The Guitarist
Brian May was born on July 19, 1947, is an English musician and astrophysicist most widely known as the guitarist, songwriter and occasional singer of the rock band Queen. As a guitarist he uses his home-built guitar, "Red Special", and has composed hits such as "Tie Your Mother Down", "I Want It All", "We Will Rock You", "Fat Bottomed Girls" and "Who Wants to Live Forever".
He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005 for "services to the music industry and for his charity work". May earned a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College in 2007 and is the current Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University. He resides in Surrey.
In 2005, a Planet Rock poll saw May voted the 7th greatest guitarist of all time.[4] He was ranked at No. 26 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
The Guitar
For the avid Queen fan like myself, the Red Special is the quintessential rock guitar.
It is a very unique guitar because it was originally built by Brian May himself, with the help of his father Harold in August 1963. The Red Special was his staple guitar in almost all Queen concerts, videos and recordings ever since!
What made it really special is how Brian used unconventional methods in order to create this guitar. Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia.org:
Most of the wood came from an 18th century fireplace mantel that a friend of the family was about to throw away. The neck was hand-shaped into the desired form; this was difficult because of the age and quality of the wood. According to May, there are two wormholes in the neck of 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 of the Red Special was made from oak, blockboard and mahogany veneer; 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. White shelf edging was then applied as binding. 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 with Araldite epoxy to reduce microphonics. He originally wound his own pickups, as he had for his first guitar, but he did not like the resulting sound using bending because of the polarity of these pickups: alternating North-South instead of all North.
The tremolo system is made from an old hardened-steel knife-edge shaped into a V and two motorbike valve springs to counter the string tension. The tension of the springs is adjustable by screwing the bolts, which run through the middle of the springs, in or out via two small access holes next to the rear strap button. To reduce friction, the bridge was completed with rollers to allow the strings to return perfectly in tune after using the tremolo arm (the arm itself was from a bicycle saddlebag holder with a plastic knitting needle tip). For the same reason, at the other end of the neck the strings pass over a zero fret and through a bakelite string guide.
In recent years, lots of replicas of the Red Special have been created, the most prominent are by Burns and Guild. There is even a company owned by Brian himself, aptly named Brian May Guitars, that makes replicas in the correct specifications. In my opinion, this is a good thing because other than the fact that Brian's making money out of it, the fans get a chance to own this one-of-a-kind guitar.
I've grown up listening to Queen's music. Watching their concerts (only in videos, which is doesn't fully represent the experience of watching the band live) wouldn't be complete without seeing Brian playing the heck out of his Red Special, which is truly a legendary guitar!
Photo source:
www.obsoletos.com
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