The distictively rectangular and blazing red Electromatic® Bo Diddley model features dual chrome humbucking pickups, a bolt-on maple neck with rosewood fingerboard, adjustable bridge, volume and tone controls, three-way pickup switch and die-cast tuners.
Unlike the primary instruments of most musicians, the original Red Special was built by May himself along with his father, Harold. They began to work on the guitar in August 1963. Most of the wood came from an 18th century fireplace mantel that a friend of the family was about to throw away. The neck was hand-shaped into the desired form; this was difficult because of the age and quality of the wood. According to May, there are two wormholes in the neck of the guitar.
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 with Araldite epoxy to reduce microphonics. He originally wound his own pickups, as he had for his first guitar, but he did not like the resulting sound because of the polarity of these pickups: alternating North-South instead of all 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 two small access holes next to the rear strap button. To reduce friction, the bridge was completed with 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-1960sVox 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.
He still uses the original but he has been using replicas in some performances since his own company (Brian May Guitars) builds this instrument. One of the most well known occasions on which the original guitar was not used is in the videos We will rock you , and Spread you wings since he did not want to expose the Red Special to snow. He also opted out of using the Red Special for the Play the game video, using a knock-off guitar based on a Fender stratocaster since at one point in the video, singer Freddie Mercury would snatch the guitar from him and "throw" it back to him (also the reason he used a cheap Satellite-badged copy instead of a real Strat). Another video that did not feature the Red Special was Princes of the universe, where May used a white Washburn RR11v (for reasons unknown, and this guitar is often mistaken for a Jackson Randy Rhoads. May also recorded the original version of "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and performed in the accompanying video with a Fender telecaster
Also check The Official Web Site for Brian May guitars
