter. It was very cleverly disguised by wrapping it in material that matched his guitar strap. If you looked carefully you could see a box a little bigger than a pack of cigarettes attached near the low end of his strap. You could only see it when his back was to the camera and probably wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking for it. I have one of these and the good ones are very reliable with excellent sound quality. But mine doesn’t match my strap. 
I have never played outdoors in the rain so I am not familiar with the challenges and hazards of doing so. Heck, I’ve gotten a few shocks off mikes when either the mike or my guitar was not properly grounded indoors. There was a well-publicized elctrocution death when a Stone The Crows guitarist Les Harvey had a similar but fatal experience.
Water just makes it all worse.