The Story Of The Home Made Guitar That Rocked Queen And The World
Here’s a shot of the Red Special‘s scratchplate, one that’s at a slightly different angle to that of the image featured in the book. It shows not only the bevelled edges and modest width of the material, but also the three pickup surrounds and the wounds of over 50 years in rock ‘n roll.
A lovely shot of the Red Special on the day it was finished, propped up on a chair in living room of the May family home, Feltham, October 1964.
Note the original features; the headstock logo, those quaint radio knobs, the guitar’s first tuners and the orginal pickups. This also shows the vibrato arm in its original configuration. When compared with images from the earliest Queen gigs, it’s far straighter here than it became, developing a kink that was adopted for the Burns and BMG guitar’s vibrato arms of several decades later.
Two images of the 12th fret dot inlays of the Red Special. The contrast of the second has been adjusted to highlight the fine cracks that have appeared in the central dot, one that was actually replaced by Andrew Guyton during his 2016 restoration of the guitar. It was, by all accounts, ‘wafer thin’.
Image (c) Duck Productions
Image (c) Duck Productions
And here are some of the original buttons that the teenage Brian ‘sourced’ from his mother’s sewing box during the build. They’re all either pearl or mother of pearl and Brian meticulously shaped each one of the Red Special’s 16 fingerboard dots by hand. He recalls that he could get ‘two or three’ from each pearl button.
Inage (c) Duck Productions
Here’s a great shot of the contraption that Harold and Brian May made – from scratch, of course – upon which they wound the three pickups that were originally fitted to the Red Special. Sadly, they didn’t quite do what Brian wanted, so he shelled out for a trio of Burns Tri-Sonics and the rest is history.
Image (c) Queen Productions
We’ve been very fortunate to have been able to grab a few minutes with Dave Colquhoun, a Cumbrian guitarist who was one of the music coaches on the recent Oscar-winning Freddie biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, aiding Gwilym Lee and, more extensively, Rami Malik in mimicing the guitar styles of Brian and Freddie.
He’s toured and worked with many bands and musicians since winning Guitarist magazine’s Guitarist of the Year shindig in 1994, and has also gone on to become an established teacher. Currently he’s guitarist in Rick Wakeman’s English Rock Ensemble and lives in the South East.
Interview by Simon Bradley (c) The Red Special.com 2019
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Dave (right) with Brian and Rick Wakeman. Image (c) Queen Online.com
SB: When did you first meet Brian?
Dave Colquhoun: It would have been when he guested with Wakeman at 2015’s Starmus Festival in Tenerife. I’m into running, and I’d gone for a run the day before and sprained my ankle. Turns out I’d actually broken it and, as is the way of things, pretty much everyone took the mickey out of me. Brian was the only one who gave me any sympathy and, from there, he started taking an interest in my playing. He’d ask me technical questions and it was a bit surreal. I got a get well soon card from Brian and Anita too, which was so nice of them.
SB: So how did you get involved with the film?
DC: Brian asked me to do a gig with him and Kerry Ellis for Radio 2, the Michael Ball show, in 2017, which went well, and we just kept in touch. Moving on from that I got a bizarre call from Becky Bentham, who was the Music Supervisor on the film, asking me if I was available the following week to come down and do this thing. I didn’t even know that the movie had been commissioned and I didn’t really understand what it was they wanted me to do. I had to send some pictures for the body doubling; whether I’d fit into the costumes was the main issue. I filmed a couple of solos because they were interested in hand-shape, that sort of thing, too. Yeah, so that was on the Saturday and the day after I was on-set for the Live Aid thing, sitting around in a wig!
Dave with Brian in the background. Or is it… wait… wha’? Fun on-set… Image (c) Dave Colquhoun
SB: What was your role on the film?
DC: Gwilym would have been doing guitar lessons for six months by that point and he just about had it down, although I did coach him for the Smile gig section, Freddie’s first gig. I was brought in as a double, so it was full-costume fittings, although I didn’t know whether I was actually going to be used, but I did continue to check in with Gwil and offer him moral support and approval.
