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History
The story of the Red Special begins in August 1963:
The place, Hampton/Middlesex, near London.
Ever since he was a kid, Brian used to study piano, but a few years later he picked up classical guitar, which then became his main instrument. His talent, however, soon took him further.

To join the rock world, he had to own an electric guitar, but Brian’s family couldn’t afford to buy him an expensive one (Brian was 16 at the time). So he and his father (an electronics engineer) set out on their project to build what would have unknowingly become “the most famous guitar of all times”!: the RED SPECIAL .

They turned one of the rooms of their house into a lab, never using fine wood, but the most unusual and unlikely material they could find at home or elsewhere.

For instance, the neck was carved out of a century-old mahogany fireplace mantle.
Oak was used for the fret fingerboard, then painted in black to give it that “ebony look””, while mother-of-pearl buttons Brian found in a sewing box were stuck as position inlays.
The fingerboard had a short 24” (610 mm) scale length with 24 frets, (later modified), zero fret with bakelite string guide.
The body was made out of an oak central section and layers of blockboard stuck onto the sides and covered in a mahogany veneer. The tremolo block (as the bridge and Tone/Volume knobs), built by Brian at the school workrooms, was rocked against a case-hardened steel knife edge, with the main body connecting the vibrato bar.
Two springs/valves from an old motorbike were used to counter string tension, while to reduce tension to the minimum, the bridge was fitted with small rollers to help the strings return perfectly in tune even after banging on the tremolo bar.

Now here comes the soul of the instrument: the pick-ups.

Brian and his father initially made the pick-ups themselves, but got the magnet polarity wrong and bad results too: at the first Binding, Brian got a nasty sound, so they opted to buy the components, choosing a set of three English Burns Tri Sonic pick ups they opened and modified, potting the coils with Araldite epoxy to reduce microphonics.

All the guitar was then coloured with a particular red (giving it its name, Red Special), and later lacquered with various layers of Rustin’s plastic coating (the fingerboard too), which gives a particular touch and gives great results in protecting the instrument from time wear.

After almost two years of hard work and a total cost of only £8, the results were so impressive that Brian brought the guitar along with him when he joined the Astronomical Physics School of the Imperial College of London in 1965, hoping to rise the ranks on the hot music scene of the capital where the history of Queen would have begun.

Brian May and the Red Special, still very close after more than 40 years.