Brian May's Original Home Made Red Special Pickups

dsgb

This one is a gift from the Brian May niche enthusiast group to a general audience who might be interested in winding their own guitar pickups or Queen/Brian May/Red Special history.

Before he fitted the three Burns Tri-Sonic pickups to his Red Special guitar which feature in all Queen recordings and live concerts, Brian made his own pickups with his father Harold’s guidance. He discussed them in an interview with Simon Bradley for the Red Special book in which they featured in Chapter 6: Revisiting The Past. You can read the transcript on the official Red Special website which is maintained by Simon:

https://www.theredspecial.com/2018/01/brian-may-interview-the-red-specials-original-pickups/

I recently completed a project to make a replica set of these pickups following Brian May's original sketch for his home made Red Special pickups but winding them to try to achieve similar DC resistance (7.0-7.4 kOhm) and inductance (2.0-2.3 H) to a typical vintage Tri-Sonic pickup. I made a 17 minute video covering the project in which I discuss the pickups and wind one using my Stepcraft 2/840 CNC machine and small AC industrial milling spindle. The only additional piece of equipment I bought was a magnetic wire tensioner for £67 shipped from AliBaba and the reed switch magnetic counter from Amazon for about £15.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtVDcheIzBE

00:01 Introduction

01:05 Brian’s design sketch and pickup design details

02:42 How the pickups are mounted onto the guitar body

03:15 Paxolin information

03:37 Brian’s 70th birthday Guyton Red Special

04:15 Unknown design details

05:32 Discussion of potential coil turns

05:56 Tonal limitations caused by the button magnet polarity

06:35 The CNC pickup winding apparatus

07:50 The magnetic wire tensioner

09:02 Making the coil former strip

10:26 Attaching the pickup to the coil former back plate

10:32 CNC wire traverse

11:01 Threading the coil wire through the feed tube and feed nozzle

11:19 Loading the coil wire onto the coil former

12:08 Winding the coil

13:32 Removing the pickup from the coil former back plate

13:28 Making off the coil

14:25 Testing the DC resistance and inductance with a Peak Atlas LCR45 meter

15:12 Wrapping the coil with self-adhesive glass fibre coil tape

15:39 Wrapping the side of the pickup with 0.5 mm white plasticard

16:22 Closing remarks

For more information on Tri-Sonic pickups and all my Brian May guitar and gear projects, please visit my website: https://dsgb.net

Regards,

Doug

Funkfingers

Bookmarked for later.

BillDL

Fascinating.  Brian May was certainly a very inventive person even back then.  I particularly like the permanent contact points he placed in the pickup cavity for the pickup tags to line up with.  A modular drop-in pickup guitar well ahead of its time.  I would love to have heard your own pickups in a guitar being played to hear what the magnet polarity issue was that Brian mentioned, i.e. odd frequency spikes and drops while bending strings across where the magnetic fields intersect. 

TheMadMick

Very interesting but to hear them would have been good.

Funkfingers

Without digging out the Red Special book to check, my recollection is that the alternating magnetic polarities of the first pickups left dead spots, where the field was neither fully north or south. Strings sounded when on axis but the volume dropped off when bending into the "in between" zones.

dsgb

Gents,

Long time Brian May Red Special enthusiast community stalwart Julian Hemingway built a Red Special to match Brian's original as he built in 1964 including a set of these home made pickups (see also BHM logotype on the headstock and early version of the vibrato arm, Vox distortion unit circuit in situ). He posted on my Facebook thread yesterday to say that he also wound his pickups to 6,000 turns of 44 AWG wire. He also repolarised his button magnets by physically modifying them.

His pickups should sound similar to mine and you can check out his demonstration of the guitar on a video on his YouTube channel which is also embedded in the FAQ page on my website relating to these pickups:

https://dsgb.net/faqs/bhmohm/



Spoiler alert: they sound a bit like traditional Strat single coils, perhaps not surprising.

Doug