Brian May admits he once doubted whether his Red Special guitar was good enough to cut it in Queen. Built by the guitarist when he was teenager, with assistance from his dad, the guitar was constructed from repurposed materials, including wood from an old fireplace mantle.
Despite sneers from guitarists who were convinced he’d never make it without a commercially made instrument, May fought through adversity to make the one-of-a-kind instrument the band’s secret weapon.
Speaking to Guitar World to promote the special anniversary reissue of the group's debut, Queen I, May addressed the guitar's various issues and tonal challenges.
“The Red Special held up surprisingly well,” he says. “I did have doubts in the early days because I knew it sounded different from what everybody else was using. It was different from a Strat: it’s warmer. It’s different from a Gibson: it’s got more top-end. It’s got a very wide sound.”
As the story goes, May and his father teamed up to make a guitar after the youngster was priced out of the market.
“At that time. we thought it would be interesting to make a guitar, seeing as I couldn't afford a Stratocaster,” May explained in Guitar Player's January '83 issue.
it’s body shape was plucked straight from May’s 15-year-old imagination.
“It's not exactly like any other guitar,” May explained. “We did a lot of experiments, and I played some of my friends' guitars, like Stratocasters and Hofners. It's pretty small. but the sort of shape that the semi-acoustic guitars had in those days, like the Gibson ES-335.
“But it's not symmetrical. I wanted it cutaway more on the underside so I could genuinely get up to those top frets."
Building the guitar required resourcefulness. The wood for its neck came from the fireplace mantel, while the body woods included oak scavenged from an old table.
"We made everything totally from scratch with hand tools,” May said.
It was up to his father, an electronics draftsman, to wrap his head around the electronics and craft the guitar's pickups.
Not surprisingly, the amateur luthiers came across challenges and problems as they set to work. The pickups were the first to be dealt with.
“[They] sounded pretty good except they had one bad fault,” May admits. “When you would squeeze the strings — bend them across the fingerboard — they would make this kind of rushing sound because the pole pieces went north-south, north-south, north-south, instead of north, north, north, north, north, north.”
“I eventually bought some Burns pickups,” he continued. “Burns were making guitars in England at the time, and they made some of the stuff for the Shadows.”
May and his dad had better luck building the guitar's vibrato. May says “it's better than anybody else's."
“The strings lock onto a milled steel plate which pivots on a case-hardened knife edge,” he details. “The tension of the strings is balanced by two motorcycle springs. There is very little friction in the system. I also designed a special bridge that has rollers that move instead of the usual arrangement where the strings come over a fixed bridge. It really performs quite well."
Even so, he admits it has one major flaw.
"The only big problem comes if you break a string; the whole thing goes out. It's hopeless. You just have to put it down!”
Although it looks like a solidbody, the Red Special is hollow. May had intended to cut f-holes in the top but couldn't bring himself to do it after he saw how good it looked as it was.
In the end, it took two years to build the Red Special — May was 17 when it was completed — as well as a fair amount of persistence and faith.
“Everyone had told us, ‘Nah, it’s never going to work,’" May recalls. "But hearing it back through the speakers was thrilling,” he says smiling as he recalls hearing the guitar on the playback of Queen's debut. “We thought, ‘We can conquer the world.’ That self-belief has to be there. It has to be the source of your power.
“The Red Special was designed to make that kind of noise. We wanted it to sing. We wanted it to feedback. That’s why it’s got the acoustic pockets in the body. I still don’t know if it was all thanks to our design or luck, but it just made that sound. Still does.”
The Red Special was designed to make that kind of noise. We wanted it to sing. We wanted it to feed back
Brian May
Part of that is undoubtedly down to May's use of a Rangemaster Treble Booster into a Vox AC30, a setup he copied from Rory Gallagher. As he tells Guitar World, he’d met the Irishman after he played a London show with his early band Taste.
“I saw Rory Gallagher and managed to stay behind at the Marquee when everyone had gone home,” May reveals. “I asked him, ‘Rory, how do you get that sound?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s easy, I have the AC30 and this little box, and I turn it up and it sings for me.’
“The next day, I went to a guitar shop and found two secondhand AC30s for £30 each. I found a Treble Booster. And that did it. I plugged in with my guitar, turned all the way up, and it just melted my stomach. That’s my sound.”
Interestingly, Gallagher’s booster of choice, a Number 1 Rangemaster, now belongs to Joe Bonamassa. It is believed to be the same pedal that informed May’s now-iconic guitar rig.
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