Brian May - History of his Guitars

[Music] hi guys gus here in this video we're going to be looking at the history of brian may's guitars before we start i just want to give a shout out to mark reynolds simon bradley and greg fryer for all the information that i used on the last video called um the history of brian may's effects so big shout out to them also check out simon bradley's book called brian may's read special it's an amazing book if you want to really go in depth into this subject brian was born on the 19th of july 1947. he was born in hampton hill london england brian's early influences were little richard frank sinatra and johnny ray and brian heard these singers on the radio growing up in england brian first took up piano lessons and actually got to grade four and interestingly also freddie mercury got to the same grade on piano later brian's influences would include hank marvin rory gallagher and eric clapton brian's father harold may was a big george formby fan and played the ukulele banjo and his father carried the instrument with him throughout world war ii brian was able to pick up the chords by listening to his father play songs such as when i'm cleaning windows and chinese laundry blues on his seventh birthday brian asked his mother and father for a guitar when he woke up on his actual birthday he found a giant guitar on his bed it was an eggmund acoustic guitar and this is a photo of brian's first guitar which is a small bodied eggman acoustic that he got on his birthday in 1954 as you can see the condition is excellent and brian has had this somewhat restored brian exchanged his eggman student guitar for a hair thread acoustic as you can see here this belonged to brian's band mate and friend dave dilloway dave dilloway played the bass in brian's band 1984 from 1964 until 1968. brian used this guitar from 1969 until 1972 brian did not see his eggman acoustic again until 1991 when at a band reunion of former members of 1984 his school friend and musical collaborator dave dilloway returned it to him brian was very thrilled about this and he even featured the guitar in the video for queen's headlong single brian says of his eggmund acoustic guitar i still have it and it's been through the wars over the years my mate took all of the finish off and drilled holes in it to make it do various things but i recently had it restored to pretty much how it looked on that birthday morning gleaming like a toffee apple it was nice and easy to play with the low action and early on i worked out that if you put your hand on the tailpiece and wiggled it you could get a sort of tremolo effect by 1964 brian and dave dilloway were already recording amateur duets together and by linking up their two reel-to-reel tape decks they discovered they could lay down guitars on one machine and perhaps base percussion and sometimes vocals on the other they would record tracks by artists such as bo diddly in the autumn of 1964 brian and dave formed a rapidly evolving band through which many schoolmates passed but which eventually settled with a lineup of bases john jag garner drummer richard thompson and harmonica playing vocalist tim steffel they named themselves after george orwell's novel 1984. brian talked about his hairfield acoustic in 1983 in guitar player i made it sound like a sitar by taking off the original bridge and putting a hardwood bridge on it i chiseled away at it until it was flat and stuck a little piece of fret wire material underneath the strings just very gently lay on the fret wire and it makes that sitar-like sound brian mentioned three occasions when he'd recorded with his modified healthred brian may used this guitar on tracks such as the night comes down he also used it on white queen from queen 2 in 1974 and also jealousy from the album jazz in 1978 these guitars were not expensive and they were made in germany in 1962 brian decided that he needed an electric guitar his father harold was an electronics engineer and his field of expertise was radar and radio in november of 1962 brian decided to make and design his own electric guitar pickups he went to his local hardware shop in kingston upon thames and bought some eclipse button magnets the pickup design was to have three magnets in a line the three eclipse button magnets were mounted in a line on a plastic base on each pickup went a few thousand turns of copper wire which was 48 or 50 gauge they were wound with a home made winder that his father harold built brian had to repair on his eggmund fingerboard a seventh fret dot marker he used a button from his mum's sewingboard he was actually mother of pearl to get it to fit properly he made a template a steel rod to stick it on and do the filing and polishing he used the same method to make the dot position markers on the red special guitar again all with mother of pearl buttons brian quickly found out that there was a problem with these pickups in fact he installed one of the pickups on his eggman guitar only to find out when he bent a string there was a strange noise as it moved across the pickup this is because the magnets weren't correctly lined up and the polarities were north to south rather than all north brian made the red special with his father in his dad's workshop this was just a spare bedroom in a small suburban house in felton middlesex it took about two years to build and was mostly done with hand tools such as planes chisels and saws and sandpaper the center of the body was taken from an oak table it took many hours of work and a lot of the tools were blunted shaping this piece of wood brian says a lot of swearing went on but eventually we got there quite often we'd slip up and something would go wrong and we think the whole thing was ruined but we'd find some way around it and repair it because brian was so comfortable with his old eggmund acoustic he used that as a basis for the red special on how he wanted the guitar to feel his old acoustic had quite a thick neck but had a low fret profile