ART STAR: "The Red Special"

Queen's lead guitarist, Brian May's homemade guitar:  The Red Special (aka The Fireplace and The Old Lady)

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A guitar that would define May's signature style, it was intentionally designed to feedback after he saw Jeff Beck playing live and making different sounds just by moving the guitar in front of the amp. He wanted an instrument that was going to be alive and interact with him and the air around him.

The Red Special was built by May and his father when he was a teenager in the 1960s.  Harold May, Brian May's father, was a genius.  He was an electronics engineer and senior draughtsman at the Ministry of Aviation, working on the creation of blind-landing equipment for Concorde.  Previously, Harold had served as a radio operator during the Second World War.  

May Senior was known for his resourcefulness and ingenuity.  

As money was tight, explained Brian, 'my dad made everything  He was a technical civil servant.  So he'd fix everybody's equipment.  Everything we had in our house was pretty much made by him; the radio, the TV, the record player...'

(below) Photo of Harold May, 1960

At the age of five Brian began taking his first steps toward learning music when his father began teaching him a few chords on the ukulele.  Piano lessons soon followed and on his seventh birthday, Brian awoke to find 'a Spanish guitar handing off the end of my bed.'  His hands were still a bit too small to play so Harold began by carving down the bridge.

Anatomy of Electric Guitar:

The Red Special: How it was made

Brian May and his father Harold with "the Red Special" Brian's guitar that his father helped him to build when he really needed one but couldn't afford it was made from an old fireplace mantle, a kitchen table, other odds and ends including finds from a raid on his mother's sewing basket: a knitting needle and buttons.  May liked the idea of fashioning his own guitar from scratch giving him more control over the way it would sound.  This is how he tells the story:

 (from Is this the Real Life by Mark Blake)  In the summer of 1963 the pair began the painstaking process of designing and building an electric guitar from scratch.  It took them eighteen months to complete but gave May a instrument that became his signature for the next 45 years.  The guitar's body was moulded from oak and blockboard: the neck was made from an eighteenth-century mahogany fireplace salvaged from a friend's house (two woodworm holes are plugged with matchsticks); the fret markers on the neck were fashioned from mother-of-pearl buttons scavenged from Ruth May's sewing box and sanded down by hand, while the tremolo arm was made from a piece of steel originally used to hold up the saddle of a bike and, recalled Brian, 'capped by mum's knitting needle'.  Two valve springs from a 1928 Panther motorcycle were then used to balance the strings' tension.  The only parts of the guitar not made from scratch were the pick-ups and the fret wire used for the strings.  As Brian and Harold's homemade pickups didn't give them the sound they wanted, Brian relented and installed Burns pick-ups.  'Then I bought the fret-wire from a shop called Clifford Essex in (London's) Cambridge Circus,' he recalled. 'But everything else was junk.' (p. 30-31)

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May attained a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College in 2007 and was Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University from 2008 to 2013. He has homes in London and Windlesham, Surrey

In 2005, a Planet Rock poll saw May voted the 7th greatest guitarist of all time. He was ranked at No. 26 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". In 2012, May was ranked the 2nd greatest guitarist of all time by a Guitar World magazine readers poll.

Brian May

From his official biography:  Dr Brian May, CBE, PhD FRAS, is a founding member of Queen, a world-renowned guitarist, songwriter, producer and performer, also a Doctor of Astrophysics, 3D stereoscopic photographic authority and a passionate advocate and campaigner for animal rights.