Brian May handbuilt his guitar for that special sound.
The Red Special
May, with his father Harold's help, began work on Red Special in August of 1963. Most of the wood came from an old fireplace mantel that a friend of the family was about to throw away. The neck was hand-shaped until it reached the desired form, which was difficult due to the age and quality of the wood. Even today, according to May, there are two wormholes in the guitar[1].
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, to reduce microphonics with Araldite epoxy. 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: North-South-North-South-North-South instead of North-North-North-North-North-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 little 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.
The name Red Special came from the red/brown color of the guitar after it was stained and painted with numerous layers of Rustin's plastic coating.
The overall amount May spent on his guitar was £17.50.
