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Everything you need to know before playing ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’

By Queen standards, the arrangement of Fat Bottomed Girls is a stripped down affair, with just drums, bass and a couple of guitar tracks. Instead, the trademark Queen multi-tracking is reserved for vocals rather than the guitars. The song is based around open chords, mainly using D, G, F and A. The chords are linked together using 3rd-fret-to-open-string pull-offs on the two bass strings. Add some bluesy quarter-tone bends and you have all the ingredients for Brian May’s cool, sleazy hard rock riff.

Practise the riffs slowly while focussing on accurately fretting the chord shapes. Although the song sounds loose with a relaxed strumming approach throughout, Brian has immense control over his parts. Although there isn’t a solo as such, there are some string bends accompanying the vocals in verse 3 and a short burst of lead guitar during the outro. And, just a reminder, we’re looking at the album version from Jazz rather than the shorter single and Greatest Hits edits.

Brian May’s setup is simple, but, thanks to his home-built guitar, unique. Essentially though, he’s using the Red Special guitar through a Dallas Rangemaster treble booster into a Vox AC30 amp. The chances are, you don’t own any of these, but any blues-rockoriented amp will get you a usable overdrive tone. Dial in enough gain to allow the single notes to sustain, but not so much that the chords become mushy. Brian also uses the guitar volume pot to clean up the sound in the intro of this song, so check that your tone cleans up too. Brian’s pick of choice is an old English sixpence – a modern five pence will suffice for that clink of metal on metal. You can also add a subtle chorus effect to give the tone some added Queen character.