Red Special

Brian May on-stage with the Red Special in 1981 during The Game Tour
Manufacturer	Brian May, Harold May
Period	1963–1965
Body type	Semi-hollow
Neck joint	Straight through/bolt-on
Scale	24"
Body	Oak, blockboard with mahogany veneer
Neck	Mahogany
Fretboard	Oak
Bridge	Custom made with separate string adjustment

The Red Special is the electric guitar that was designed and built by Queen's guitarist Brian May and his father, Harold, when Brian was a teenager in the early 1960s. The Red Special is also sometimes referred to, by May and by others, as the Fireplace or the Old Lady. A guitar that would define May's signature style, it was intentionally designed to feed back after he saw Jeff Beck playing live and making different sounds just by moving the guitar in front of the amp. He wanted an instrument that was going to be alive and interact with him and the air around him.

May has used the Red Special almost exclusively, including on Queen albums and in live performances since the band's advent in the early 1970s. The name Red Special came from the reddish-brown colour the guitar attained after being stained and painted with numerous layers of Rustins' Plastic Coating. The name Fireplace is a reference to the fact that the wood used to make the neck came from a fireplace mantel.

In celebration of the instrument's 50th anniversary, a book about its construction and history, Brian May’s Red Special: The Story of the Home-Made Guitar that Rocked Queen and the World, was written by Brian May with Simon Bradley.

Unlike the primary instruments of most musicians, the Red Special was built by May along with his father. They began to work on the guitar in August 1963, with the project taking two years to complete. The neck was constructed from wood from a "hundred-year-old-ish" fireplace mantel that a friend of the family was about to throw away. The neck was hand-shaped into the desired form, a job that was made more difficult by the age and quality of the wood. According to May, there are worm holes in the neck of the guitar that he filled in with matchsticks.

The neck was finished with a 24-fret oak fingerboard. Each of the position inlays was hand shaped from a mother-of-pearl button. May decided to position them in a personal way: two dots at the 7th and 19th fret and three at the 12th and 24th.

The body was made from oak from an old table, blockboard (strips of softwood sandwiched between two plywood skins) and mahogany veneer; the final result was technically a semi-acoustic guitar – the central block is glued to the sides and covered with two mahogany sheets to give it the appearance of a solid-body guitar. It was originally intended that the guitar would have f-holes but this was never done.