Gwilym Lee and Rami Malek. Image (c) Alex Bailey
DC: Nobody really knew what the director would be looking for, although I think in hindsight he wasn’t really that interested in the guitar thing. I think the actors really wanted to do it all themselves, for obvious reasons, and Gwilym had done so much work to get to the level he got it to. After about seven days it became apparent that I wasn’t going to be used for anything much!
DC: Anyway, there was Live Aid and all these other different locations; basically all the music stuff moved around. I did the Rockfield stuff and the scenes at LH2, pretty much everything, but… I used to get in at 6 o’clock in the morning, get made up and into the outfit, and then you’d just sit there for twelve hours until it was time to get de-wigged! After a few days I thought ‘I’ve got to do something about this’, so I started to bring in my guitar, and I sat in my trailer and just wore the frets out!
Shooting Live Aid. Part of the crowd not pictured… Image (c) 20th Century Fox
SB: Then the director reportedly left…
DC: Yes, then there was the big director change and a couple of things got cancelled. I didn’t know what was going on; I read in the press that things had gone a bit belly-up. I mean, I think they might have even ceased filming for a while. Then I got another call from Becky…
SB: That was to work with Rami, right?
DC: Rami, yeah. I mean I’d seen him on set and everything but it’s all a bit intense; there’s a bit of a hierarchy and you keep yourself out of the way, so I’d never really spoken to him. They were shooting the scene where they were writing Crazy Little Thing Called Love, a ‘Freddie in the bath tub’ kind of vibe, and I was asked to teach him how to play it. He’d never played guitar and he didn’t have a lot of time… when you get to that B-flat chord, you can’t really do that in a couple of weeks. So I had this idea that if they were writing it, it would be a kind of framework so why didn’t we just do a one-chord strum version of it. So they filmed me doing that and they thought that approach was great. Then they got Marc Martel to basically recreate that by singing it kind of half-written with a few wrong lyrics, and I had to teach Rami to play that version of it.
DC: We did loads of sessions over the course of seven or eight days just breaking it down and it was so hard for him because he was also doing piano stuff and all the filming – he was absolutely burnt to a crisp. He stuck with it and we became quite close – it’s quite an intimate thing, all that! – and we did the shoot and he did brilliantly. I basically played the guitar along with what he was playing just to give him the timing of it, which was really strange because he was in a gold, diamond-encrusted bathrobe, of course. And, because I would have been reflected in the bath tub, I had to stand on the toilet on one leg with the guitar right up in the air, and look over my shoulder to see when he was going to strum the chords. And that was, like, for four hours!
SB: But… that scene’s missing from the final cut!
DC: It was a great scene and they were really into it but I think because CLTCL had been used a couple of other times it didn’t make the final cut. I’m sure it’ll come out on a boxset or something. But yeah, Rami was really pleased with it and I think he was disappointed that it didn’t make it.
Dave with Brian’s rig 2017. Image (c) Pete Malandrone
(c) Simon Bradley/TheRedSpecial.com
Here’s an outtake from the book, an interview I conducted with Adrian Turner back in 2011 (I think) about not only the history of the Tri-Sonic pickup but also those that are in the Red Special.
The interview was conducted by email, so any typos or other grammatical inaccuracies are mine – Simon Bradley 2019
The origins of the Tri-Sonic pickup are firmly rooted in earlier European pickup manufacture. Coil type and base-plate assemblies are typical of the central European manufacturers (such as Fuma in Germany). These types of pickups were popular in the UK throughout the 1950’s under various brand names. Primarily designed for fitting to cello guitars, they were mostly fairly low output affairs, not ideally suited to solid body instruments.
Jim Burns had been using similarly constructed pickups, reproduced in the UK and adapted with different top covers, on a handful of solid body instruments manufactured in the mid to late 1950’s.
In 1959, Burns teamed up with Henry Weill and produced a small range of solid body ‘Burns Weill’ instruments, with complete electrical assemblies supplied and manufactured by Weill. These units were noticeably hotter, with visual influences similar to early Guyatone manufactured solid guitars, starting to appear in the UK in the late 50s.
As 1960 approached, Burns was keen to follow his own solo path and the Burns Weill partnership ended.
