The Brian May Project - Play Music Pickup

The Brian May Project
Attempting to recreate the sounds of the legendary Red Special
Brought to you by Playmusic Pickup
magazine www.playmusicpickup.co.uk
TM

Contents
Introduction
Six switch trick
Picking the pickups
The Seymour Duncan Liberator
To conclude
Pickup template – Red Special spacing
Pickup template – 25.5 inch compensated
© Simon Croft 2011
TM
If some of this document sounds like techno-babble to you – or you’d like more
technical detail – please download my Hot-Mod Pickup Primer from the Playmusic
web site. Also, if you like the sounds you hear in the accompanying videos but you
don’t have soldering skills, you might want to ask a guitar tech to mod your
existing guitar. Or try a Brian May Red Special guitar – it’s a relatively affordable
and high-quality instrument.
The name Hot-mod Your Guitar is used as a Trade Mark by Simon Croft. All content, including the text and technical drawings, remains his property.
The Hot-mod Your Guitar series is currently published in Playmusic, the UK’s only free magazine for musicians, available nationwide from musical instrument stores. This
guide and a range of further on-line resources is available at www.playmusicpickup.co.uk. You are welcome to distribute this guide freely in its current form without further
permission but removal of the copyright or this notice is expressly prohibited.
Brought to you by Playmusic Pickup
magazine www.playmusicpickup.co.uk

Introduction
As just about everyone and their dog knows, Brian
May’s preferred electric guitar throughout his career is
the one he built as a 16 year-old with help from his Dad.
I set about attempting to get some of Brian’s signature
sounds from the Modocaster, the test-bed guitar I put
together for precisely this kind of project. (Videos of the
guitar being assembled and played are on the
Playmusic web site.)
Without building a replica of the Red Special from the
ground up, I’m not going to able to nail every aspect of
the tone. The first limitation is that I’m not Brian May, of
course.
But also, the Modocaster has a longer a scale length
than the Red Special’s 24 inches and it doesn’t have its
unique tone chamber hidden in the body. (It does
The Brian May project: Red Special
however have a large
route to accommodate
whatever electrics we can
dream up – so who
knows?) And although I
have a Vox Valvetronix, it
won’t be a match for
Brian’s bank of AC30s
overdriven by his treble
booster.
That’s enough on what
we can’t do; let’s look at
what we can. My main
focus will be on the Red
Special’s unusual sixswitch
wiring scheme, but
it’s not the whole story.
Two aspects of Brian’s
design that sometimes
get ignored – but will
affect the sound – are the
relative distance from the
bridge of the three
pickups, and their height from the strings.
The distance of the pickups from the bridge will affect
the harmonics they pickup. I’ve copied my pickup
spacings from the Red Special and they look kinda
weird on a longer scale guitar but I’m hoping it will help
to capture ‘that’ sound.
(I’ve included my original pattern and a ‘proportional’
scaled-up pickup template that may be more
appropriate to your guitar at the back of this PDF.)
I believe that the correct heights for the pickups are
the bridge position highest, then the middle and neck
progressively lower, so that they have equal volume.
Again, I’ve followed that scheme. Players of Brian May
signature guitars tell me that the pickup heights are
critical to capturing the authentic tones, which makes
sense as so many of them depend on the subtle
interactions between two or three pickups.
The pickup spacings on my test-bed scratch plate are similar to those on the Red Special but look a little
strange on a 25.5-inch scale guitar. There is an argument for moving the pickup spacings proportionately* to
compensate for the difference. This means moving the pickups forward by about 6.2%, or 7mm in the case of
the neck pickup. The difference in sound probably isn’t going to be radical but I’ve put a ‘compensated’
pickup template at the back of this book. NB: This guitar has a ‘swimming pool’ pickup cavity.
Six switch trick
3
As a hyper-intelligent schoolboy, Brian May chose to
wire his pickups in series (Figure 1). The advantage of
this scheme is that switching in more pickups makes for
a bigger tone. In fact, some combinations form
humbuckers, because the centre pickup is reverse
wound/reverse polarity. But it does complicate things a
little on the wiring front.
Most three-pickup guitars – such as a Fender Strat –
are wired in parallel. This produces quite delicate, airy
tones when you have more than one pickup in circuit.
Another characteristic of parallel wiring is that it is
simpler, because switching off one pickup doesn’t switch
off any other. Take another look at Figure 1 and you’ll
realise that cutting the connections to one pickup cuts
the entire circuit, so none of the pickups would work.
Figure 1: Because the
Red Special’s pickups
are wired in series,
combining pickups
produces fatter,
humbucking tones
but it means the
wiring is more
complicated.
Simply cutting out a
pickup breaks the
entire circuit.
* There are also
arguments against.
In the end, only
your ears can
decide.

