Red Special

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Brian May with The Red Special

Red Special is the personal guitar of Queen guitarist Brian May.

May, with his father Harold's help, began work on Red Special in August of 1963. Most of the wood came from an old fireplace that a friend of the family was about to throw away. The neck was hand-shaped until it reached the desired form, which was difficult due to the age and quality of the wood. Even today, according to May, there are two wormholes in the guitar.

The neck was finished with a 24 fret oak fingerboard. Each of the position inlays were hand shaped from mother-of-pearl buttons. May decided to position them in a personal way: two dots at 7th and 19th fret and three at 12th and 24th.

The body was made mostly of hard oak, blockboard and other woods; the final result was a sort of Semi-acoustic guitar—the central block is glued to the sides and covered with two mahogany sheets to give it the appearance of a solid-body guitar. It was then completed with three pickups and a custom-made bridge. May purchased a set of Burns Tri-Sonic pickups but re-wound them with reverse wound/reverse polarity and "potted" the coils, to reduce microphonics with Araldite epoxy. He originally wound his own pickups, as he had for his first guitar, but he didn't like the resulting sound using bending because of the polarity of these pickups: North-South-North-South-North-South instead of North-North-North-North-North-North).

The tremolo arm is made of an old hardened-steel knife-edge shaped into a V and two motorbike valve springs to counter the string tension. To reduce friction, the bridge was completed with little rollers to allow the strings to return perfectly in tune after using the tremolo lever. For the same reason, at the other end of the neck the strings pass over a zero fret and through a Bakelite string guide.

Originally the guitar had a built in distortion circuit, adapted from a mid-60's Vox distortion unit. The switch for this was in front of the phase switches. May soon discovered that he preferred the sound of an Vox AC30 distorting at full power, so the circuit was removed. The switch hole is now covered by a mother-of-pearl star inlay.

The name Red Special came from the red/brown color of the guitar after it was painted with numerous layers of Rustin's plastic coating.

Official copies of the "Red Special" guitar have been manufactured in varying amounts and in multiple models (i.e. a higher-end full-featured model, and a lower-cost one lacking some of the intricacies of the former) several times during the 1980's and 90's, most often by the Guild Guitar Company from 1983 to 1991 and by Burns Guitars in the latter 90's. Currently 3 separate companies manufacture "Red Special" models, Burns (a mass-produced model made in Korea), RS Guitars (hand-built in Arizona, US) and KZ GuitarWorks (replica-quality built in Japan).

Greg Fryer, an Australian guitar luthier, produced 3 copies of the Red Special in 1996/97 with permission from Brian, who allowed Fryer to x-ray the body for information on the internal cavities in the body, taking exhaustive body measurements for CAD/CAM reproduction, Fryer named his three replicas John, Paul and George Burns. May has 2 of these guitars, John and George while Fryer kept Paul, which was built with slight different tone woods for a "more aggressive edge" tonally for himself.

After viewing the replicas and taking notice on the wear-and-tear the "Red Special" had gone through during nearly 30 years of constant touring, May had Fryer restore the original Red Special in 1998 using as much original and time-period specific material as possible. Damaged veneer on the back of the guitar was removed and new pieces scarfed in. The binding was removed and various nicks and dents in the top were repaired. Fryer re-finished the neck and body in the original Rustin's Plastic coating used in the creation over the existing finish, and fingerboard wear was repaired and dot-markers replaced. The original electrics were also re-wired and overhauled, and cosmetic work such as wear and holes in access panels, pickup covers (worn by Brian's use of a sixpence coin as opposed to a standard pick) and the front scratchplate were filled in.

In the year 2004 Andrew Guyton, a guitar luthier from East Anglia in the UK, manufactured 50 copies of the Red Special, 40 in red to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the guitar and 10 in Green, as he had previously seen a Guild copy available in green and liked it. He has recently made another Red Special copy with a scalloped fretboard.

At the end of the Queen + Paul Rodgers tour in 2005, Brian May had several revisions made to his original red special, including having it refretted for the first time (this was judged not to be needed at the time of the 1998 restoration) and making a larger opening for a new jack.

The Overall price Brian May spent on his guitar was £17.50

Statistics

Body
*Oak and blockboard (with a mahogany veneer), semi-solid body
*Depth: 39 mm
Neck
*Mahogany taken from a two-hundred year old fireplace
*Neck Pitch: 2°
*Headstock Angle: 4°
*Width at nut: 47 mm
*Width at 12th fret: 51 mm
*Depth at 1st fret: 25 mm
*Depth at 12th fret: 27 mm
Fretboard
*Black-painted oak
*Radius: 7"+1/4"
*Scale length: 610 mm
*Number of frets: 24
*Fret gauge: 24 x 1.2
*Inlays: 3°, 5°, 9°, 15°, 17°, 21° (one dot), 7° and 19° (two dots), 12° and 24° (three dots)
*"Zero" fret with Bakelite string guide
Nut
*"Zero" fret with Bakelite string guide
Strings
*String spacing at nut: 41 mm
*String spacing at bridge: 49 mm
Misc
*Pickups: 3 modified Burns Tri-Sonic
*Tremolo Arm: Self-made from old motorcycle parts
*Pickguard/Pickup Surrounds/tailpiece: black Perspex
*Controls: Master Volume, Master Tone, On/Off (toggle) Switch for each pickup, In/Out of Phase Switch for each pickup
*Weight: approx 8 lb (3.6 kg)

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Red Special

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