Everyone has a favorite guitar solo — Brian May included.

While the Queen guitarist drew tonal inspiration from Rory Gallagher and has called Ritchie Blackmore an incendiary trailblazer of electric guitar, neither man played what he considers the greatest solo ever recorded. That honor, for May, belongs to Eric Clapton on “Key to Love,” from Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton.

“It’s the hottest, burning, high-passion piece I’ve ever heard in my life — still to this day,” May reveals (via Classic Rock). “I just love it. It totally rips, and I’ll never get over that. That’s one of my great inspirations.”

Clapton was just 20 when he left the Yardbirds to join John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, a move that coincided with what Jeff Beck later described as a streak of jealousy when his former band beat him to a U.S. breakthrough. In hindsight, though, Clapton hardly needed to worry: his brief tenure with the Bluesbreakers produced one of the defining blues-rock records of the era — an album that would go on to inspire future guitar giants, including Eddie Van Halen, who credited Clapton as a primary influence.

Though “Key to Love” runs just over two minutes, its loose, swinging groove builds toward a climactic stretch where Clapton unleashes roughly 30 seconds of unrestrained lead work.

“He burned in that solo!” May gushes. “The whole track revolves around that solo. Every time I put it on, I’m just waiting.

“John Mayall’s great,” he adds, “but you’re waiting for that moment when Eric rips out, and suddenly he’s whacking into those top notes. It’s incredible. Absolutely spine-chilling.”

May and Van Halen later paid tribute to Clapton on May’s 1983 solo EP Star Fleet Project, where the pair went head-to-head on the 13-minute blues workout “Blues Breaker.” Clapton, however, said he felt “almost insulted.”

“I think he hated it,” May said with a laugh in a 2023 interview with Guitar Player. “But he’s entitled. Eric could do anything and he’ll still be our hero. There’s probably lots of things I disagree with Eric about, but that doesn’t change anything. He’s been one of the greatest inspirations of my life, and that’ll never change.”

For May, Clapton’s playing didn’t just set a standard — it raised his own. And despite any critical remarks, the mutual respect between them is clear: they’ve shared the stage on several occasions, a quiet acknowledgment that the admiration runs both ways.

Before he became one of rock’s most distinctive guitarists, Brian May was a teenager in southwest London trying to find his musical voice. Like many aspiring British players of the era, he was captivated by the guitar heroes emerging from the local club scene. But two musicians in particular would fundamentally alter the way he thought about the instrument: Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

Speaking about his formative years in a school band called 1984, May recalled regularly performing soul covers by Sam & Dave and Otis Redding before Britain’s psychedelic explosion changed everything.

“We played a mixture of adapted soul stuff,” he said. “It was just pre-psychedelia. We used to try and do a couple of songs of our own. Luckily, as time went on, Pink Floyd, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix came along, and we started doing that.”

The first major revelation came from Eric Clapton during the guitarist’s tenure with the Yardbirds.

“Clapton was unbelievable, just so sparkling and fluid,” May said. “He was what turned me away from the Shadows style and sent me back to listening to B.B. King, Bo Diddley, and all those people I’d heard before.”

At the time, May admitted he had underestimated the blues, viewing it largely as a repetitive form.

“I thought it was all the same: 12-bar blues, and that was it,” he explained. “I didn’t realize the depth or emotion there was in it until I saw Eric Clapton doing it. That somehow made it accessible for me.”

Inspired by Clapton’s playing, May began tracing the guitarist’s influences and immersing himself in the records that had shaped the British blues boom.

“I went back and listened to his influences,” he said. “I listened to Clapton very closely, and to people like Mike Bloomfield on the first album by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.”

May was equally enthralled by Jeff Beck, who replaced Clapton in the Yardbirds and pushed the electric guitar into increasingly adventurous territory.

“I couldn't believe what he could do,” May recalled. “I remember seeing him put the guitar down, make it feedback, and play a whole tune without even touching the fingerboard. That was the first time I saw a Les Paul guitar. I saw a gig at the Marquee soon after Beck had joined, and Eric Clapton came on and jammed at the end. That was pretty amazing; I'll never forget that.“

But even the combined impact of those two British guitar giants could not prepare him for what came next.

After years of developing his own expressive approach to the instrument, May believed he was beginning to achieve the sounds he heard in his head.

“I was beginning to make the guitar sort of talk,” he recalled. “I always wanted the guitar to play for people, to talk the same way a vocal did and have feeling in it.”

Then he encountered Hendrix.

“When I saw Hendrix, I thought, Oh my God. This guy is doing everything that I was trying to do.”

The experience was humbling.

“He just made me feel like I couldn’t play,” May said. “It makes you feel very uncomfortable when you thought you knew everything that was going on, and then suddenly somebody comes along who seems to be doing all sorts of things you hadn’t even thought of.”

Initially, May suspected that some of Hendrix’s seemingly impossible sounds might have been studio trickery. Hearing the guitarist’s conversation-like soloing on “Stone Free,” he wondered whether recording techniques were responsible.

That skepticism vanished when he saw Hendrix perform live at London’s Savoy Theatre while supporting the Who.

“He completely blew me away,” May said. “I thought, ‘He’s it.’”

The impact was so overwhelming that May believed even one of Britain’s biggest bands couldn’t compete.

“The Who couldn’t follow him in those days,” he said. “Anybody in the world would find it hard to follow Hendrix.”

The lessons May absorbed from both players would remain central to his own style. From Clapton, he learned that blues guitar could communicate emotion and nuance — even if he did once earn Slowhand’s wrath when he and Eddie Van Halen dedicated a blues jam to the guitarist that Clapton called “so horrible.” From Hendrix, he discovered that the instrument’s expressive possibilities were far broader than he had imagined.

Those influences would eventually help shape the singular voice May developed with Queen — a style capable of singing, soaring, and, just as he had always wanted, making a guitar talk.

