
Ever wonder what’s so special about the Queen guitarist’s custom guitar?
Brian May is one of the most immediately identifiable guitarists of all time, and part of his sonic mojo comes from his unique 6-string—the Red Special. Let's explore this instrument to learn how it works and discover how you can mod a production or custom replica to make it even more versatile. Once you understand the electronics, you'll even be able to rewire a Strat to Red Special specs.
Red Special history.
Guitar freaks know the story about May's main axe and how as a kid he built it with his father in the early '60s. From the moment May started playing with Queen—filling stadiums worldwide and recording monster hits—the Red Special's distinctive tone has been essential to his music. What makes this guitar different?
The Red Special boasts three single-coil pickups, Telecaster-style master volume and master tone knobs, and individual on/off and phase switches for each pickup. Like some older Danelectros, its pickups are wired in series rather than in parallel, and this yields a very fat, loud sound.
Photo by Chris Kies
The theory behind series wiring is that the ground wire of one pickup is connected to the hot wire of another pickup. As a result, they become a kind of compound pickup with one ground and one hot for both.
When wired in series, the pickups' impedance (resistance) is summed and the output is very high. (To learn more about series wiring, read "Stratocaster Parallel/Series Switching.")
May's original Red Special is constructed with unusual materials.
The body is made of oak and blockboard, and topped with a mahogany veneer. Its center block and neck consists of an unknown wood taken from an old fireplace mantel, and the fretboard is oak. The result is a kind of semi-acoustic guitar that's almost impossible to copy, but a standard Strat isn't a bad foundation.
If you're intrigued with the idea of configuring a Strat à la May, Image 1 is the wiring diagram for a stock Red Special. Naturally, you can physically arrange the on/off and phase switches to your personal taste.
Pickup details.
A big part of May's tone comes from the Red Special's Burns Tri-Sonic pickups. Though Tri-Sonics are single-coils, they're wider than standard Stratocaster pickups. This means if you want to install a replacement set of Tri-Sonics in your Strat, you'll have to enlarge the pickup holes in the pickguard and reroute the pickup cavities in the body. Fortunately, Burns also offers a drop-in replacement for Strat pickups called the Mini Tri-Sonic. These pickups sport ceramic magnets and a chrome cover, and have a typical DC resistance of around 7k ohms and an inductance of approximately 1.9H.
The Tri-Sonic's unique construction gives it richer harmonics than a standard Stratocaster pickup. In fact, a Strat-sized P-90-style pickup will get you closer to Brian May territory than a Strat pickup. But to get as close as possible, Tri-Sonics are the ticket.
The Red Special boasts three single-coil pickups, Telecaster-style master volume and master tone knobs, and individual on/off and phase switches for each pickup.
Instead of a common 5-way pickup selector switch, May uses an on/off switch for each pickup. This arrangement gives him seven different combinations from the three pickups. Besides the five well-known Strat combinations, he can also pair the bridge and neck pickups, as well as engage all three pickups. His Red Special uses slide switches, but mini-toggle on/off switches work just fine.
A passing phase.
On his Red Special, May also incorporates an individual phase switch for each pickup, so he can reverse its phase in any pickup combination. When two pickups are in phase, they work together and sonically reinforce each other. When they're out of phase, two pickups work against one another, cancelling many frequencies. The resulting sound is the "leftovers" from these cancellations.
Before we go any further, let's review two things about switching pickup phase: You don't have to engage two phase switches—reversing the leads of both pickups puts them back in phase again and thus yields a stock sound. And switching the phase of a single pickup has no audible result. For example, the bridge pickup by itself sounds the same whether it's switched in or out of phase. You can only get an out-of-phase sound when you use two pickups together and only one of them is out of phase.
So why add all these phase switches?
Consider this: There are two ways you can use the bridge and middle pickups together with one of them being out of phase with the other. The bridge pickup can be in phase and the middle out of phase, or the other way around. Each configuration delivers different harmonic content, especially when you're playing with distortion. The difference is subtle, but audible, and May is known for tinkering with this option a lot. It's an important part of his signature tone.
May typically plays with heavy distortion, pushing his amps hard with those series-wired Tri-Sonics. His out-of-phase sounds are an excellent choice for cutting through the mix, and this whole circuit is perfect for his playing style.