brian decided that he wanted two cutaways because he enjoyed getting up to the dusty end of the fretboard and therefore the guitar neck would have to be 24 frets brian says all of the hardware and electronics were designed from scratch because there was no such thing as tremolos and tremolo friendly bridges in those days i wanted to make sure that if the tremolo was used even to extremes the strings would return to the correct pitch brian and his father came up with several tremolo systems one of these was a tubular design on ball bearings later they had the idea of putting a bridge made of steel which rocked on a knife edge the bridge was sawn and filed out of a block of aluminium and tiny stainless steel rollers were used instead of saddles for the strings to go over at the tremolo end this would eliminate most of the friction brian himself filed out all the slots for the rollers and he even made the little rollers themselves brian says later when the guitar was in use every time i broke a string there was a risk of the roller disappearing since they're not captive within the bridge they're genuinely free running so unless we were lucky and could see it roll across the stage we had to have a supply of spares i used to make them myself but eventually we found somebody who could make the rollers for us this guitar also has a slightly shorter scale length than the normal fender and gibson guitars it makes the fingering easier and also the tone is somewhat brighter the red special originally had three pickups which were handmade by brian himself for each of those pickups three eclipse button magnets were mounted in a line 48 or 50 gauge copper wire was used for the coils these were wound on a homemade rounder because the magnets were not organized in terms of polarity string bending was a problem the string sound would cut out as the string moved over the three pole pieces brian decided to visit burns shop on tottenham court road in london the only pickups they had for sale at that time were the trisonics and they cost brian three guineas each these are the same pickups that are in the red special today to place a frets brian worked out with a slide rule all of the measurements and made a table of the results so he could get the threats in the exact right place brian says of the red special i don't think the red special ever actually been finished there were always little alterations going on but it is playable before it was finished which was very exciting i took it to school and showed my mates and everyone was amazed which was great i remember taking it even before it had strings imagining what it would be like to play one day okay guys let's talk about the body originally this guitar was going to be a semi-acoustic guitar and was going to have an f-hole the guitar was made from several pieces of wood at the center of the guitar which is used to anchor the neck is a solid piece of oak and this takes most of the strain of the strings the body shape itself is made from blockboard blockboard of course is made from various size of blocks of wood all glued together the guitar is then surrounded with plywood on each side which is sandwiched together the cavities were made by chiseling out the block board so brian made these cavities in view of having the guitar as an f-hole but then he decided he didn't need the f-hole as the guitar would still feedback naturally due to having the cavities the veneer used on the guitar was made from mahogany and this veneer was stuck onto the body using classical mite adhesive brian and his father used a reddish brown wood dye and then coated it with rustin's plastic coating which was brushed on all over the body guitar binding was not really available at the time so they had to improvise with edging that you would normally use for shelves this was cut down and stuck using evo stick the scratch plate was cut from black perk specs this needed to be quite large to cover the space for the pickups and also the hole for the switches too this made the guitar very easy to service as once the scratch plate is removed all the contact points for the pickups are easily accessible brian originally had an old vox fuzz pedal installed inside this guitar he drilled a hole in the scratch plate for the on and off switch after performing with the fuzz box installed he realized it wasn't really his sound so he removed it with a hole still remaining later greg fryer covered up the hole with one of brian's signature stars and abalone the trisonic pickups are constructed with a couple of bar magnets brian found that these pickups would squeal under high volume so he filled them with aerodyne to resolve the problem compared to his original handmade pickups they were slightly warmer and the combination of the treble boost and the ac30 it was a great sound and here we can see the control cavity and what we have here are six terminals and obviously these six terminals are from the three pickups which connect to the switching system the red special guitar is wired in series and there's an on and off switch for each pickup there's also a phase reversal switch for each pickup hence the numerous combinations that brian is able to obtain with this guitar one of brian's favorite sounds is when he puts the bridge and middle pickups together in phase brian says of this sound i've ended up using that sound for so many things this was a sound that brian used on the main riff for the song tie your mother down for the solo on bohemian rhapsody he used the neck and middle positions both on but one is out of phase and for the guitar sound on stone cold crazy brian used the neck and bridge pickups together both out of phase if we look at the volume and tone knob on brian's guitar these were actually made by him at imperial college actually on a real lathe the truss rod is made from a steel rod and it sits in a groove under the neck and fingerboard the truss rod hooks around the nut and bolt that holds the guitar together the headstock