One of the most recognizable sounds in the history of rock, that of Queen’s Brian May’s Red Special guitar, does not come from a very expensive instrument. It comes from a guitar that the guitarist built himself at home in the 1960s, as a boy, together with his father Harold. And, surprise, the credit doesn’t even go entirely to the guitar. The history of this guitar, also called “The Old Lady” and “The Fireplace”, is a little lesson in method. Faced with a limit, that is, not being able to afford an expensive guitar, Brian May did not stop: he designed an original solution, studied the electronics of the signal and obtained something unrepeatable. A helpful reminder: It’s often not the most expensive tool that makes the difference, but how we understand and put things together. Together with the guitarist Marco Di Marco, let’s find out how the Red Special is made and where that tone really comes from.
We are in the early sixties. The young Brian May can’t afford a Fender or a Gibson, so with his father Harold he decides to build a guitar from scratch, with the idea of making it even better than those on the market. The work lasted about two years, from 1963 to 1964. The materials are almost all recycled:
- The handle is made from an old mahogany fireplace over a century old, with the holes left by woodworms plugged with matches
- The body is made of oak and wood taken from old furniture
- The decorations are mother-of-pearl buttons
The Red Special has a semi-hollow body, i.e. partly hollow, which helps the instrument sustain notes and produce the controlled feedback Brian was looking for. The bridge and vibrato lever are built by hand, with springs from a motorcycle and the tip of a knitting needle. But the heart of the sound are the three pickups, the magnets that transform the vibration of the strings into an electrical signal. Unlike a Fender, where the pickups work in parallel, here they are connected in series, one behind the other: the signal that comes out is more powerful and full-bodied. Furthermore, each pickup has switches for on, off and phase reverse, which gives a huge range of sounds, including the thin and cutting tone of the most “operatic” section of Bohemian Rhapsody.
The timbre of Freddie Mercury’s guitarist does not arise from the guitar alone, but from a chain of three elements. The first is the Red Special. The second is the treble boostera small pedal that cuts the bass, enhances the medium-high frequencies and always stays on. Third is the Vox AC30 amplifier, pushed to the max. The pickups in series send an already strong signal, the treble booster increases it even more, and the amplifier goes into saturation, that is, it distorts in a natural and warm way, without modern distortion pedals. The result is that sound that is both distorted and crystalline. The key point is that it is enough to remove one of these three elements for the magic to disappear: it is the combination, not the single piece, that makes the sound.