When Steve Cropper heard the mixes of his final album, he knew exactly what he thought of it.

“I finished the mixes about a week and a half before Steve passed, and we brought a CD to him at the medical facility,” songwriter and producer Jon Tiven recalls. “He called me the night before he passed to tell me how much he loved it. He was playing it for everyone who came to visit him, telling them it was the best record he’d ever made.”

That album — Watching the Tide — will arrive later this year, serving as a poignant final statement from one of the most influential guitarists in soul and rock history.

The record was largely completed before Cropper’s death in December, with 10 of its 11 tracks finished beforehand. Recorded at Nashville’s RCA Studio C, the album again pairs him with Tiven and is being released under the banner Steve Cropper & the Midnight Hour.

Like its predecessor Friendlytown, the project brings in a notable roster of collaborators. Eric Clapton appears on the lead single “Ticket First,” released May 7, while Ronnie Wood contributes to “Until Now.” Other guests include Billy Gibbons and Brian May, with May joining Cropper on the aptly titled “My Angels Are Calling.”

“Making music was Steve’s greatest joy,” Tiven says. “Steve was so encouraged by Friendlytown. He was adamant he wanted to do another record.”

Cropper’s career stretched back more than six decades. As the guitarist for Booker T. & the M.G.’s — the house band for Stax Records — he helped define the sound of southern soul and co-wrote classics including “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay,” “Knock on Wood,” and “In the Midnight Hour.”

Beyond his work at Stax, Cropper built a formidable résumé as a session player and producer, working with artists such as Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Jeff Beck, Ringo Starr and Rod Stewart. He also appeared onscreen as a member of the Blues Brothers Band.

Along the way he earned multiple Grammys, including one for “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay” and another with Booker T. & the M.G.’s for the 1995 track “Cruisin’.”

Despite that legacy, Cropper kept his advice to young guitarists simple. In one of his final major interviews, with Total Guitar in 2024, he said, “Do not get into this business for money. Do it for fun — and if you’re good, somewhere along the way someone will pay you.”

He described his own approach to the instrument as practical. “I use it as a tool,” he said of the electric guitar. “I couldn't afford to hire another guitarist on a lot of Stax records, so I learned to play rhythm and lead at the same time so when I was soloing the rhythm wouldn't drop out.”

Watching the Tide is scheduled for release Aug. 28 via Provogue Records / Artone Label Group.

Freddie Mercury was the consummate rock-and-roll showman. In both his songs and performances with Queen, he gave everything he had to make the audience feel part of the story. A song like “We Are the Champions” demonstrates this clearly. Although it begins as a reflection on the trials of show business, the song ultimately becomes an anthem for the audience: not “I am the champion,” but “We are the champions.”

So it was fitting that the final song on Queen’s last album with Mercury should celebrate the stage itself. “The Show Must Go On” fills that role, and like “We Are the Champions,” it functions both as a reflection on Mercury and as a message to the band’s fans.

As guitarist Brian May explains, the song was also an attempt to confront Mercury’s battle with AIDS, the illness that would claim his life on November 24, 1991.

“It’s a long story, that song,” says May, the track’s main composer, “but I always felt it would be important because we were dealing with things that were hard to talk about at the time. In the world of music, you could do it.”

The song began during a jam between drummer Roger Taylor and bass guitarist John Deacon.

“‘The Show Must Go On’ came from Roger and John playing the sequence, and I started to put things down,” May explained. “At the beginning it was just this chord sequence, but I had this strange feeling that it could be somehow important, and I got very impassioned and went and beavered away at it.”

When May felt he had something worth developing, he arranged a writing session with Mercury to discuss the theme and lyrics. But the singer was already too frail to work for long.

“We only wrote one verse together — that was all we managed that afternoon — but it was enough to push me forward with the song.”

The concept they devised centered on a clown who is suffering but must still paint on a smile.

Over the following days May continued shaping the piece, adding a bridge inspired by Pachelbel's Canon and completing the lyrics.

One line in particular arrived, as he later described it, like “a gift from God.”

“I woke up one morning with this image of butterflies in my head, and I thought I would love to hear Freddie sing: ‘My soul is painted like the wings of butterflies.’ I thought: this is Freddie. And he’s not going to write it for himself, because he wasn’t going to thrust himself forward in that way. But I can write it for him. I wanted to put those words in his mouth.

“And it was a gift from God. I don’t even know where those lyrics came from.”

May finished the demo himself, although the melody was pitched so high that he had to sing the guide vocal in falsetto. He played it for Mercury the next time the singer was able to come into the studio.

“By that time he was suffering a lot. He could hardly stand,” May said of the session. “I played him some of the demo, with me singing, which went incredibly high and was very difficult. In the past Freddie was always shouting at me, like, ‘It’s too fucking high! You’re making me ruin my beautiful voice!’”

This time, Mercury had no complaint.

Once the band completed the backing track — with May, as usual, playing his homemade Red Special electric guitar — he raised the issue again.

“I said, ‘Fred, I don’t know if this is going to be possible to sing.’ And he went, ‘I’ll fucking do it, darling,’” May recalled to Rolling Stone in 2010.

Mercury fortified himself with a drink.

“So he downed a couple of vodkas, neat, then propped himself up on the desk and worked his way through singing all of that song,” May later told Total Guitar. “And it was amazing. I think he did three or four takes, and he absolutely smashed that vocal. It’s like he reached into a place that even he’d never got to before.

“I remember saying to Freddie, ‘I don’t want you to hurt yourself. Don’t force yourself to do this if it’s not going to feel good.’ But he said, ‘I’ll fucking do it, Brian!’ And he did. And it was beautiful. I think it’s one of his finest performances of all time. It’s incredible.”

Built on a dramatic, ascending chord progression and one of May’s most orchestral guitar arrangements, “The Show Must Go On” ultimately became one of the most powerful recordings in Queen’s catalog.