end of the guitar the truss rod is attached to a plate behind the nut and that is easily accessible okay let's talk about the neck the neck is made from mahogany and if you look real close you can actually see wormholes that brian plugged with matchsticks the fingerboard which is cambered was made from a very old piece of oak brian actually used rusting's coating on the oak fingerboard and sanded it down to give the impression that it was ebony he sanded it down so smoothly that it looks like glass one thing worth mentioning is that this guitar has never been rethreaded to play the guitar brian uses an old british sixpence the dot markers were made by using his mother's real mother of pearl buttons these were actually fashioned by hand and fitted the guitar has a zero nut and therefore the action is dictated by the zero fret rather than the nut and as you can see the strings go right through to the machine heads which helps to eliminate any friction brian brought his original tuners from clifford essex music store but has since replaced them with shallow looking m6s with perloid buttons brian feels this really helps with the tuning during the 70s and 80s brian used a very light gauge string set these were 8 10 11 22 30 and 34 brian tends to like the sound of older strings rather than new strings this guitar is a fender stratocaster and as you can see it is white with a maple fretboard and brian used this guitar between 1972 and 1973 on queen's tours brian found out that he didn't actually like the strat and ac30 combination so he tended not to use stratocasters in the future this next guitar is a martin d18 bryan acquired his first d18 in the early 70s ever since the early 1970s brian used the martin as his main acoustic guitar his original martin d18 can be heard on queen's funny how lovers over the years he's bought more of these this guitar is built out of mahogany and spruce it also came with features such as open tuners and a larger lower body and this next guitar is a gibson les paul deluxe lebron wasn't too happy using his stratocaster through the vox ac30 he started using a les paul instead for the 1974-1975 tour but this also ended up being disappointing for brian and therefore he went back to playing his red special but this guitar also didn't quite fit with brian style and he ordered a john birch replica as a backup brian says i used to think that the stratocaster would be the thing when i got one i always thought when i got enough money to get one of those that will be it then when i got enough i didn't like it the same with the les paul i thought the les paul would be it brian carried the gibson let's pull deluxe as a spare guitar on queen's sheer attack tour between 1974 and 1975. during the night at the opera tour between 1975 and 1976 brian played the red special on all the songs after being disappointed with the way both his strat and les paul combined with his vox ac30 amplifiers and thus this was the reason why he commissioned luthier john burch to make a replica of his fireplace guitar and actually had his debut on this very tall john burch was a noted luthier based in birmingham who along with john diggins made this guitar john burch was responsible for the super job famously played by slaves dave hill brian broke this replica in three pieces during a show in new jersey in 1982 it was repaired by suffolk luthier andrew guyton in 2006. brian may said i suppose you know the story of its demise did i throw it over the amps in a fit well obviously i would never do that but yes i think that's what happened this is the first replica ever made of the red special john diggins had also made guitars for tony naomi and angus young and this instrument was featured in queen's video we will rock you and although it had pretty much the same type of pickups as the original version brian actually wasn't satisfied with the tone one of its design flaws was that it had unstable tuning to quote brian i met john through tony naomi i hate to think of how long ago it was and at that point i had no proper spare which was a very difficult situation to be in if i broke a string i'd have to pick up the stratocaster or les paul which would sound totally different from my guitar so we came up with the idea of making a replica of my guitar and i had three spare pickups so he built it around those there were problems it turned out that the pickups didn't have the warmth that mine had and that the guitar was made of different materials so it really didn't have the sustain the tremolo wasn't accurate either and the neck was a lot thinner because it was regarded as insane to make a neck as thick as mine it was closer than the gibson or the fender to sounding like my guitar but it didn't really fulfill the job very well i used to break a lot of strings i suppose you get carried away with adrenaline and squeezed things further than you should otherwise so yes i'd pick up this guitar and it did okay but it wasn't quite there and that did frustrate me a bit having said that it was a nice piece of work some of its design flaws contributed to an unstable tuning this replica was sent to john page of fender and it stayed with him for about two decades luckily the chief designer at fender came to one of our shows and said he would build me a copy i'm really delighted because he's going to build me an exact copy of what i have even down to get in the same woods and building it the same way so brian here is obviously talking about john page who took ownership of the three pieces of the birch replica guitar unfortunately the fender replica of the red special never materialized so this next guitar is a gibson les paul custom with a bixby vibrato this concert was at fairgrounds in oklahoma city it's quite possible that brian didn't even own this guitar as it's only ever been seen once it had a big speed but no pick card on it so guys if you know anything more about this particular guitar please let me know in the comments this next guitar is a 1967 