Image: Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0 — via Wikimedia Commons

Red Special

Category	Strings
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Classification	electric guitar
Wikipedia	en.wikipedia.org
Wikidata	Q692489

Editorial note: The Red Special is a specific named guitar built by Brian May, not a generic instrument category. This page documents that single instrument and its sound. WP publication is recommended subject to CEO review.

Overview

The Red Special (sometimes called the Old Lady) is the electric guitar that the British musician Brian May built with his father, Harold May, between 1963 and 1965 in their home in Feltham, west London. May has used the Red Special as his primary instrument with the rock band Queen and on his solo work ever since, and the guitar’s distinctive bright, vocal, harmonically rich tone is one of the most recognisable signatures in popular music.

Origin & History

In the early 1960s the teenage Brian May wanted an electric guitar with a built-in tremolo system that would not go out of tune, and that would respond well to amplifier feedback. Commercial guitars of the period that met these requirements were beyond his family’s budget, so May and his father — an electronics engineer — designed and built one from scratch over about eighteen months.

The Red Special’s central body block was shaped from a piece of oak salvaged from a friend’s two-hundred-year-old fireplace mantel. The neck was carved from a piece of mahogany from an old table, and the fingerboard was made of oak finished with Rustins plastic coating. The vibrato system was built around a knife-edge pivot on hardened steel, with springs from a motorcycle valve return spring. The pickups were Burns Tri-Sonics, with a custom switching arrangement that May designed himself.

May completed the guitar in 1965 and took it through Smile (his pre-Queen band) and into Queen at the start of the 1970s. He has used it on every Queen recording from the band’s debut in 1973 onward and continues to play it live.

Design Features

The Red Special’s distinguishing features include:

Hand-built mahogany-and-oak body with internal acoustic chambers
24-fret neck carved from reclaimed mahogany
Three Burns Tri-Sonic single-coil pickups, each with its own on/off and phase switch — giving a wide range of tonal combinations including out-of-phase sounds rarely heard on commercial guitars
Custom knife-edge tremolo designed for stable return-to-pitch
Played with a sixpence coin rather than a plectrum, which gives the strings a distinctive bright attack

Cultural Significance

The Red Special is one of the most famous individual instruments in rock history. Its layered, orchestrated, harmonised lead lines on Queen recordings — Bohemian Rhapsody, Killer Queen, Brighton Rock, Somebody to Love, Brian May’s solo on Bohemian Rhapsody — established a guitar voice that no other player has matched on a different instrument. The guitar’s home-built origin has also made it an icon of DIY ingenuity in instrument-making. Brian May Guitars now produces a commercial Red Special model based on the original, and a wide community of luthiers and hobbyists builds replicas.