To get close to the Brian May tone, there are several more things to consider: He plays with very light strings (.009–.036) and uses an old sixpence coin as a plectrum. He also runs his guitar into a treble booster and a wall of Vox AC30s. There are other details, but to enter the May zone without breaking the bank, use thin strings, pick with a coin, plug into any Rangemaster Treble Booster clone, and use a Vox amp—ideally an AC30.
There is a Vox Brian May signature amp (the VBM-1), which was designed to mimic his studio sound and has a built-in treble boost circuit. Though the amp is no longer in production, it sometimes shows up used on eBay.
There are a lot of mods out on the web for Red Special replicas and clones, mostly designed to coax more sounds out of the guitar. My favorite (Image 2) is by John Hewitt, an Australian guitar tech and the mastermind behind the GuitarNuts website. This mod incorporates series/parallel pickup switching, leaves all stock wiring sounds untouched, and only requires one additional switch, which acts as a master series/parallel switch. Parallel switching of the pickups offers more traditional Stratocaster tones. Compared to the series wiring, it has reduced output but delivers enhanced clarity, twang, and top end.
All you need for this is a 4PDT mini toggle or slide switch. A mini toggle switch should be easy to acquire, but finding a 4PDT slide switch can be more difficult. Using the new switch is fairly simple: Dial in a pickup combination of your choice—for example, bridge-plus-middle—and you'll hear them connected in series (the stock wiring). If you want a more Strat-like sound, flip the new switch and both pickups are now wired in parallel for a more traditional tone. Flip it again and you are back to the stock series wiring.
This isn't an easy wiring project, so be methodical and don't rush through it. The third pickup wires (not shown in Image 2) from the Tri-Sonics are twisted together and soldered to ground as shown in Image 1's stock wiring (represented in green).
And that's it! Until next time, keep on modding!
[Updated 9/28/21]
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The country virtuoso closes out this season of Wong Notes with a fascinating, career-spanning interview.
We’ve saved one of the best for last: Brad Paisley.The celebrated shredder and seasoned fisherman joins host Cory Wong for one of this season’s most interesting episodes. Paisley talks his earliest guitar-playing influences, which came from his grandfather’s love of country music, and his first days in Nashville—as a student at Belmont University, studying the music industry.
The behind-the-curtain knowledge he picked up at Belmont made him a good match for industry suits trying to force bad contracts on him.
Wong and Paisley swap notes on fishing and a mutual love of Phish—Paisley envies the jam-band scene, which he thinks has more leeway in live contexts than country. And with a new signature Fender Telecaster hitting the market in a rare blue paisley finish, Paisley discusses his iconic namesake pattern—which some might describe as “hippie puke”—and its surprising origin with Elvis’ guitarist James Burton.
Plus, hear how Paisley assembled his rig over the years, the state of shredding on mainstream radio, when it might be good to hallucinogenic drugs in a set, and the only negative thing about country-music audiences.
Tom Bedell in the Relic Music acoustic room, holding a custom Seed to Song Parlor with a stunning ocean sinker redwood top and milagro Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
As head of Breedlove and Bedell Guitars, he’s championed sustainability and environmental causes—and he wants to tell you about it.
As the owner of the Breedlove and Bedell guitar companies, Tom Bedell has been a passionate advocate for sustainable practices in acoustic guitar manufacturing. Listening to him talk, it’s clear that the preservation of the Earth’s forests are just as important to Bedell as the sound of his guitars. You’ll know just how big of a statement that is if you’ve ever had the opportunity to spend time with one of his excellently crafted high-end acoustics, which are among the finest you’ll find. Over the course of his career, Bedell has championed the use of alternative tonewoods and traveled the world to get a firsthand look at his wood sources and their harvesting practices. When you buy a Bedell, you can rest assured that no clear-cut woods were used.
A born storyteller, Bedell doesn’t keep his passion to himself. On Friday, May 12, at New Jersey boutique guitar outpost Relic Music, Bedell shared some of the stories he’s collected during his life and travels as part of a three-city clinic trip. At Relic—and stops at Crossroads Guitar and Art in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, and Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center in Wheaton, Maryland—he discussed his guitars and what makes them so special, why sustainability is such an important cause, and how he’s putting it into practice.
