Brian May and Queen: The Guitar Built From a Fireplace
Brian May and Queen built one of rock's most recognizable guitar sounds out of things other people threw away.
A hundred-year-old fireplace mantel became a guitar neck.
A coin from his pocket became a pick.
A bookshelf speaker and a car radio became an amplifier.
None of it came from a music shop.
Most retrospectives cover Queen's singles and stage shows.
This one covers the actual hardware, and the choices behind it.
Brian May performing live with his homemade Red Special guitar, New Haven Coliseum, November 1977. Image credit: Photo by Carl Lender, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Guitar Brian May and Queen Built Their Sound Around
Brian May and Queen fans know this guitar simply as the Red Special.
May started building it with his father, Harold, in August 1963.
He was sixteen years old at the time.
The project took over a year, finishing in October 1964.
He still plays that same guitar on stage today.
What It's Actually Made Of
The neck came from a real fireplace, not a lumber yard.
May and his father carved it from a mahogany mantelpiece that was already more than a century old.
The body is oak blockboard, layered with a mahogany veneer.
Even the small details were homemade.
The tremolo arm cap and the fret markers were made from buttons out of his mother's sewing box.
A knitting needle became part of the tremolo mechanism itself.
Nothing about the build used a single factory-made guitar part.
A Tremolo Built From a Motorcycle
The guitar's tremolo system is its strangest piece of engineering.
May and his father hardened the tremolo's knife-edge bearing themselves, over their own kitchen stove.
String tension is balanced by two coil springs, salvaged from a 1928 Panther motorcycle.
The strings sit in roller saddles that May shaped by hand, using a hand drill as a makeshift lathe.
A zero-fret design keeps the guitar in tune even under heavy tremolo use.
May never patented any of it.
He's said plainly that he'd rather share the design with the world than fight over a patent.
Why He Built One Instead of Buying One
May wanted a guitar that could out-perform anything sold in a shop.
He also could not afford one.
A real Fender, Gibson, or Höfner was well outside a teenager's budget in 1963.
So he and his father designed their own instead, testing and adjusting it by hand.
Fans and luthiers now nickname it the Old Lady, or simply the Fireplace.
Either name points back to the same object: a homemade guitar that ended up defining a decade of Queen's recorded sound.
The Sixpence That Replaced a Guitar Pick
Brian May and Queen also became known for an unusual choice of guitar pick.
May doesn't use plastic at all.
He plays with an old British sixpence coin instead.
The sixpence went out of circulation in the UK in 1980, so every one he owns is a genuine antique.
He prefers coins minted before 1956.
Those older sixpences carry a higher nickel content, which makes the metal noticeably softer.
A 1947 sixpence is his personal favorite, the same year he was born.
The serrated edge of the coin is the real trick.
Turned at an angle against the string, it produces a sharp, percussive attack May calls "graunch."
He holds the coin loosely between his fingers rather than gripping it tight.
That looseness lets the coin flex against the string on impact.
The flex is what gives each note its variation, instead of a flat, uniform strike.
It's a small choice, but it shapes nearly every solo he's ever recorded.
During his first solo tour in 1993, May had commemorative sixpence-style medals struck for fans, stamped "First Pick."
The original habit goes back decades earlier, to a coin he simply happened to have in his pocket.
The Amp John Deacon Built From a Bookshelf Speaker
Brian May and Queen's studio sound also depended on an amplifier nobody could buy.
Bassist John Deacon built it himself, by hand, for May to use in the studio.
Deacon assembled it from a discarded bookshelf speaker and salvaged electronics from an old car radio.
The finished amp put out about 1.5 watts, barely enough to fill a small room.
It became known simply as the Deacy Amp.
May first used it on "Killer Queen" in 1974.
Because it was too quiet for a stage, the Deacy Amp stayed in the studio permanently.
May ran his Red Special through a treble booster first, then into the Deacy Amp.
For the layered guitar overdubs, that signal then fed a bank of up to twelve Vox AC30 amplifiers.
The combination produced a warmer, more rounded tone than his usual stage rig.
May has said the Deacy Amp made his multi-tracked harmonies sit together in a more symphonic way.
Without it, those layered parts would have sounded harsher and less blended.
A bass player's scrap-bin project ended up shaping some of the band's most recognizable studio recordings.
Why "No Synthesizers!" Became Queen's Proudest Boast
Brian May and Queen used all of that homemade gear to build something bigger than any single guitar part.
May multi-tracked his Red Special again and again, layering harmonized lines on top of each other.
The goal was a sound closer to a horn section or a string orchestra than a typical rock guitar.
You can hear it clearly on the operatic middle section of "Bohemian Rhapsody."
The same technique carries "Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy" and the long solo on "Brighton Rock."
Listeners in the mid-1970s assumed some of it had to be a synthesizer.
It wasn't.
Every one of those layered textures came from May's guitar, his treble booster, and his amps.
Queen made a point of saying so directly.
Starting with 1975's "A Night at the Opera," the album sleeves carried a simple disclaimer: "No Synthesizers!"
It wasn't a technical footnote.
It was a boast, and the band knew it.
The line stayed on Queen's 70s album sleeves for years afterward, a reminder that the orchestral sound was built entirely by hand.
That's the real throughline connecting a fireplace mantel, a pocket coin, and a bass player's spare-parts amplifier.
Brian May and Queen turned homemade tools into a signature nobody else could copy.
Curious how the rest of Queen's catalog matches your mood?
Try the Random Artist Picker.
Or test what you actually know about the decade with the 70s Music Trivia Quiz.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Brian May's guitar called?
Brian May and Queen fans call it the Red Special.
May built it himself with his father, Harold, starting in August 1963.
The neck came from a hundred-year-old mahogany fireplace mantel and the body from oak blockboard with a mahogany veneer.
May finished the guitar in 1964 and has played it on nearly every Queen record since.
Why does Brian May play with a coin instead of a pick?
Brian May plays with an old British sixpence instead of a standard pick.
He prefers coins minted before 1956, when they carried more nickel and stayed softer.
The coin's serrated edge, turned at an angle against the string, produces a sharp percussive sound he calls graunch.
Holding it loosely lets the coin flex for extra variation in tone.
What is the Deacy Amp?
The Deacy Amp is a homemade amplifier Queen bassist John Deacon built for Brian May's studio use.
Deacon assembled it from a discarded bookshelf speaker and salvaged car radio electronics, producing about 1.5 watts of output.
May first used it on Killer Queen in 1974 and kept it strictly for studio overdubs, running it through a treble booster into banks of Vox AC30 amplifiers.
Why did Queen's album sleeves say No Synthesizers?
Queen's album sleeves carried the disclaimer starting with A Night at the Opera in 1975.
Brian May built the record's dense, orchestral guitar textures entirely through multi-tracked layers of his Red Special, not keyboards.
The line told listeners that the horn-like and string-like sounds they heard were guitar overdubs, not a synthesizer, and the band wore that distinction as a point of pride.
What makes the Red Special's tremolo system unusual?
The Red Special's tremolo rides on a hand-hardened knife-edge bearing that Brian May and his father built over their kitchen stove.
String tension is balanced by coil springs salvaged from a 1928 Panther motorcycle.
The strings sit in roller saddles May shaped using a hand drill, and a zero-fret design keeps the guitar in tune even during heavy tremolo use.
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