Brian May Signature Guild Guitar Owner's Manual

Guild "Brian May" Signature Guitar.

In the Spring of 1964, Brian May, then a student at Hampton Grammar School,
Middlesex, England, and his father, an electronics engineer, worked on a
project to make an electric guitar.  After two years of experimentation and
construction the "Red Special" emerged.  This guitar, Brian's principal
instrument, has been an important part of "Queen's" great sound.

In 1984, the Guild guitar company and Brian worked closely together to
produce 316 close counterparts of the "Red Special", which had to retain
the quality and special features of a custom-made guitar.  It is a unique
guitar-different in feel, sound, features, appearance, and character.  The
new edition, with custom made parts such as pick-ups, tremolo, and the
design and shape of the neck and body, is almost a perfect copy of Brian's
own guitar.

So you may say that the new re-issue is a spitting image of the "Red
Special".  Guild will only produce a limited amount of this new edition.


Components and Feel.

As with the original version, this body is made out of hand-picked mahogany
that was cut specially to show the beauty of the grain.  The fingerboard is
made out of high-grade ebony with low frets for fast easy action.  The neck
is wider than most electric's (1 13/16 at the nut) allowing plenty of space
for string bending and full control of chords with the left hand.  Two full
octaves are fretted with cut-a-ways allowing easy access to the 24th fret.
The inlaid fret markers give a lot more guidance than on most guitars.  The
head of the guitar is shaped so as to position the tuning pegs almost in
line with the strings, giving it minimum bending at the nuts.  The graphite
nut positions the strings horizontally, and a 'zero fret' positions them
vertically.  This eliminates tuning problems at low fret positions,
bringing the open string sound into line with fretted notes.  This nut
arrangement holds tuning with aggressive vibrato use.


The Vibrato.

Vibrato units rock strings back and forth over the bridge, and twenty years
ago Brian's guitar was the first to have micro rollers to eliminate
friction at the bridge.  This saves breakage, but equally important,
enables the vibrato to return to true pitch, which has always been a
problem with early units.  Brian's own design of a frictionless vibrato
uses a rocking plate on a knife-edge which hsa served him well.  This
vibrato will be identically reproduced by Schaller.


The Sound.

The Guild "Brian May" doesn't just sound like a typical Gibson Les Paul or
a Fender Stratocaster.  It gives you more in terms of getting your feelings
across than any other guitar.  The new re-issue has specially designed
Seymour Duncan pick-ups which duplicate the original Burns Trisonic
pick-ups.  These pick-ups have a widened magnetic field, so that the unit
picks up from a greater string length than the normal single coil pick-up.
The end result is an output which retains the clarity of a single coul
pick-up with some of the warmth associated with a hum-bucker.  Equally as
important is the way the pick-ups are wired in series, rather than parallel
as normal, each has an on/off switch (upper row) and a phase-reversing
switch (lower row).  This is to product a large number of different sounds
without having to use any tome controls.


Setting Your Sounds.

Setting 1.  Top On/Off Switches.    ON-1, OFF-2,3
	    Bottom Phase Switches.  (doesn't matter)
The guitar has a true "off setting", in this position it can be used as
"standby".  Volume can be preset at a level, switching one or more on/off
switches, brings the guitar on at a pre-set level.  Phase switches can be
set anywhere in the standby mode.

Setting 2.  Top On/Off Switches.