The song was released on October 14, 1991, as the final single from the album Innuendo — the last Queen album released during Mercury’s lifetime. Too ill to appear in the music video, Mercury is absent from the promo clip, which instead uses archival footage drawn from the band’s earlier videos and live performances spanning 1982 through 1991.

Roughly a month later, on November 23, Mercury released a statement confirming that he had AIDS. He died the following day.

In hindsight, “The Show Must Go On” stands as one of Mercury’s most poignant performances — a recording that captured his determination to keep singing even as his health failed. The title proved tragically prophetic: the singer was gone, but the music endured.

Freddie Mercury may hold the record for history’s most profitable half hour in the bathtub.

In May 1979, as Queen were preparing to record The Game at Musicland Studios in Munich, Queen’s lead singer stepped into a bathtub in the Bayerischer Hof Hotel and emerged 30 minutes later with a new song fully formed: “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”

Grabbing an acoustic guitar, he quickly worked out the tune in his hotel room.

“’Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ took me five or 10 minutes,” he confirmed to Melody Maker in 1981. “I did that on the guitar, which I can't play for nuts, and in one way it was quite a good thing because I was restricted, knowing only a few chords. It's a good discipline, because I simply had to write within a small framework.”

As quickly as Mercury wrote it, Queen got to work tracking it in the studio.

“We recorded that song, really, six months before the rest of the album,” drummer Roger Taylor explained in a 1989 interview for In the Studio With Redbeard.

“It took half an hour to record. I remember he came in the studio. He says, ‘My dear, I just wrote this in the bath,’ and he did. He'd just been lying in the bath, and there it was. It was very simple, very easy, and it had a great fresh sound to it.”

As it turned out, everyone was present for the session except Brian May, who had been at the studio late the night before. In his absence, Mercury strapped on an acoustic guitar to lead Taylor and bass guitar player John Deacon through the song.

“It always happens: If I go out for a couple of hours, they create something else,” May humorously griped to In the Studio with Redbeard in 1989.

“I came back and they'd already put down the backing track. Roger just had the live drums, Freddie had played acoustic guitar — ‘cause that rhythm on there is Freddie. I don't think I played any of that.”

While he’s most often thought of as a singer and piano player, Mercury was also a talented guitarist. “Certainly in the early days he used the guitar as much as the piano to write songs,” May wrote in his Queen in 3D book.

May also notes that Mercury had solid rhythm chops, especially on acoustic.

“Freddie was really a good acoustic player. He was very modest about it, but he could really play the acoustic guitar very well in an inimitable, very frenetic kind of style.

“I can still his kind of horny fingers hitting the strings — Freddie doing his Elvis, very successfully.”

As May revealed in a February 2008 interview with Guitar and Bass magazine, Mercury even attempted to record the song’s guitar solo.

“He did the original solo on ‘Crazy Little Thing,’” the guitarist confirmed, “on a version that got lost, and I had to redo it. He was very good in a particular style of his own.”

While Mercury’s guitar solo is absent from the recording, we do have May’s, which is widely considered one of his best. Remarkably, it doesn’t feature his homemade Red Special.

In fact, by his own account, May was railroaded into using a Telecaster by producer Reinhold Mack, who decided that classic model was best suited to the song’s vintage rock-and-roll style.

“I said, ‘Well, I can make my guitar sound like a Telecaster, like those old rock and roll records,’” May told In the Studio with Redbeard. “And he said, ‘If you want it to sound like a Telecaster, play a Telecaster.’

May did so, calling it “one of the few times I ever played something that wasn't my regular guitar.” Taylor, who both plays and collects guitars, delivered a rarity from his vault.

“I used one of Roger's really old, beat-up, natural-wood Telecasters,” May told Guitar Player in our January 1983 issue “I got bludgeoned into playing it. That was Mack's idea.

“I said, ‘I don't want to play a Telecaster. It basically doesn't suit my style.’ But ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ was such a period piece, it seemed to need that period sound.

“So I said, ‘Okay, Mack, if you want to set it up, I'll play it.’ He put it through a Mesa/Boogie, which is an amplifier I don't get on with at all. It just doesn't suit me. I tried it, and it sounded okay.”

It may have sounded “okay” to May’s ears, but it was an absolute knock out to everyone else. May’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” solo is a stunning example of his ear for giving a song exactly what it needs — and in a style that has no equal in Queen’s catalog.

For that matter, it wasn’t the first time May had to fight over a solo. As he told Total Guitar, he had to push to convince Mercury to let him track a solo on Queen’s 1979 hit “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

With "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" completed, the band took a break from making The Game, during which time they performed at the Saarbrücken Open Air Festival in Germany that August.

Meanwhile, their label, eager for something new to release, took “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” for an advance single, releasing it in the U.K. in October 1979. The song quickly reached number two, leading the group to launch a short tour — dubbed, appropriately, Crazy — where they played a number of theater dates in the U.K. from November through December.

By December, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” had been released in the U.S., where it quickly began moving up the charts. Queen were back at work on The Game when it hit the top of the charts, becoming the group's first U.S. single to do so.

Roger Taylor recalled the strangeness of hearing the song had reached peak position in the States while they were still recording The Game in Germany.

“It seemed unreal because we were in the other side of the world, and we hadn't even finished the album, which the single was from,” he told In the Studio With Redbeard. “We were still working on it. And we thought, We’re off to a good start here!”

“Crazy Little Thing Called Love” would continue to pay dividends as a radio staple and popular cover tune. But for Taylor, the best of these rewards came in the form of a compliment from no less than John Lennon.

“I remember actually one of the things which made me very proud,” Taylor said, “was that John Lennon said in some article... ‘I heard the Queen record and it made me wanna get back in the studio.’”

The former Beatle would soon do just that, recording what would be his final album, Double Fantasy, in 1980.

“And I thought, Wow, fantastic!” Taylor remarked. “To have actually had any little dent on somebody like Lennon is great.”

