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The Red Special is an 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.〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher="Brian May Guitars – The Official web site" )〕〔 The Red Special is also sometimes referred to, by May and by others, as the Fireplace or the Old Lady.〔(Hey, what's that sound: Homemade guitars ) ''The Guardian''. Retrieved 17 August 2011〕 A guitar that would define May's signature style, it was intentionally designed to feedback〔〔(Brian May Interview ) The Music Biz (1992). Retrieved 17 August 2011〕 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. As his main guitar, he has used it 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.〔Plastic Coating is an acid-cure urea-formaldehyde resin clear varnish made by Rustins. It is commonly used for hard-wearing finishes on wooden floors, bar tops and guitars.〕 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.〔 ==Construction== Unlike the primary instruments of most musicians, the Red Special was built by May along with his father.〔(Songwriters Hall of Fame – Brian May Biography ) Songwriters Hall of Fame. Retrieved 17 August 2011〕 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)〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Blockboard )〕 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. White shelf edging was then applied as binding. It was then completed with three pick-ups and a custom-made bridge. May purchased a set of Burns Tri-Sonic pick-ups but re-wound them with reverse wound/reverse polarity and "potted" the coils with Araldite epoxy to reduce microphonics. He originally wound his own pick-ups, as he had for his first guitar, but he did not like the resulting sound because of the polarity of these pick-ups: alternating North-South instead of all North. The tremolo system is made from an old hardened-steel knife-edge shaped into a V and two motorbike valve springs to counter the string tension. The tension of the springs can be adjusted by screwing the bolts, which run through the middle of the springs, in or out via two small access holes next to the rear strap button. To reduce friction, the bridge was completed with rollers to allow the strings to return perfectly in tune after using the tremolo arm (the arm itself was from a bicycle saddlebag holder with a plastic knitting needle tip).〔 For the same reason, at the other end of the neck the strings pass over a zero fret and through a bakelite string guide. Originally the guitar had a built-in distortion circuit, adapted from a mid-1960s Vox distortion effects unit. The switch for this was in front of the phase switches. May soon discovered that he preferred the sound of a Vox AC30 distorting at full power, so the circuit was removed. The switch hole is now covered by a mother-of-pearl star inlay, but was originally covered by insulation tape. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Red Special」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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