burns double six brian used this guitar from 1974 up to recently brian says i use this guitar on long away funnily enough i think i bought it because i like the pickups but i fell in love with the guitar once i started playing around with it and the song materialized the guitar actually inspired the riff that powers that song you can see elvis also playing one of these guitars in the 1966 movie spin-out and this 12-string electric featured a trio of traditional strat style single coils rather than the trisonics that would have originally featured on this guitar brian's guitar features a green burst and it was used on the queen song long away from 1976's a day at the races album brian still owns his guitar to this day and here we have a photo of brian using a 1966 burns baldwin bison and this is a photo from a rehearsal at ridge farm in 1975 and as you can see behind all the red special replicas he still owns this guitar to this day this model had a white finish and three burns resomatic single coil pickups it had a bound rosewood fingerboard and a residue vibralo this is a 1977 greco bm80 and brian used this from 1977 until 1978. greco are a japanese firm who specialized in making copies of american guitars brian says greco made a brian may guitar an exact copy they called it a bhm 900 or something they sent me an example and i said thanks very much for sending it to me it looks nice but it doesn't actually sound that nice why don't we get together and make it sound good too then you can put my name on it properly they never replied it would be nice if a real class company would do one for me you can see brian may playing this guitar during the video of the queen's song good old-fashioned lover boy here we have a 1977 ovation pacemaker 1615. brian has several of these guitars and they were the staple of live shows from 1977 until 1986. you can hear this guitar on the song love of my life and also the rhythm part in the first section of crazy little thing brian says of this guitar is nice stable and didn't give much trouble tuning wise love of my life is very piano based and we wanted to do it live but it would have been fiddly on the piano so i suggested to freddie that just he and i should do it and i picked up the 12 string i kind of evolved ways of making it do what i wanted so it became the guitar i used for that song i string it upside down with the lightest strings on the treble side that means that when i'm picking with my fingers rather than the thumb i'm picking the high strings so you can play tunes on it a bit more easily in fact both freddie and brian played one live each for crazy little thing called love and this next guitar is a 1978 vendor telecaster and he first used it at the rds arena in dublin on the crazy tour from december 22nd november 1979. brian says i honestly can't remember where it came from on the road if i was in la if there was time and it was a nice day i'd go down to guitar center to play around with guitars find something i could fall in love with but normally i was too busy so i think what happened was that i just asked someone to get me a couple of telly's you can see brian using this for the crazy little thing called love video and you can also see it on the video for backchat and at the live aid concert the guitar features two single coil pickups with the original magnetic plate guard brian can be seen also using a telecaster on a recording a 1967 model with natural finish but this however is owned by roger taylor roger taylor is actually a big guitar collector this is a 1967 fender esquire brian used his guitar in 1982 this guitar was also owned by queen's drummer roger taylor this guitar was used on the track sheer heart attack although originally thought to be a 1954 esquire the four bolt neck plate serial number dates the guitar to early 1967. the neck seems to be from a different era as it's missing its gold transition logo here we have a satellite stratocaster this was basically a copy of a fender stratocaster brian used one of these guitars in the early 1980s you can see it on the music video for play the game what made these guitars interesting was the somewhat hotter single coil pickups compared to a normal fender stratocaster these were made in japan and these were part of what we now know as the lawsuit era guitars the satellite strat is not a particularly high-end guitar in terms of quality but it is pretty sturdy and well-equipped this is a gibson flying v which brian was using from in the early 80s brian was asked if he had a large guitar collection he replied no i've got about half a dozen that's it roger taylor collects guitars i have one strat and one telecaster and a green sunburst 12 string burns i also have a flying v which is a recent acquisition this particular model seems to date back to the early 1980s the guitar featured a tobacco sunburst finish and two uncovered unbuckling pickups it also had white binding here we have a washburn tour rr11v and brian used this guitar on the music video princes of the universe in 1986. officially this instrument was used only once for the video of queen's 1986 song these are pretty rare and are part of washburn's rrv tour series which were produced for a very short period in the 1980s this guitar featured a floyd rose tremolo style bridge called the wonderbar tremolo it had a pickup configuration of one humbucker at the bridge and two single coils at the neck brian's guitar featured washburn branded emg pickups this is a guild rs replica from 1985. brian seems to have preferred this guitar a lot more compared to the birch and diggins special that he smashed back in 1982. guild partnered up with brian and released this limited line under the slogan would you play one guitar for 20 years these guitars seem to be pretty rare these days and it was actually quite desired back in the 1980s with number one being given to brian himself apparently brian no longer owns one of these guild replicas the pickups in these guitars were actually