More than three decades after the death of Freddie Mercury, Queen continues to perform — a reality that once seemed impossible to the band itself.

Mercury died of complications from AIDS on November 24, 1991, and in the immediate aftermath guitarist Brian May says the surviving members believed the band had reached its natural end.

How May and drummer Roger Taylor managed to carry on to this day owes something to Mercury and a gift he gave to the band in his final days.

Speaking recently with Sammy Hagar on Rock & Roll Road Trip for AXS TV, May recalled that Queen had long agreed that if any member died, the group would stop.

“I suppose what we did was give it up,” May explains. “We actually did give it up when Freddie died. We'd always said, ‘If one of us goes, that's it.’ So Roger and I both went out kind of grieving to the max and saying it's over.

“We didn’t even want to talk about it for quite a long time.”

But in the singer’s final months, Mercury — who had once fought with May over one of his most celebrated guitar solos — himself had already been laying the groundwork for the band to continue. Despite rapidly declining health, May says the frontman was determined to record as much as possible before the end.

“Freddie, in his last days, was like, ‘Okay guys, I’m not going to be here long. Just give me stuff to sing,’” May recalls. “Write me stuff on the back of a cigarette packet — whatever. Just give me stuff to sing.”

The band obliged, bringing Mercury fragments of songs so he could record vocal parts whenever he was physically able.

“And then when he'd gone… he was very undramatic about it,” May says. “He was never maudlin, ever. I never saw him cry or go into self-pity. He never did that. He was like, ‘Let’s just do it. Let’s keep doing stuff.’”

Those final recordings eventually became the foundation for Queen’s 1995 album Made in Heaven, released nearly four years after Mercury’s death. The surviving members built new arrangements around Mercury’s last vocal and piano performances.

“We made the last album, the Made in Heaven album, with the tracks Freddie had left us to play with,” May says. “It became a real labor of love because he left some lovely little bits and pieces.”

For May, Mercury’s presence is still felt whenever the band performs.

“Freddie was always inspiring,” he notes. “If he was here now, we'd be doing what we always do, I'm sure.”

In recent years, Queen has found new life touring with vocalist Adam Lambert, who has fronted the group alongside May and Taylor since 2011.

According to May, Lambert’s willingness to reinterpret the band’s classic material keeps the music from feeling frozen in time.

“Adam brings fresh views on things,” May says. “He’s not afraid to say, ‘Why don’t we try it this way or that way?’ So the songs are not fossils. They're alive and evolving with Adam.”

Lambert’s vocal range, in particular, continues to astonish the guitarist — especially when the band performs Queen’s epic ballad “Who Wants to Live Forever.”

“Sometimes he blows my mind,” he adds. “We do ‘Who Wants to Live Forever,’ which Freddie would do at times, but if he if he felt a little off color, then that was going to be a little bit too much strain for Freddie.

“Adam will always do it and always pull it off, and he’ll take it higher and higher. I’m standing there playing and sometimes I’m going, ‘What did he just do?’

“It blows my mind — the range that he has and the courage he has to morph things into a new place. I love it. I love working with that right now.”

While Queen + Adam Lambert have performed a number of the group’s biggest hits, May says there’s one song they’ll never play, out of respect for Mercury.

The band has no official plans to tour right now. Should that change, don’t expect to see them in the U.S. for the immediate future. May has said ““America is a dangerous place at the moment,” in the wake of the U.S. government killing American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota in January.

May has also sworn off performing at Glastonbury, due to the culling of badgers that has occurred at the farm where the festival is held.

In related news, Steve Vai recently revealed that he had a chance to play May’s Red Special — his home-built electric guitar — around 1980 when he was 20, and found the guitar impossible due to its incredibly baseball bat–like neck.

“Between the gauge .008 strings, ultra-low action, and a neck the size of a small tree, I played it like a baby giraffe on roller skates,” the guitar virtuoso says.

In all the years Queen’s Brian May and Freddie Mercury wrote and performed together, creative friction was part of the process.

But May says they didn’t see eye to eye on one of his most famous and beloved guitar solos — and had he not held firm, it likely wouldn’t have made the final cut.

“Freddie envisioned it very much as a piano song, akin to Elton John, really,” May told Total Guitar of the track “Don’t Stop Me Now,” from 1978’s Jazz.

“[He heard] powerhouse piano, powerhouse vocal, and that’s it. I played lots of rhythm guitar on it, and Freddie still said, 'No, no, no, no — it's a piano song!’”

Mercury — whom May later honored with a touching tribute on his first signature guitar — eventually came around, conceding, “‘Well, it does need a solo. I need you to take over the vocal.’”

As May explains, that kind of push-and-pull was typical of their working dynamic.

“It’s the way we thought about things,” he says. “I said, ‘Okay, give me a verse, and let me see what I can do.’

“And again, being in the studio and hearing it evolve, I could sort of hear the solo in my head before I actually picked up the guitar to do it. As very often with me, it’s a kind of little diversion. It’s a countermelody.

“It’s not the actual tune of the verse. But it’s something which goes with it, a sort of counterpoint, and it’s something I could sing. And it was just a question of transferring it to a guitar.”

In hindsight, May feels vindicated — not by theory, but by audience response.

“It’s very simple,” he concludes. “I sometimes feel a bit apologetic about it. But I do notice that when it’s played in the dancehall, it gets a reaction from people in the solo and it steps up the energy quite a bit, even from a song that’s got high energy, so I’m happy with it the way it is.”

That instinctive, vocal-like phrasing is central to May’s sound, which is built on a highly individual rig: his homemade Red Special, a Treble Booster pushing a Vox AC30 — an amp he came to with a little help from Rory Gallagher — and his famously unconventional pick: an old British coin.

Brian May said last year that Queen were looking at the possibility of performing at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

He’s now ruled out any future concerts in America.