Burns new range of guitar designs to meet the new decade, were relatively thin, small bodied instruments (probably governed by the availability and size of quality timber, at this frugal time). Scaling down the size of the pickups made them more visually correct, whilst also allowing space for his innovative and rather complex (often confusing) control options. There was an awful lot going on inside early Burns instruments.
Pic (c) Guyton Guitars
Burns’s pickups had stayed faithful to a proven formula but now appeared with flattened chrome covers with large holes punched into the top face (originally to allow for exposed magnets). Output of the units was extremely high for this period.
The Tri-Sonic made its first outing in two different versions and sizes. The upmarket ‘Artist’ and ‘Vibra-Artist’ guitars originally featured three separate small casing type Tri-Sonic’s with staggered, exposed Alnico pot magnets.
The more affordable ‘Sonic’ guitar featured a pair of slightly larger Tri-sonic’s, visually the same, but lacking the exposed magnets. Originally a single Alnico bar magnet was placed internally with a gloss plastic insert sandwiched beneath the covers, visible through the holes. It would be this larger cased variant which would remain in production throughout the decade and was the type purchased and fitted to the Red Special.
This larger version was more economical to manufacture for a few reasons. It used a slightly heavier gauge magnet wire, which made it far easier and quicker to assemble – and far less susceptible to manufacturing error/breakage (although this led to a bulkier coil, hence the slightly larger size of the units). The use of a single non- exposed bar magnet also saved both time and cost, when compared to fitting the individual exposed magnets, which needed riveting individually to the metal base-plates.
After the first few months of production, the larger pickups lost the Alnico bars which were replaced by two Ceramic block magnets, butted together to form a solid ‘bar’ along the length of the pickup. These Ceramic magnets are the type found in the Red Special’s pickups.
As various different Burns Guitar models appeared throughout the 1960’s, many were fitted with different adaptations of the Tri-Sonic, voiced to suit each instrument respectively (all marked with the standard Tri-Sonic logo). Magnet types were extremely varied (Alnico 2 bar, Alnico 2 pot, Alnico V pot, Alnico 3 Block (rare), Ceramic block and Ceramic pot magnets).
Each different magnet type and coil assembly producing tonal and output variations. A common mistake often made, is the belief that every Tri-Sonic manufactured in the 1960s will produce an accurate Red Special sound. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
In 1965 Burns and his then partners sold the company to Baldwin.
Around this time a degree of rationalisation seems to have occurred in pickup production.
Throughout the 1960’s Burns had not only produced Tri-Sonics, but also several other types of innovative pickups. Many of these units shared similar magnet assemblies and coils in varying different sizes. It is unknown if an attempt to ‘use up’ all existing stock ensued – or if a policy of ‘one size fits all’ was adopted, but for a while much bulkier coil assemblies appeared, rather uncomfortably ‘squeezed’ into Tri-sonic cases.
Although, both physically and visually larger, this does not mean that they are over-wound or hotter. It simply means that they were manufactured using a different size former and the thickness of the protective insulation was greater. It is these large type ‘rationalisation’ coils, which are present in the Red Special’s pickups.
Most regular Tri-Sonics from the mid 60’s period tend to average between 6.5 Kohms and 7.5 Kohms. The Red Specials pickups are no exception, with the centrally located pickup being the slightly hotter of the three.
Production of the tape-wound coil assemblies supplied to Burns, had always varied considerably. Examining a selection from each year, clearly indicates that coils were obtained from various sources. This is evident in the different materials, construction techniques and grades of magnet wire and hookup wires. Very early Tri-Sonic’s are often internally identical to Henry Weill’s units. Much later coils are akin to the Italian EKO manufactured items. Doubtless, there were numerous other armature suppliers too.
Like many products which are produced in relatively large quantities – they can often be haunted by undesirable quirks – especially if pushed beyond the use they were originally intended for. Such issues have been addressed on the Red Special.
The plated pickup covers were originally designed to be held in place by the spring action of the steel base-plates alone. This was originally aided during assembly by the application of liberal amounts of rubber cement. This not only helped to ‘glue’ the casings together, but also had an insulating affect and soaked up any internal movement or vibration. In later production, this was changed to a black bitumen based product – for the same purpose.
