In the pantheon of rock gods there are several iconic guitars that are inextricably linked to certain guitar players: Jimmy Page’s double-neck Gibson, Jimi’s scorched, backwards Strat, Pete Townsehend’s SGs. But perhaps one of the most iconic axes is Brian May’s Red Special. Everyone plays a Les Paul or a Strat now and then, but the custom built Red Special is forever linked to Queen guitarist Brian May. Sure you can buy a replica, but the heart and soul of that guitar belongs to the man who built it and has played it for over 40 years.
Red Special began its life as a Victorian-era fireplace mantle. The story goes that May had begun playing lead guitar and needed a good electric but couldn’t afford the Gibsons and Fenders at his local shop. A family friend was getting ready to dispose of a mahogany mantle and May decided to repurpose the high-quality wood to meet his electric guitar needs.
Enlisting his father, a draftsman and electronics whiz, May set out to build the perfect guitar for his needs. The neck was carved, with some effort due to the quality of the old wood, out of solid mahogany. The fretboard—a full two octaves—was made of oak and inlaid with mother-of-pearl markers May formed from old buttons. The frets on Red Special, incredibly, have never been replaced, despite over 30 years of constant touring.
The body of the guitar is also made mostly of oak with a mahogany veneer. While Red Special looks like a solid body guitar, it is actually partly hollow. May designed it to have “acoustic pockets” to make the guitar more naturally resonant and more prone to feedback than a solid body.
The electronics are another unique aspect of Red Special. May originally wound his own pickups for the guitar, but was unsatisfied with the sound he got out of them. He opted for a set of Burns Tri-Sonic single-coil pickups. Not content with the sound of these pickups as they were, he rewound them and potted them in epoxy to make the pickups less microphonic.
May also wired the pickups differently than most guitars. They are wired in series (most guitars are in parallel). Each has its own on/off switch and each also has its own phase reversal switch. This gives Red Special several more tonal options than most guitars have.
Red Special’s tremelo system is another work of homebrew genius. Long before the Floyd Rose locking tremelos popular from the ‘80s onward (oh how many guitars were routed out and destroyed to accommodate those things!) Brian May devised a tremolo system that returned the strings to their original position after dive bombs and flourishes. To do this May used some rather unorthodox materials—not to mention an incredibly ingenious design. The materials used include springs from motorcycle valves and a tremelo arm made of a bicycle saddlebag holder.
Next time we’ll investigate how Brian May gets that distinctive sound out of Red Special and look into the different Red Special replicas that have come out.