“America is a dangerous place at the moment, so you have to take that into account,” May tells the Daily Mail. “It’s very sad because I feel like Queen grew up in America and we love it, but it’s not what it was. Everyone is thinking twice about going there at the moment.”

May’s comments come in the wake of the U.S. government killing two American citizens in Minneapolis. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers deployed to Minnesota in January.

May had previously expressed excitement about returning to the U.S. for a Las Vegas residency.

“I’m very keen on the Sphere,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s got my mind working. I sat there watching the Eagles, thinking, ‘We should do this. The stuff that we could bring to this would be stupendous.’ So, yeah, I would like to do it. We’re having conversations.”

Queen + Adam Lambert last performed in the U.S. in November 2023. The guitarist has been cautious about returning to the road following a minor stroke in 2024, although he has been onstage since then, including a performance with Benson Boone at Coachella, where he performed his electric guitar solo to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

May recently told the Daily Mail that Queen would never perform at Glastonbury Festival due to the practice of culling of badgers on the grounds of Worthy Farms, where the music event is held.

“I wouldn’t do Glastonbury next year because of the politics of the people who run it,” he said, “Unless that changes, I won’t do it.”

It’s become one of the most popular music festivals in the world. Each summer, major artists like Coldplay, Paul McCartney and the Cure make it a favored stop on their tours. Thousands of fans flock for the entertainment.

But Glastonbury will have to continue to do without one of the world’s most celebrated music acts: Queen.

As founding guitarist Brian May tells The Daily Mail, he is a longtime animal rights activist and the founder of the Save Me Trust to protect wild foxes and badgers. Unfortunately, Glastonbury’s organizers act in direct conflict with May’s organization.

“I wouldn’t do Glastonbury next year because of the politics of the people who run it,” May tells The Daily Mail. “Unless that changes, I won’t do it.”

Michael Eavis, a dairy farmer who is a co-founder of the Glastonbury Festival, supports badger culling, saying it is necessary to prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis.

May thinks that’s just an excuse to kill the animals.

“They like killing badgers, and they think it’s for sport,” he says. “And that’s something I cannot support because we’ve been trying to save these badgers for years, and they are still being killed for years. So that’s the reason we’re missing out on it.”

But whether Queen will return to touring at all is another matter altogether. The band’s last performance was for the Rhapsody tour, in February 2024, with singer Adam Lambert. Unfortunately, since suffering a stroke in September of that year, the 78-year-old guitarist has significantly altered his approach to live music and is likely ending full-scale world tours.

While he initially lost control of his left arm, May has since made a recovery and returned to the stage with his iconic Red Special electric guitar, although he is pacing himself and focusing on his health

“I don’t know when Queen will be back onstage,” he tells The Daily Mail. “It’s an unknown. We’ll take it day by day. It was time to take a break and spend time with family, take stock.

“But never say never about not coming back,” he adds tellingly. “The rebuild of Queen II is coming back, and there are a couple of things you haven’t heard.”

Sometimes a song becomes something bigger than a hit. It strikes a nerve with its audience and becomes an anthem that unites listeners with its message.

Brian May had no idea Queen were on the verge of recording such a momentous tune as the group set out to make News of the World, their sixth album, in 1977. Frontman Freddie Mercury had been working on a song designed to encourage audience participation. But when he first presented it to May, bass guitarist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor at a rehearsal, they didn’t get it.

Part of the problem was its lyrics, in which Mercury moved from complaints about having paid his dues to telling his audience his climb to the top had been “no bed of roses.”

Worst of all was the title: “We Are the Champions.”

“Our initial sense of it was that it was something very big-headed,” May told Guitar Player. “We all looked at Fred and said, ‘Really?’

“But he had a very clear view of it. It was aimed at an audience that wanted to feel a togetherness and a power and an optimism. He knew people would sing it.”

More than a gifted vocalist, Mercury was a performer who knew how to unite an audience. Which was only appropriate, considering that Queen had decided to bring them into the show with News of the World,

The genesis of this approach came after Queen‘s 1977 show at Bingley Hall in Stafford, England, where the audience sang along loudly and enthusiastically to every song.

“We did an encore and then went off,” May explained in a BBC interview that year, “and instead of just keeping clapping, they sang ‘You'll Never Walk Alone‘ to us, and we were just completely knocked out and taken aback.”

As they began to work on News of the World, the band was inspired to write tracks that would harness that collective energy. May brought along “We Will Rock You,” sensing its stomp-clap rhythm and simple vocal refrain would be good way to bring the audience together. Mercury, meanwhile, envisioned “We Are the Champions” as a theme that would unify fans in a moment of collective celebration.

“This was the first album where we contemplated audience participation,” May told Guitar Player. “Up until that point, we were sort of tentative. We didn't expect the audience to sing along because they didn't in those days. It was a big transition for us to realize that the audience was part of the show, and we decided to encourage that.”

As he explained, this shift in audience behavior was evident more in England and Europre than in America.

“This phenomenon started in Europe way before in the states,” he said. “And I used to prefer that people didn't sing, to be honest. I liked them to hear all the delicate nuances of what we were doing. I found it kind of annoying, as if it was getting in the way of Freddie’s vocals. It's funny to look back on that.”

Regarding “We Are the Champions,” May recalls that it was recorded in what was a typical fashion for Queen at the time.

“Normally, [Mercury] would put down the piano part with Roger and John live, and when it was good enough — after three or four takes — that would be what we used. And that's pretty much what happened with ‘Champions.’”

Working that way allowed May to think about his guitar parts while the others were recording their parts. But sometimes his best ideas came later, as they did for “We Are the Champions.” Roughly two weeks after initially completing his part, he added two new guitar tracks of bell-like chimes using his Red Special electric guitar.

Panned in stereo on the song’s second verse, they ping-pong from speaker to speaker during the lines “It’s been no bed of roses, no pleasure cruise,” adding a bit of decoration as the arrangement builds to a new high ahead of the chorus.

