BRIAN MAY: RED SPECIAL
The home-built electric guitar that's fit for a king
Brian May would sound unique even with an off-the-shelf guitar, but his instantly recognisable sound is thanks in no small part to his Red Special. Brian was just 15 when he began building a guitar with his dad, and they used parts they had available at home. The neck was from a fireplace and the solid core of the otherwise hollow body was from an old oak table. These timbers aren’t commonly used in guitar construction (even in later Red Special replicas) and have continually frustrated guitarists’ attempts to ape Brian’s tone.
So formidable were the Mays’ engineering skills that they designed and built their own tremolo system from scratch, a marked improvement on contemporary designs.
Again, they scavenged parts, rocking the tremolo against motorbike valve springs and using a saddle bag support from a bike for the tremolo arm itself, keeping the total cost of parts for the build incredibly low in the process.
Even the original pickups were homemade, with an ingenious design where the pickups were placed in the circuit simply by screwing them into the guitar. Unfortunately they made a scraping sound when bending strings that couldn’t be cured, so Brian bought a set of Burns Tri-sonics. These look similar to Strat pickups, but the tone has much more humbucker fatness, although with less compression and more top end. Brian liked them because they retained clarity on chords while sounding smooth and singing for lead lines.
Brian’s switching design is unique and incredibly versatile. Each pickup has its own on-off switch as well as its own phase switch. Unusually, the pickups are all wired in series, giving a huge, thick tone. Throwing any pickup out of phase gives a thinner, hollower sound. Brian’s Vox AC30 amps are always fully cranked with a Rangemaster Treble Booster (which in practice adds gain and upper mid) on full. With the guitar’s knobs on maximum, this produces a wall of fuzz that Brian almost never uses. His main sound is the bridge and middle pickups in phase, which depending on the guitar’s volume can take you from Under Pressure to Hammer To Fall. For the wailing lead sounds on Bohemian Rhapsody, he uses the middle and neck pickups out of phase. It’s a tone almost no one can replicate, not only because of the unique gear but also the outrageous volume required.