What IS Brian May's Guitar?!
Question: 1. I have heard 2 different storiies on how May's uniques sounding guitar came-about.
..a. That he disigned & built it from scratch
..b. That he took an existing guitar model; and modified it.
2..Is his "signature sound" mostly from the guitar or does he use filters to get his most common sound.
I hope to hear from "THE BUFFSTER" on this Quesiont :-)
Answers: 1. I have heard 2 different storiies on how May's uniques sounding guitar came-about.
..a. That he disigned & built it from scratch
..b. That he took an existing guitar model; and modified it.
2..Is his "signature sound" mostly from the guitar or does he use filters to get his most common sound.
I hope to hear from "THE BUFFSTER" on this Quesiont :-)
I'm not quite sure if I can write while I'm blushing . . .
Brian and his father did design and build it themselves. The mantel piece was used as the neck, since it had the qualities needed for the rigidity. The body of the guitar, to my understanding, was done from an old coffee table! It had the grain they were looking for as well as the thickness and width. It was definitely a "scratch" build, including the electronics.
I've seen Brian's rig and it's extensive. Although I can't give you the box-by-box layout of his effects [gnashing teeth], I can tell you that he has rack-mount effects as well as stomp boxes that his guitar signal passes through for that signature sound. I CAN tell you that among the array is at least one octave effect; one harmonizer; and one echoplex. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that his playing style, that is, his fingering on the fretboard, has a great deal to do with his sound as well. How many PhD's do you know playing guitar on a world-wide level? The man is vastly underrated.
i think he modified his amp to get the sound, I could be wrong. I know Van Halen did that and a bunch of other artist
I had a Guitar World magazine that featured the worlds craziest, priciest, coolest, etc. guitars. And they did a little feature on Brian May's....I think I recall that he and his dad built it out of some chunk of a 400 year old fireplace mantle from scratch...I don't know what the electronics are like, and I am sure he does use external electronics.
he built the guitar himself from a fireplace. i dont know if its true i looked it up on wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Special
He and his father hand built it from scratch, they actually made it out of an old fireplace.
His sound will be a combo of his guitar, strings, pickups, amp and effects.
He designed and built the guitar--The Red Special--from scratch with his father. They used an old mantel piece, knitting needles, and parts of motorcycles for it. The grand total for how much his guitar cost--maybe 12 pounds.
His signature sound comes from the guitar, the amps, etch...and he uses a six-pence coin as a pick.
Edit: He also uses a Deacy amp, designed by fellow Queenie John Deacon.
Hope this helps!
The 'Red Special'.
Brian and his father designed and built it.
Brian May= Queens lead guitar player.His Red Special,rocked
He and his father built The Red Special by using the wood found in a old fireplace mantle starting in August of 1963. 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 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 2 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.
Originally the guitar had a built in distortion circuit, adapted from a mid-1960s Vox distortion unit. The switch for this was in front of the phase switches. May soon discovered that he preferred the sound of a Vox AC30 distorting at full power, so the circuit was removed. The switch hole is now covered by a mother-of-pearl star inlay, but was originally covered by insulation tape.