“I remember listening to it in the car the day it was to be mixed and thinking that my guitar wasn't good enough,” he explained. “I told them to give me one more go and planned that little piece in stereo that happens in verse two, which I really like, it's that sort of bell effect between two guitars. So I know I did some extra work on this one in the light of having lived with it for a couple of weeks.”

May also added some guitar lines — “the lead guitar responses to Freddie’s vocal, particularly at the end,” he said. But when listening to them in the final mix, he felt they were too obtrusive.

“We were very wary of that, because we liked order in our music,” he said. ”But the guitar in that case was kind of competing with Freddie’s vocal.”

However, Mercury felt it was exactly what the song needed: a contest of wills. He told May, “No. The guitar is fighting with the vocal here, and that’s the way it should be.”

“That song doesn’t have a solo as such,” May said, “and I don’t think it’s ever needed one.”

Journeyman guitarist Steve Vai has recalled two of his most poignant meetings with his early hero Brian May, and how it created “the most satisfying full-circle twists the universe has offered me.”

The former Frank Zappa, David Lee Roth, and Whitesnake man has taken to Instagram to show off his ‘Green Red Special’ — a gift from the man himself. Modeled on Brian May’s homemade axe, it is bestwowed with some important tweaks to eliminate the possibility of a repeat of the first time he met the Queen guitarist.

The electric guitar was built by U.K. firm Guyton Guitars and has been described by Vai as “devotion made tangible.” It features a longer scale length than the guitar May built out of an old fireplace with his dad while he was still a teenager — it has a 25.5” scale, usurping May’s 24” creation.

It also has a stunning quilted maple top, a much thinner neck, and Yonderbosk Vai-Sonic pickups. This trio of single coils was custom-wound for Vai specifically for the instrument. For Vai, it’s the realization of a near-lifelong dream.

“In the 1970s, when I was a kid in Carle Place trying to figure out how to play anything in tune, Brian May was one of my absolute heroes. His tone and touch oozed rock and roll class,” Vai writes on Instagram. “The songs he wrote and the notes he chose dug deep into my psyche and helped shape a future fantasy image of myself in my mind.

“His Red Special was not just a guitar to me, it was a mythical object, an alchemical wand built by a young genius and his dad,” he adds. “I studied every photo and rumor I could find. That guitar planted the seed that maybe someday I could build my own, which thankfully never happened, due to a total lack of expertise.”

But the guitarist didn’t stay locked away in Vai’s imagination or on his record player forever. At 20, he relocated to Los Angeles. There, he started work as Frank Zappa’s transcriber, before being promoted to guitarist and learning an invaluable lesson from the eccentric musician.

“I landed a tiny apartment at Fairfax and Sunset, and one night I walked into the Rainbow Bar and Grill and saw Brian just standing there. Alone. Like a normal human,” Vai remembers. “I thought I was hallucinating.

“Brian was incredibly kind to this unknown kid and then did the unthinkable: he invited me to a Queen rehearsal at Zoetrope.”

It was a ”pinch me” moment for Vai, who was still coming to terms with the fact that he was on the payroll of another one of his heroes.

“Sitting in a room with the entire band was already unreal enough, but then I saw the Red Special,” he says. “I pointed and said, ‘Is that it?’ Brian said, ‘Yup. Want to try it?’ Time definitely slowed down.”

Guitars, though, can be highly personal things. He soon realized that he and the Red Special were not the perfect match.

“After idolizing that guitar my whole youth, holding it was seismic,” Vai purrs, before dropping the all-important ‘but.’ “I thought, ‘This is it, I’m finally going to sound like Brian May.’ But much to my chagrin, I didn’t. I sounded like me. And between the gauge .08 strings, ultra-low action, and a neck the size of a small tree, I played it like a baby giraffe on roller skates. Still, it was heaven.”

Though the guitar wasn’t quite what it was in his dreams, it remained a memory he held dearly. It seems May didn’t forget that meeting, either.

Vai continues: “After [Vai‘s second studio album] Passion and Warfare came out [in 1990], I was invited to perform at a Guitar Legends concert in Seville, Spain, and Brian was the musical director.

“Brian told me the story about a young guitarist he once let play his guitar at rehearsal, a kid who was in town working with Zappa and who played amazingly well. I let him tell me the whole story and then said, ‘Brian, that was me.’ This stands as one of the most satisfying full-circle twists the universe has offered me.

“Through the years since, I’ve been blessed to have had the opportunity to get to know Brian, jam with him on multiple occasions, and even work with him. It’s always an immense pleasure and honor, and he always delivered like a boss.

“And now comes the part that still makes me blink, laugh, and shake my head in disbelief: The true unspeakable honor of this extraordinary guitar he had custom-made for me and gifted to me.

“It’s a ‘Green’ Red Special! It’s hard to find the words. I’m truly humbled.”

Elsewhere, May has gifted his best friend, Tony Iommi, with a special left-handed version of the Red Special, which could yet get a Gibson-made reissue. The Queen guitarist signed with the historic gear makers in 2024, with his first-ever signature guitar, a 12-string SJ-200 acoustic, hitting the shelves last year.

Queen guitarist Brian May has gifted Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi a left-handed model of his Red Special replica that merges elements of the two guitarist's custom guitars.

Built by master builder Andrew Guyton, the electric guitar was placed in Iommi’s hands last week, which led to his celebratory Instagram post over the weekend.

“Huge thanks to my best friend @brianmayforreal and master builder Andrew Guyton @guyton_guitars for this incredible left-handed Red Special replica,” Iommi wrote on Instagram. “Andrew personally delivered it last week — a true gift from Brian, two years in the making. Christmas came early! 🎸🎄 - Tony

“Andrew said ‘It’s built with the exact vintage construction of Brian May’s original Red Special, but shaped to match Tony’s iconic Jaydee Old Boy neck. Features a built-in treble booster and authentic vintage-style pots and pickups to replicate the classic tone.’”