Before his talk, we sat in Relic’s cozy, plush acoustic room, surrounded by a host of high-end instruments. We took a look at a few of the store’s house-spec’d Bedell parlors while we chatted.
“The story of this guitar is the story of the world,” Bedell explained to me, holding a Seed to Song Parlor. He painted a picture of a milagro tree growing on a hillside in northeastern Brazil some 500 years ago, deprived of water and growing in stressful conditions during its early life. That tree was eventually harvested, and in the 1950s, it was shipped to Spain by a company that specialized in church ornaments. They recognized this unique specimen and set it aside until it was imported to the U.S. and reached Oregon. Now, it makes the back and sides of this unique guitar.
A Bedell Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides.
As for the ocean sinker redwood top, “I’m gonna make up the story,” Bedell said, as he approximated the life cycle of the tree, which floated in the ocean, soaking up minerals for years and years, and washed ashore on northern Oregon’s Manzanita Beach. The two woods were paired and built into a small run of exquisitely outfitted guitars using the Bedell/Breedlove Sound Optimization process—in which the building team fine-tunes each instrument’s voice by hand-shaping individual braces to target resonant frequencies using acoustic analysis—and Bedell and his team fell in love.
Playing it while we spoke, I was smitten by this guitar’s warm, responsive tone and even articulation and attack across the fretboard; it strikes a perfect tonal balance between a tight low-end and bright top, with a wide dynamic range that made it sympathetic to anything I offered. And as I swapped guitars, whether picking up a Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides or one with an Adirondack spruce top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides, the character and the elements of each instrument changed, but that perfect balance remained. Each of these acoustics—and of any Bedell I’ve had the pleasure to play—delivers their own experiential thumbprint.
Rosette and inlay detail on an Adirondack spruce top.
Ultimately, that’s what brought Bedell out to the East Coast on this short tour. “We have a totally different philosophy about how we approach guitar-building,” Bedell effused. “There are a lot of individuals who build maybe 12 guitars a year, who do some of the things that we do, but there’s nobody on a production level.” And he wants to spread that gospel.
“We want to reach people who really want something special,” he continued, pointing out that for the Bedell line, the company specifically wants to work with shops like Relic and the other stores he’s visited, “who have a clientele that says I want the best guitar I can possibly have, and they carry enough variety that we can give them that.”
A Fireside Parlor with a Western red cedar top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
A beautifully realized mashup of two iconic guitars.
Reader: Ward Powell
Hometown: Ontario, Canada
Guitar: ES-339 Junior
I’ve always liked unusual guitars. I think it started when I got my first guitar way back in 1976. I bought a '73 Telecaster Deluxe for $200 with money I saved from delivering newspapers.
I really got serious about playing in 1978, the same year the first Van Halen album was released. Eddie Van Halen was a huge influence on me, including how he built and modded guitars. Inspired by Eddie, I basically butchered that Tele. But keep in mind, there was once a time when every vintage guitar was just a used guitar—I still have that Tele, by the way.
I never lost that spirit of wanting guitars that were unique, and have built and modded a few dozen guitars since. When I started G.A.S.-ing simultaneously for a Les Paul Junior and a Casino, I came up with this concept. I found an Epiphone ES-339 locally at a great price. It already had upgraded CTS pots, Kluson tuners, and the frets had been PLEK’d. It even came with a hardshell case. It was cheap because it was a right-handed guitar that had been converted to left handed and all the controls had been moved to the opposite side, so it had five additional holes in the top.
Fortunately, I found a Duesenberg wraparound bridge that used the same post spacing as a Tune-o-matic. I used plug cutters to cut plugs out of baltic birch plywood to fill the 12 holes in the laminated top. I also reshaped the old-style Epiphone headstock. Then, I sanded off the original finish, taped the fretboard, and sprayed the finish using cans of nitro lacquer from Oxford Guitar Supply. Lots of wet sanding and buffing later, the finish was done.
I installed threaded insert bushings for the bridge, so it will never pull out. The pickup is a Mojotone Quiet Coil P-90 and I fabricated a shim from a DIY mold and tinted epoxy to raise the P-90 up closer to the strings. The shim also covers the original humbucker opening. I cut a pickguard out of a blank and heated it slightly to bend it to follow the curvature of the top.
All in all, I'm pretty happy how it turned out! It plays great and sounds even better. And I have something that is unique: an ES-339 Junior.
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