Brian May Red Special Tribute

Tom's Brian May Red Special Tribute

The Brian May Red Special is the legendary, handmade electric guitar that Brian May built with his father in the early 1960s. This guitar shaped the signature sound of the rock band Queen. Because the original is hand made, it is truly unique in its body shape, the pickups used, the 3 pickup serial wiring scheme and many other features.

Brian still uses the guitar, but if it ever sold at auction, it would probably bring close to the $14 million that David Gilmour's black Strat fetched in 2026. I wanted to add a copy to my collection of tributes to famous guitarists (see my Jerry Garcia Tiger and Alligator guitars, George Harrison Rocky, Ry Cooder Coodercaster and John Lennon Rickenbacker). Brian May sells high end copies of the original for $4,400 and a cheaper version for $1,300. I didn't want to spend that much and so employed a strategy I've used before - find a Chinese copy and use my skills as a luthier to bring it up to the quality of the real thing.

My Chinese copy cost $246 on eBay and shipped from a US warehouse so it arrived within a week. The guitar had a nice finish and now plays well after giving it my standard truss rod neck relief adjustment, fret leveling, bridge height and intonation adjustments.

The neck is 25.5" scale length instead of Brian's original 24" scale. 24" is a really short scale as found on Fender's student model Mustang guitars and I actually prefer 25.5". Also the neck radius of 12" is a bit flat as compared to the original at 7.25" and the official replica at 9.8", but close enough.

The pickups look like the original Red Special Burns pickups from the outside and are true to the originals in their internal construction. They measure about 8k ohms of resistance which is spot on. These pickups are known for their beefier than Fender single coil pickup tone but brighter than humbuckers, A bit like a P90.

Unfortunately, the wiring on the Chinese guitar was completely wrong. The controls on the original were 6 switches; a switch to turn each of the three pickups on or off and a switch to reverse the phase of each pickup. The wiring from China was completely wrong with numerous combinations producing no sound at all.

A big part of the problem was that the pickups were 2 wire pickups with the negative wire of the pickup also soldered to the pickup base plate. In order to support the phase reversal capabilities of the original, I had to unsolder the negative wire from the base plate and then tape up the bare end of the negative wire..

Then I had to add a third wire from the base plate to the common ground (red wire in this picture).

Then I completely redid the wiring to what it is supposed to be, Here's the diagram (note the volume and tone controls are reversed from what they should be in the diagram).

And here's what it looks like after the soldering was finished.  

The Chinese copy also came with a standard guitar nut instead of the original's zero fret (an extra fret where the nut usually goes). Zero frets help reduce string friction through the nut slots and therefore are great for tremolo equipped guitars like the Red Special. I corrected this omission by buying a Zero Glide combination nut and zero fret which I shaped to fit this guitar. See the extra silver fret abutting the black nut.

I also had to cut a window in the plastic back plate to match the original's capability to replace strings without having to remove six screws holding the back plate on.

Here's the back plate installed.

The switches from China were black with silver screws but I replaced them with copies of the original's white switches (easier to see in the dark) and used the proper black screws. I also bought original looking volume and tone knobs from eBay. The final touch was fashioning a replica of the black plastic curved plate that sits behind the bridge on the original

The guitar now plays and sounds great. The unique serial wiring lets you stack pickups to get a nice thick solo sound. The phase switches let you quickly switch from that thick solo to a bright and snappy sounding rhythm,