The original Red Special was built by May and his father in the early 1960s and became a key part of Queen’s sound and identity.

In creating Iommi’s guitar, Guyton carefully matched the neck profile of Iommi’s Jaydee Old Boy electric, the custom guitar built between 1975 and 1978 by John Diggins, the founder of JayDee Custom Guitars as a successor to Iommi’s original Gibson “Monkey” and black John Birch SG. The Monkey was itself a heavily modified Gibson SG Special that defined the sound of the early Black Sabbath albums, which in turn became a hallmark of the heavy metal genre.

Iommi and May’s friendship goes back decades and began out of mutual respect — Iommi has been a fan of May’s guitar sound, and May has rightfully recognized Iommi as the father of heavy metal. May has called Iommi his "dearest friend in the business,” while Iommi has dubbed May a "rock god.”

Although the duo have never released an album together, Iommi appeared at the 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert to perform on "I Want It All" and "Stone Cold Crazy,” while May has played on Iommi’s self-titled 2000 solo album.

Over a 56-year recording career, Paul Rodgers has collected guitar players like a connoisseur collecting fine wines. They’re pulled in by the soulful power of his voice, and he embraces what the combination, and combustion, of that with their playing can do to a song.

Consider the company English-born Rodgers — a solid rhythm guitarist himself, as well as a pianist — has kept, starting with the late Paul Kossoff in Free between 1969 and 1973, the band that put both men on the rock and roll map.

After that he joined forces with Mott the Hoople’s Mick Ralphs in the recently minted Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group Bad Company, for six albums defined by brawny, muscular but still sophisticated hard rock that had few peers for success during the ’70s. (The new Can't Get Enough: A Tribute to Bad Company demonstrates the group's continuing influence, with Rodgers and drummer Simon Kirke joining on tracks like "Shooting Star" and "Feel Like Makin' Love" with Halestorm, Blackberry Smoke and Def Leppard's Joe Elliott and Phil Collen.)

Then for his next trick? No less than Jimmy Page in the short-lived band the Firm, delivering a pair of powerhouse albums and Billboard Mainstream Rock chart toppers such as “Radioactive” and “All the King’s Horses.”

Rodgers went on to join forces with drummer Kenney Jones in the Law, then spent five years alongside Brian May in Queen + Paul Rodgers, another supergroup collaboration that brought May and drummer Roger Taylor back on the road and also yielded two live albums and 2008’s The Cosmos Rocks, the first Queen-related studio album since 1995’s Made In Heaven.

Rodgers maintained his impressive six-string relationships outside of his band affiliations, too, and through his seven solo albums — Jeff Beck, Joe Bonamassa, Steve Cropper and Slash among them.

“I don't really know the secret of how guitarists create their own unique sounds,” he tells us, “but I know a good guitar sound when I hear it.”

Here he shares some reflections about some of the best he’s worked with.

Paul Kossoff (Free)

“Koss was my friend and guitar player extraordinaire from before the formation of the band Free. We had met at a jam session. He came up onstage at a blues club in London, the Fickle Pickle, and blew me away with his powerful sound and his fluid electric guitar work. We played like we had been playing together for a long time, There was an instant rapport between us.

“His Gibson Les Paul was, as we used to say, ‘the bees’ knees.’ At the time, Eric Clapton was doing the Les Paul–Marshall stack thing and was playing at the Marquee just across town on Wardour Street in the West End.

The London music scene was referred to as experiencing a blues boom. The blues was the music we all listened to, the likes of B.B. King, Albert King, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters.

“Paul was one of those instantly recognizable players. You could identify him from just a few notes or chords, as in the opening chords of ‘All Right Now.’ Such a full spectrum of sound — all the high tones and all the low, with just a hint of crunch. I think the uniqueness is in the fingers, but you have to have the right gear too, and Koss had one hell of a great sound, even to this day. He was my soulmate guitarist, and we were in sync musically. Sad we lost him when he was just 25. Such a tragedy.”

Mick Ralphs (Bad Company)

“We were ‘label buddies.’ Both our groups, Free and Mott the Hoople, signed to Chris Blackwell's Island Records. I would see Mick in the office on Bodine St., Notting Hill Gate. Then Mott the Hoople and my next band, Peace, toured the U.K. together. I got to know Mick and liked him as a person — always friendly and so funny.

“We started writing songs together, and songs being the lifeblood of any band, the songwriting turned into a band, Bad Company. He had ‘Can’t Get Enough;’ Mott's Ian Hunter did not feel it suited the band's style, so when Mick played it for me I told Mick that the song was a hit and that I would love to sing it — and we were off to the races on our first album.

“Mick was often, described as a nuts-and-bolts guitar player, but to me he was always so much more than that. Being both a brilliant songwriter and guitarist. One of the great things about his sound was that he was multi-dimensional.

“Take ‘Rock Steady’ or ‘Burning Sky’ or ‘Silver, Blue and Gold,’ and of course the unstoppable ‘Can’t Get Enough’ or ‘Movin’ On.’ If you picture each song or track and focus on the guitar, not just the part he chose to play but the actual sound, each song is a a one-off — never been done before or since. Although there have been lots of copycat attempts — which is the highest praise, I’m told.

“In each song his sound perfectly matched and enhanced the mood and atmosphere of the lyrics — dark, moody and mysterious ‘Electricland’ or the blatantly rock and roll ‘Preacher.’ To me he was, and will forever and always be extremely inspirational. I believe that Mick made Bad Company what it is with his unique and varied guitar sounds.

“I can’t say how he got the variety of sounds he did. They broke the mold when they made him. I’m so happy we learned about our Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction while he was still alive. He was very happy when he heard the news.”

Jimmy Page (The Firm)

“We kind of fell together after I had built a studio in my London home, with the help of a designer, Steve Hoyland, and made a solo album Cut Loose — coincidently the same name as the smash hit American movie at that time.