Over a number of years, this adhesive tends to completely dry out, leaving behind either a mustard coloured dust residue or a black powder coat type effect, visible on the inside of 60s pickups. Not only can this cause the covers to randomly spring off (just what you need midway through a performance) but can also cause severe feedback and uncontrollable whistling at volume. Quite why Burns never originally soldered the casings together (like modern units) is a bit of a mystery.
Tri-Sonics have always been expensive units to manufacture and it is unknown if this was purely down to cost or simply the faith they had in the adhesives at that time but production remained the same throughout the 1960’s.
The neck and bridge pickups of the Red Special have the internal voids filled with Araldite Epoxy, before being squeezed back together.
Modifications have also been made to the base-plate and fixing/adjustment tabs of the Red Special’s neck pickup, lowering the overall Inductance of the unit. This has a ‘fine tuning’ effect, to achieve a more focused tone from the neck pickup, relative to its placement on the guitar. The original black plastic inserts have at some time been replaced by extremely thin pieces of a textured black rubber material, visible through the holes in the top covers. Each pickup is shimmed for height and screwed down directly into the body wood.
In use, Tri-Sonics from this time period are renowned for their powerful, compressed tone when pushing an amplifier into saturation.
Because of their ‘full metal Jacket’ design, they can always be prone to a little natural high-gain feedback, but a skilled player can control and use this to great effect, producing lush harmonic overtones and seemingly endless sustain.
All Tri-Sonics by design, sense a wide string area, which favours midrange rather than over emphasising lows and highs. These units become extremely effective at volume when switched together in series, producing an extremely smooth ‘wall’ of compressed midrange.
A large image of the Red Special’s innovative tailpiece. Easy to use and maintain, it’s smooth and comes back perfectly in tune just about every time.
The long-awaited 20th Century Fox Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody is ready to rock (you…) and, with a release date of 2 November 2018, issues surrounding its somewhat laboured production have faded in the glare of the admittedly excellent trailer that dropped just a few weeks ago.
If you’ve somehow missed the trailer you can enjoy it (yet again) here.
According to IMDB.com it’s… ‘a chronicle of the years leading up to Queen’s legendary appearance at the Live Aid concert in 1985…’ and, with casting for the actors who are playing the four band members completed and announced in early 2017, guitarist Brian May has been sharing images and video clips to whet the appetite of the fans ever since.
The trailer, although perhaps understandably concentrating on actor Rami Malek in his guise as Freddie Mercury, also shows fleeting glimpses of Gwilym Lee, who’s playing Brian, on various stages with a Red Special in his hands. Whilst obviously not the original, online discussion forums and chat rooms have been chewing over what the guitar might have been and who’d made it, and, while the identity of the luthier in question was hardly a huge secret, details have been scant until now.
In a TheRedSpecial.com exclusive we caught up not only with Brian himself, but also the creator of two guitar props for the film, the indomitable Andrew Guyton, to get the full story.
Words by Simon Bradley.
The interview with both Brian and Andrew took place in October 2017.
All images (c) Guyton Guitars. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Do not redistribute.
The seventies-period RS prop. Image (c) Guyton Guitars
RS.com: Please tell us about the guitars that are being used in the film
Brian May: Andrew Guyton was asked to make guitar props for the film and he’s made, I think, two different guitars that represent my Red Special from the past. One’s for Live Aid and the other’s for Madison Square Garden in the seventies, and he’s made them absolutely faithfully to the appearance and condition of the guitar at those moments: it’s uncanny to see it. Times when it had bits of tape holding it together, times when the fretboard was all worn down and had lost some of its colour, and lots of damage to the body, and he’s reproduced everything in the finest detail.
The Live Aid-era RS prop. Image (c) Guyton Guitars
Andrew Guyton: They emailed me saying they needed some props for the film, but they didn’t really know what they should do. At the beginning they thought they would modify some BMG Supers, but they asked me if I could build three in three weeks. That was the initial idea but I just told them that it simply couldn’t be done in that time. After quotes and a bit of backwards and forwards we agreed that I should build two, one from the Bohemian Rhapsody recording era and another from Live Aid. We tackled that one first and it took two weeks – in fact they each took two weeks to build – but they were both done in time!
