Red Special

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

May, with his father'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. Brian purchased a set of Burns Tri-Sonic pickups but re-wound then 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 vibrato 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.

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.

Copies of the guitar were manufactured in a limited run of one thousand in the year 2000.

Greg Fryer, an Australian guitar luthier restored the original Red Special in 1998. He also produced 3 copies of the Red Special back in 1996/97 which he called John, Paul and George Burns. Brian has 2 of these guitars, John and George, while Greg kept Paul for himself.

In the year 2004 Andrew Guyton, [a guitar luthier from East Anglia, UK] manufactured 50 copies of the Red Special, 40 in Red to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the guitar and 10 in Green, He had previously seen a Guild copy available in Green and liked it.

Statistics

• Body
  • Oak and Mahogany, semi-solid body
  • Depth: 39 mm
• Neck
  • Mahogany
  • 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: 9"
  • 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: 40 mm
• Misc
  • Pickups: 3 modified Burns Tri-Sonic
  • Vibrato: Self-made
  • Pickguard/Pickup Surrounds/Vibrato cover: black Perspex
  • Controls: Master Volume, Master Tone, On/Off Switch for each pickup, In/Out of Phase Switch for each pickup
  • Weight: approx 8 lb (3.6 kg)

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external links http://www.brianmayworld.com/redspecial.htm http://www.brianmaycentral.com (new owner: under reconstruction)