Brian May

Brian May's guitar sound rests on three pieces of gear that have barely changed across Queen's entire discography: the Red Special guitar he built himself, Vox AC30 amplifiers, and a treble booster that stays on in front of the amp's Normal channel¹. The Red Special is a single coil based guitar, built by May from a piece of wood and a lot of hand work². The amps are run loud, and the booster pushes them into the sustained, singing overdrive that carries everything from the early albums to the stadium years.

What surprises many players is how little else is in the rig. On stage between 1972 and 1992 his setup was almost the same throughout, built around a Pete Cornish pedalboard and a wall of AC30s². The effects that are there, tape echo, phaser, chorus and a harmonizer, do specific jobs rather than filling a board.

The sound: Red Special, AC30 and a treble booster

The starting point is the guitar. The Red Special's single coils feed a booster, which feeds the Normal channel of AC30 combos set at three quarters of full volume²³. That is the whole engine of the classic tone: no distortion pedal, no master volume, just a booster driving an already loud amp into compression and sustain.

The AC30s are not stock. May performs with eleven VOX AC30 amplifiers on stage, three of them fully cranked, plus three sidefills, and the amps are modified to remove the tremolo and EQ for the live rig⁴. All the AC30s used by May were modified by Pete Cornish to improve their reliability; he removed the valves in the Bright and Vib/Trem preamps along with the Vib/Trem oscillator and modulator valves².

The booster itself changed over time, which matters to anyone chasing the sound by era:

The Rangemaster was one of the first treble boosters used by guitarists in the 1960s⁸, and May came to it through Rory Gallagher, who inspired him to make it part of his signature sound⁹. May asked Gallagher how he got his sound, and the next day went to a guitar shop and found two secondhand AC30s at £30 each¹. That pair of amps, with the booster in front of the Normal channel, set the pattern for the next fifty years¹⁰.

For players who want the whole chain in one box, several makers have built May-style pedals. The Catalinbread Galileo MKII is described as a "Queen in a box" pedal replicating May's famous signal chain of an always-on treble booster into a Vox AC30¹¹. The Jeds Peds May I? is a DIY kit whose circuitry emulates a custom tuned Range Master styled treble booster hitting a Vox AC30 preamp¹². Vox makes an amPlug Brian May headphone amp modeled on the AC30 sound with treble booster, plus built-in delay, phaser and chorus, which May designed and voiced in collaboration with Vox¹³. May's own words on it:

Early Queen: a Rangemaster type booster into the AC30

In the earliest Queen recordings and shows, the chain was simple: the Red Special into a Dallas Rangemaster type treble booster, into a couple of VOX AC30 combos with the booster in front of the Normal channel¹⁴¹⁵. May used the British Range Master Germanium Treble Booster in his early days, a unit produced between 1965 and 1969⁵.

A treble booster does two jobs in this chain. It shapes the sound of the guitar and reduces issues with impedance mismatch between the guitar and what follows¹⁶, and it hits the amp's Normal channel hard enough at high volume to push it into overdrive. That is why the amp volume matters as much as the pedal: the booster is not a distortion pedal, it is the shove that makes a loud AC30 distort.

The sound of this era is what several modern boosters aim at. Premier Guitar's reviewer found that the Fryer Brian May Treble Booster Touring with P-90 pickups produced the closest thing to the rangy crunch and woolly thickness of May's early-70s work on songs like "Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll" and "Son & Daughter"⁷. Guitar Pedal X called the Hello Sailor Effects Brian May style Treble Booster, which uses a transformer input stage, "a great tone-enhancer" that "can sound really immense and intense"¹⁷¹⁸.

The modified AC30s and the Pete Cornish pedalboard

In 1972 May asked Pete Cornish, a British technician involved in Queen's touring, to design and build a pedalboard for him². From left to right it carried:

1. Two tape echoes
2. Phaser
3. Treble booster, a modified Dallas Rangemaster
4. Chorus, a Boss CE-1
5. Harmonizer²

That board, with the AC30s behind it, is what he used on stage between 1972 and 1992, almost unchanged². The phaser on the board was a Foxx Foot Phaser; the control labeled "Cry Baby" on his pedal board is the Foxx Phaser speed control¹⁹. The Foxx Foot Phaser studio model 7 was used by May to create "Bohemian Rhapsody"²⁰.

By 1982 the system had grown into two units: a pedalboard on stage and a large rack unit off stage behind the AC30s, as pictured in the August 1986 issue of Guitarist USA¹⁹. Pete Cornish documents the signal chain in detail¹⁹:

• Pete Cornish Line Driver on the guitar strap, fed by a 100ft special cable with power for the Line Driver
• Pete Cornish Treble Boost, then a second Treble Boost with bypass switch
• Foxx Phaser with bypass switch
• Foxx output to three AC30 Normal channel amps via a Line Driver and Hum Loop Buster
• Foxx also to an MXR DDL II feeding three Delay 1 amps, and to a second MXR DDL II feeding three Delay 2 amps
• Foxx also to a Roland CE-1, seriously modified by Pete Cornish, feeding three chorus amps¹⁹

The Line Driver on the strap is the key to driving long cable runs without losing the top end the booster is there to preserve, and the multiple amp groups let delay and chorus run on their own amps rather than in front of everything.

Eventide gear and the harmonized sound

The harmonizer on the 1972 board is the piece most players ask about. May used tape delays together with the harmonizer to put parts of the huge overdubbing studio work into live performances, as heard on "Brighton Rock"². At the 1992 Wembley concert he used three Vox AC30s, a ping-pong delay and three-part harmonization²¹.

His layered guitar orchestras in the studio were built by overdubbing, and his playing technique supports it: he normally plays the lower strings with the pick and the higher strings with the fingers, hybrid picking².

Eventide, the maker whose name became shorthand for harmonizer effects, counts May among the players who used Eventide gear in their rigs in the '70s and '80s, alongside Jimmy Page, Frank Zappa, Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai²²²³. In the later rack years, his rig included Rocktron units: the Rocktron Intellifex multi-effect unit, along with the Rocktron Patch Mate and Rocktron MIDI Mate foot controller²⁴.

Modeling the sound in a pedal

May's position on amp modeling is straightforward: he would not use it live. He prefers his amps to interact with his guitar physically²⁵. But he has put his name on modeling in pedal form. The DigiTech Brian May Red Special signature pedal reproduces 14 of his most famous tones²¹, modeling his Red Special guitar and Deacy amp, his customized Vox AC30, treble booster, Foxx Foot Phaser, acoustic and Telecaster guitars and more²¹. DigiTech's engineers built it with their Production Modeling process, with recording engineer Eddie Kramer as the project's lead production modeling consultant²¹. Its Flexible Output Mode offers mono, stereo to mixer and stereo to amplifier, with the mixer output usable as a direct injection device at correct mixing board impedance levels²¹. May calls it:

He has also pointed players to the Catalinbread Galileo as a way to replicate his sound for under $200²⁵, saying of such pedals:

Questions