The neck pickup and fingerboard from the Live Aid-era RS. Image (c) Guyton Guitars
RS.com: Presumably they have the period-correct playing marks and wear patterns…
BM: The one that Gwilym, who’s playing me in the film, is using at the moment to do the Rockfield period has a little piece of red paper from Rymans over the hole that used to house the fuzzbox. He’s doing the scene where I’m recording the Rhapsody solo – I probably shouldn’t be telling you this! – and Freddie’s listening and commenting. I used to coil the strings around the machineheads and he’s reproduced that, and the exact amount of distress the fretboard and body had. It’s amazing.
The neo-legendary ‘red dot’… Image (c) Guyton Guitars
AG: I tried to get the ageing as close as I could given the timeframe. You just think of what the guitar goes through and what impact that has on it, like the forearm: you get gradual wear there. Obviously there’s a lot of sixpence damage and putting 30 years worth of damage into a guitar is quite tough. I used a wire brush into a drill to keep the sweep going and whacked the hell out of it, strummed it good and hard, with a fifty pence piece.
Wear on the rear of the Live Aid-period prop. Note the piece of tape securing the binding. Pic (c) Guyton Guitars
RS.com: What reference material did you use?
AG: We went through all the pictures we could find and we had help from Greg Brooks and the [Queen] archive. He sent me a lot of images, especially of the seventies one as although there are quite a few pictures floating around, not many have any detail. One of the things we really got stuck on was the indicator on the volume knob [of the Live Aid-era prop]; it seemed to change every few years.
The Live Aid-era prop’s volume pot. Image (c) Guyton Guitars
RS.com: Were there any other issues?
AG: The tuners on the seventies one were a major problem; trying to find those online was a nightmare. So I spoke to [fellow luthier] Martyn Booth to see if he had any in his parts bin and he basically donated the ones off his first guitar. He was sure, so fair enough. They were ‘six in line’ so we had to modify three of them to turn them the other way, which wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. It’s fiddly, but you approach it in the right way: I literally couldn’t do anything else for the tuners. It’s not like it has to be road-worthy, they just have to hold in tune and not fall off!
A close-up of the customised tuners fitted to the seventies-era RS prop. Image (c) Guyton Guitars
AG: The machineheads for the Live Aid version were like the old design Schaller M6s, and I wasn’t sure where I could get some of those from. I looked in the workshop and I’ve got an old Gibson Melody Maker that had been modified with these exact tuners, so we used those.
The one of the props in a state of undress. Image (c) Guyton Guitars
RS.com: How close is the construction of the props to that of the original Red Special?
AG: The necks are mahogany with oak fingerboards and the only reason I used [those materials] was that I already had the fingerboards made for the Transporters. That saved a lot of time. The bodies are plywood, just laminated up then veneered and bound like the real thing, and finished in the Rustins plastic coating.
The preworn Tri-Sonics covers from the Live Aid-period prop. Image (c) Guyton Guitars
RS.com: The pickups look good. Where did you source those?
AG: Adrian Turner supplied the covers, which were pre-worn. There aren’t any coils inside so the pieces of rubber [visible through the holes in the covers] are kept in place with layers of plywood. The only reason we didn’t get them working was that we just didn’t have time to get some pickups wound.
The tip of the vibrato arm from the Live Aid-period prop. Pic (c) Guyton Guitars
RS.com: You’ve told us that ageing the tip of the vibrato arm was tricky too…
AG: Well, it’s modern plastic so it’s a bit of a toughie because it’s difficult to stain and it’s made to be UV-stable too. I used some concentrated stains but if you use it too much it just tends to come off: it was a tough one.
RS.com: But do they actually function as guitars?
AG: They’re dummies but everything works mechanically – the switches move, the volume and tone pots move and the pickups are there – but there’d be no sound if you were to actually plug them in; nothing’s wired up. There’s no truss rod either and we tried to think of every way, not to cut corners as such, but to save time.
BM: And they do play, they’re proper guitars. I don’t know what we’ll do with them, maybe something for charity. That’d be nice.
Both prop bodies with their binding being attached. Image (c) Guyton Guitars
Keep an eye on Andrew’s website http://www.guytonguitars.com/ as, when he gets the time in his hectic schedule, he’ll post a gallery featuring many more great shots of both prop guitars.
