Brian May

Brian May is the guitarist of Queen and the builder, with his father Harold, of the Red Special, the guitar on which he has played nearly all of his career. The two began work in August 1963 and finished in October 1964. It has a chambered body with an oak centre block, three Burns Tri-Sonic pickups, and six mini switches that turn each pickup on and off and flip its phase. Sources differ on whether the neck came from a hundred-year-old or an 18th-century fireplace, and May says everything is original apart from the tuning pegs and the bridge rollers.

He plays with an English sixpence coin rather than a pick, for finer touch sensitivity and the bite of its serrated edge. His amp sound comes from Vox AC30s with a treble booster, an idea he took from Rory Gallagher, who told him he used an AC30 and a little box and turned it up. May copied the Rangemaster-style setup and bought two 30-watt AC30s after trading in a Burns transistor amp. Live, three AC30s are used in a wet-dry-wet arrangement, with the centre amp getting the dry signal and the outer two different delay signals.