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:
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
Comments
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