The Red Special: The guitar Brian May made with his father
Every musician’s story starts somewhere unique. For many, it was when they first heard The Beatles play. For others, like Mick Jagger, it was upon seeing Muddy Waters and knowing he wanted to bring the blues to the UK. For Brian May, on the other hand, his musical journey started in a workshop with his father, as the two of them slaved away trying to make a guitar together.
May always had an inkling for music and was keen on becoming a guitar player. The family’s issue, however, was that guitars were expensive, and they were by no means wealthy. As a result, they had to get imaginative.
“I desperately wanted a guitar, so when I was seven, Mum and Dad scrimped to buy an acoustic – which I still have – and he taught me the shapes on his banjolele. It wasn’t long before I had electrified it, plugging it into a homemade amplifier,” he said, “At 16, I was desperate for a proper electric guitar, but there was no way we could afford it, so Dad and I started making one.”
Brian May’s guitar is now iconic. It’s instantly recognisable and has been responsible for the music on every single Queen album and has to have its own bodyguard when May goes on tour. It has spawned a business out of producing replicas that members of the public can buy. When you consider the magnitude of the guitar and how much of a staple it is in the world of rock, it’s hard to believe that it once started life as scraps left around the May household, as old coffee tables, fireplaces, and matchsticks went into making it.
“I was seventeen, and my dad was a great electronics engineer and a craftsman, so me and my dad set about making a guitar,” he recalled, “I couldn’t afford a Stratocaster or a Gibson or whatever, so we thought, ‘We can make a guitar, and maybe we can make something that’s better than anyone’s ever made’.”
May admits that that was his Dad’s attitude to life, and it’s a mindset he ended up putting into his music: “My dad had that attitude, which I inherit: if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.”
While the guitar might be iconic because of the way it looks, it also contributed massively to the sound that Brian May achieved in Queen. May and his dad had no limitations when making the guitar, which meant that they could play around with the configuration, neck size, and pickups. This clearly impacted the guitar’s sound, which can be heard in the songs that May would go on to record.
“The combination you get out of three pickups, in and out of phase, are very many,” said May, “So I had a separate switch for each pickup and a separate phase switch for each pickup. You can get a lot of combinations. It means you have an incredible variation of tone and of sound.”
Once the guitar was finished, it was dubbed The Red Special. Since then, May has also opted to call it The Old Lady. Whatever name you decide on using, one thing is certain: May and his father made a part of music history in that workshop.
