Guitarists are a special breed, and many of them have a close connection with the instruments they play. It might be a specific brand of guitar, or a certain setup required to achieve the sound they’re looking for. No one has a closer bond with an instrument than Brian May to his Red Special.
The guitar he toured with and played through his career with Queen and beyond had very humble beginnings. It was built from scratch by Brian and his father Harold May.
It was the early 1960’s and a young teenaged Brian May wanted an electric guitar. The problem was that the relatively new instruments were still quite expensive — into the hundreds of dollars. Well beyond the means of the modest family’s budget. All was not lost though. Brian’s father Harold was an electrical engineer and a hacker of sorts. He built the family’s radio, TV, and even furniture around the house. Harold proposed the two build a new electric guitar from scratch as a father-son project. This was the beginning of a two-year odyssey that resulted in the creation of one of the world’s most famous musical instruments.
Brian was already an accomplished guitarist, learning first on his dad’s George Formby Banjo-ukulele, and graduating to an Egmond acoustic guitar. Brian’s first forays into electric guitars came from experimenting with that Egmond. If you look close, you can even see the influence it had on the final design of the Red Special.
Body and Neck
The neck of the guitar is mahogany, made from a Victorian era fireplace mantle. The building which housed the fireplace was long gone, and Harold happened to have the mantle in his workshop. Brian filled the wormholes with matchsticks as he carved out the neck.
The center body of the Red Special was created from oak, the wood recycled from an old table. The sides of the guitar could be made of weaker material since they don’t have to support the string tension. These were made from blockboard — an engineered material made from blocks of softwood sandwiched between two pieces of veneer. All this wood was cut, carved, and shaped using only hand tools. Oak and mahogany are hardwoods, so one can imagine how long it took to carve a block of it into something resembling a guitar neck.
The neck isn’t a solid chunk of wood. Most guitar necks include a steel rod called a truss bar. This rod helps the wood pull against the tension of strings. The Red Special is no different. Brian and Harold heated one end of a steel rod, then bent it into a loop. The loop was bolted at the body side of the guitar, while the rest of the bar runs through the neck to the headstock end.
Brian originally wanted the guitar to be semi-acoustic, so he carved resonant chambers into the block board. He even planned to make an F-hole in the guitar body. Once the guitar was done though, he couldn’t bring himself to cut a hole in the mahogany veneer which makes the outer skin of the Red Special.
Tremolo
Rock guitarists need a tremolo (or vibrato) system. This is the “whammy bar” which can add or remove tension on the strings, allowing the guitarist to bend all six notes at once. The problem with tremolo systems on guitars is that they don’t always come back to a clean neutral point when the musician is done bending the notes. One or more strings will be out of tune. The Fender synchronized tremolo had this issue, and the problems always came down to friction.
Brian and Harold spent a lot of time on the tremolo system. They used the neck of the guitar-in-progress to create a tremolo testbed. The pair went through three revisions before settling on the final design. Friction is eliminated everywhere possible. The entire tremolo assembly rides on a knife edge, which Brian and Harold hardened using case hardening compound over the kitchen stove. The strings ride in roller saddles. Brian made each of the rollers using a hand drill as a…
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