produced by dimazio however they didn't really look like the original trisonic burns pickups they had a black covering with brian may's signature on them just like brian's guitar this guitar is chambered it has a correct headstock angle and also features the zero fret the production run was between 1984 and 1986. there were also options such as mahogany or a flamed maple top roughly around 350 of these guitars were produced you can see brian using this guitar on the 1985 one vision video it's 1985 sale price was 1200 the next shape wasn't as fat as the brian may red special original the scale length is 24 inches although not entirely accurate this guitar was a step up from the greco guitar and it's worth remembering why i may did actually use this guitar on a few occasions this is a gibson chet atkins ce brian used this guitar during the queen magic tour in 1986. it was introduced by gibson in 1982. essentially it's an electro-acoustic classical guitar it features a thin line body and also features tone chambers to enhance the performance brian used this guitar on every date of 1986's magic tool brian says i use that live for who wants to live forever and i have a feeling that's a guitar on the record 2 but i wouldn't swear to it it has a lovely mellow gut string sound when we came across that guitar it was quite a revelation as trying to mic up acoustic guitars on stage is a nightmare and so it worked really well here we have a golden a12 semi-acoustic in this photo at the freddie mercury tribute concert can be seen using the semi-acoustic 12-string guitar it features a solid cedar top a maple neck a rich light fingerboard and a knot width of 1.9 inches it has a graftec nut and 22 frets here we have a greg fryer special replica back in the 1990s brian got in touch with luthier greg fryer for a potential replica of his red special when the whole process started greg approached it thoroughly even putting the instrument under x-rays to have a complete image of its internal cavities the result was three very convincing replicas named john paul and george burns although these versions are sold commercially may owns the original ones by friar and basically these are as close to it gets as the originals as with the original red special greg fryer used a centerpiece of oak and as with brian's it uses blockboard wings and front with veneers of mahogany it features a mahogany neck and also black painted lacquered oak fingerboard containing 24 jim dunlop 6130 frets including the zero fret these guitars even feature the rustin's plastic coating for the clear finish they come with the trisonic replicas made by ken armstrong also the original handmade bridge and vibrato tailpiece will also recreated as accurately as possible this is a guild f512 from 2003. in the 2000s brian was seen using the guild's 12 string acoustic guitar it had a spruce top and indian rosewood back and sides brian can be seen using these guitars when he was on tour with paul rogers in 2004. this is a guy ton guitars bm green andrew guyton became known for his restoration of brian may's original red special and with this knowledge and experience he was more than well qualified to make the red special replicas the collaboration between brian and his tech pete malodrone and andrew guyton resulted in these replicas one of these is completely painted green again the original red special was once again x-rayed in order to get close to the original design this guitar is called a bmg super this is a replica of the red special guitar bmg stands for brian may guitars which is brian's own company and they are the only ones licensed to make this particular double cutaway guitar design this guitar is slightly upgraded the lower part of the body is slightly enlarged for a bulkier sound and it has a modern tremolo system it has a super graphic logo on the front side of the body brian used this guitar for his european tour back in 2005 and 2006. this is a bng face from 2007. brian got this guitar from barry moorehouse for his 60th birthday it is made by brian made guitars and features a special custom finish created by artist paul karl slake the guitar is known as the face guitar since it features brian's face on the front of the body brian modified the instrument by wiring the pickups in parallel and you can see it on the rock the cosmos tour with brian roger taylor and singer paul rogers and here we have a gibson sg standard etune from 2013. brian says of this guitar i have always loved the sg ever since a friend of mine at school woolly hamilton traded his telecaster for one looking for a new sound which i think he found i'm getting used to the new min etune function which is a great tool in the studio for quick alternative tunings and opens up a whole new world of opportunities so this guitar has the robot tuners helping you tune up a guitar if you have problems tuning it this last guitar is the bmg the born free special from 2014. this guitar comes with a laser-cut stainless steel body it was done by artist dwayne becknell the guitar was crafted as both a tribute to cecil the lion and as an effort to ban world cat hunting as a tourist activity this also explains the lion seal behind the headstock this instrument comes with a maple and carbon fiber neck the nickname comes from the charity single born free which brian did with kerry ellis back in 2012. in the songs video you can see brian playing this very guitar you can also see brian using this guitar when both may and ellis toured the acoustic by candlelight tour thanks guys so much for watching this video i really appreciate it we're going to be back really really soon but don't forget to leave some comments because i actually do read every single comment that you leave thanks once again i'm goose signing out take care god bless

Channel: The Guitar Show

Views: 39,748

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Id: 0rBaonIk-G0

Length: 31min 3sec (1863 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 02 2021