The Brian May project: Red Special
TONE
CAP
VOL
Figure 2: One way of obtaining the pickup combinations of the Red
Special. In reality, it’s easier and neater to join the screen from each
pickup above the lower bank of switches, then join them to the nearest
Earth point, typically the switch top left.
The radical solution Brian came up with is shown in
Figure 2. There are three on/off switches that short
across unwanted pickups, so that the other pickups
continue to work. (That’s the top row.) Then there are
three phase reverse switches, which help to make some
of the distinctive, more ‘hollow’ tones the Red Special
can deliver. (Bottom row.)
The switches I’ve used don’t look much like the ones
on the Red Special but electrically, they’re identical.
Technically, they are sub-miniature Double Pole, Double
Throw (DPDT) and you can buy them in Maplins. (See
Figure 3.) They come in two varieties and the right ones
for this job are ‘on-on’, not the ones with a ‘centre off’
position.
Choosing the best switch size is a pay-off. The ones
I’ve used take up less room inside the guitar but they
were fiddly to solder and could be a bit scary to use on
stage if you’re used to dealing with standard
toggle/slider switches.
(The initial wiring took me about three hours and
even then it didn’t work. I traced it easily enough to one
of about 40 solder joints but this is a labour of love…)
Alternatively, you can find bigger DPDT switches on
line. They’ll be easier to wire and to operate but they will
take up a lot of space in your guitar’s body rout. I had to
Figure 3. The switches used are Double Pole, Double Throw. Left:
Inside, they are actually two switches ganged together, hence Double
Pole. Middle: The centre contacts connect to the upper contacts in one
position. Right: They connect to the lower contacts in the other
position, hence Double Throw.
4

I’ve been told that the Brian May signature pickups are a little hotter
and darker in tone than the ones I ‘borrowed’ from my Marquee Pro
cut a bit more space in the Modocaster to fit all six
switches and the Seymour Duncan Liberator solderless
pot/pickup wiring system. I didn’t attempt to get a tone
control in there because the jack socket’s on the plate
as well, so the whole assembly comes out in one.
Picking the pickups
There are a number of ways of getting hold of
appropriate pickups. One is to wait until you come
across genuine 1960s Burns Tri-Sonics like Brian
bought when they were new. That could be a long wait.
Fortunately Burns currently offers authentic
Tri-Sonics in three varieties: Tri-Sonic Vintage and Tri-
Sonic Brian May Signature, plus a new Mini Tri-Sonic,
which will fit a Strat scratch plate.
For this exercise, I ‘borrowed’ the Tri-Sonic pickups
from my Burns Marquee Pro. (Don’t worry, no Burns
guitars were harmed in the making of this article!)
The Seymour Duncan Liberator
A couple of questions that might be on your mind:
1) How would this wiring scheme work with say, Fender
Strat pickups, instead of the Tri-Sonics?
The Brian May project: Red Special
You wouldn’t guess it from looking but the Marquee Pro’s Tri-Sonic
pickups have a white exit wire, as well as the red entry wire and the
screen. So phase reverse is easy to achieve.
2) If a 500k volume pot is best for humbuckers and a
250k is best for single coils, what value do I use for a
guitar that has single coil and humbucking settings?
The Seymour Duncan Liberator system helped me to
speed up swap-outs. So, if you go to the Playmusic
website, you can hear Burns pickups with a 500k pot
(like the Red Special) and Fender pickups with Brian
May wiring but a 250k pot, as is standard on a Strat.
To conclude
So many of the contact points are in-circuit all the time,
you have to be ultra-careful about your wiring. But it’s
worth it in the end.
For me, I’ll probably work out a schematic that keeps
the simplicity of the Burns Marquee layout but adds
some Brian May options. I’ll post it on the Playmusic
web site. Let me have a think though. I’m not going to
rush to ‘improve’ on an already great guitar.
When you take into account the massive amount of
pickup combinations the Red Special offers and then
multiply that by two different sets of pickups, … well,
there’s a lot to look at and listen to at the Playmusic
web site this month.
© Simon Croft 2011
Pre-tinning wires is a good idea. It’s a lot easier if you hold the wire in
a small pair of pliers, leaving one hand free for the soldering iron and
the other for the solder.
Space is so tight
when wiring these
switches that the
easiest way to
hold wires in place
while you solder
them is to use a
matchstick.
(‘Brymay’ long
kitchen matches
are a good fit,
weirdly enough!)
5
Although
the pickup
spacing
looks ‘all
wrong’, it
copies
Brian May’s
guitar.
Templates
on
following
pages.

10mm
19mm
65mm
109mm
180mm
22mm
The Brian May project: Red Special
77mm 86mm
Please note: This template is offered ‘as is’ to aid players who are interested in experimenting with the Red Special tones on their own guitar of 25.5 inch scale length. The measurements have
not been approved by Burns or Brian May. It may not produce the results expected and should not be used to cut or modify an instrument unless you understand and accept these limitations.
Key:
Pickup template –
Red Special spacing
on 25.5 inch scale
guitar
1. Typical intonation point of 4th string
2. Typical edge of scratch plate
3. Bridge pickup
4. Middle pickup
5. Neck pickup
6. Neck pocket
6

10mm
20mm
69mm
117mm
180mm
22mm
The Brian May project: Red Special
77mm 86mm
Pickup template –
adjusted for 25.5 inch
scale guitar
Please note: This template is offered ‘as is’ to aid players who are interested in experimenting with the Red Special tones on their own guitar of 25.5 inch scale length. The measurements have
not been approved by Burns or Brian May. It may not produce the results expected and should not be used to cut or modify an instrument unless you understand and accept these limitations.
Key:
1. Typical intonation point of 4th string
2. Typical edge of scratch plate
3. Bridge pickup
4. Middle pickup
5. Neck pickup
6. Neck pocket
7