“But Jimmy and I got together in that studio and began to create music. It was a very mind-expanding, creative and exhilarating time for me. Jimmy would bring along music for me to write lyrics to; the first serious song was ‘Midnight Moonlight Lady,’ and his guitar layering on that is superb — a beautiful, introspective sensitive and deeply personal piece of music.

“I would bring songs along that I had written, like ‘Radioactive’ and ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed,’ and it was pure magic watching him add his signature touches. We weren’t together long — as agreed, two years — but we left our mark on the tapestry of the story that is rock and roll.”

Brian May (Queen)

“I always admired Queen from afar. They had such a good sound. Every word from Freddie and every note from the band was crystal clear.

“When I heard ‘I Want to Break Free,’ the guitar solo was mouth-watering — so good. When we played that song together live, I would always turn around from the end of our 30-foot thrust in the center of huge arenas and watch and listen. Every time it just blew me away.

“‘The Show Must Go On’ is another great song. The passion and commitment is breathtaking, and Brian’s guitar totally matched the incredible moments in that song. His sound burns and pierces the very heart of things. He played ‘All Right Now’, with his massive chord sound, banks of Vox AC30s hooked up together. He uses a six-pence, which is an old silver U.K. coin, for a plectrum, which gave the strings a metallic overtone. After a show the stage was littered with them.”

Jeff Beck

“Now, Jeff Beck took no prisoners. He was outstanding amongst outstanding guitar players, in a league of his very own out in the stratosphere.

“Don't believe me? Listen to ‘Shapes of Things’ with Rod Stewart. The solo on that recording can't fail to blow your gaskets. He was a towering monster on guitar. There's also a track he did in the same time period, the B-side of ‘Tallyman.’ Just listen and you will know what I'm talking about. Actual words fail me, he was just so gut wrenchingly awesome.

“In 2002, Jeff invited me to perform a couple songs with him in London at the Royal Festival Hall. Sharing the stage with him was an exhilarating experience and one that I will never forget. I remember touring with Jeff, Ann Wilson and Deborah Bonham in 2018. Jeff and I would, flip-flop: One night he would close the show, the next night I would close with my solo band. It was so surreal on the nights when he was closing to stand at the side of the stage with my wife, Cynthia and listen to Jeff. It was absolutely breathtaking.”

Steve Cropper

“Steve Cropper was a staple in my listening and learning curve. He followed the emotion of the song and was the gold standard by which I viewed every guitar player. His playing really moved me.

“Steve was a sensitive yet powerful member of Otis Redding’s band on the Otis Blue album, the first vinyl album I ever bought with my own hard-earned cash, and my first love in terms of music. I still have that album. Steve Cropper, Duck Dunne, Al Jackson and Booker T Jones — the core band on ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ — build it incredibly to a climax that moved me to tears, the band working with Otis to tear your heart out.

“And Steve is such a big part of that emotional climb, hitting just the right notes in just the right place — sometimes chordal, sometimes playing lead. He was very, very restrained, nothing flashy or extraordinary until required, as in ‘Rock Me Baby,’ which has such an incredible groove.

“And when he lets it loose on the solo — every note counts with Steve. I was blessed to work with him a few times, most recently in 2021 on his last solo album, Fire It Up. We cowrote a song together: ‘She's So Fine.’ He’s sadly missed, but his contribution to music will always be remembered and appreciated.”

Slash

“Slash played on ‘The Hunter,’ a Steve Cropper/Albert King song on my Tribute to Muddy Waters blues album in 1993, and gave the recording his own inimitable interpretation of the blues with a fiery solo and some outstanding rhythm guitar playing. I think Slash is influenced by all the right people, old-school and blues, with his powerful Les Paul and his Marshall stack. He has great stage presence, witnessed when he joined me and performed at Woodstock in 1994. He was ripping it up in the rain and sounding good with Andy Fraser on bass and Jason Bonham on drums.

“I invited him up for a jam when Queen and I played in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005. The crowd loved it and so did I. Most recently we performed together as a tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd's Gary Rossington on the CMT Awards show. That same year I also sang on his latest album, Orgy of the Damned, on which Slash's guitar playing once again shines a light on the blues with his excellent sound and unique style, pure gold, raw and bluesy.”

Joe Bonamassa

“When I first met Joe, he told me that he was a huge Free fan, which impressed me, because most people in America are aware of Bad Company, not Free, other than ‘All Right Now.’ He had taken a deep dive into Free’s catalog, and the songs that he preferred weren’t the commercial songs, which intrigued me — songs like ‘Walk in my Shadow’ and ‘Fire and Water.’

“So when he asked me to join him at New York's Beacon Theatre in 2011 to record a live DVD, I accepted. And which songs did we decide to play? ‘Walk in My Shadow’ and ‘Fire and Water.’ Joe and his band were tight and nailed both songs. I really like his tone and sound and his phrasing is blinding liquid.

In 2024 Joe organized a tribute album to B.B. King, B.B. King's Blues Summit 100 [out February 6, 2026]. He asked me to record a track and I chose ‘The Night Life.’ I have always liked that track; the sentiment spoke to me. The next generation of guitar greats has arrived, and Joe is leading the way.”

SansAmp was way ahead of the game with the amp pedal concept, and the likes of Nuno Bettencourt have gigged its ready-made pedalboards under the Tech 21 banner. The Mop Top Liverpool is its take on British Invasion amp tones of the Beatles and beyond, but how it's hit the low, low price of $99 down from $249 over at Sweetwater for Black Friday is beyond me.

That's 60% off the price of a lot of analog pedal, and the Sweetwater listing states that there are no restocks coming for this bargain – when it's gone, that's it.

Though it's not quite the Sweetwater bargain price, European players can take advantage over at Thomann for £133 (plus delivery) and the UK's Gear For Music even has a couple left at £139. Still a very significant saving.

The inspiration is unquestionably the Vox AC 30 for this two-channel amp pedal. It also has built-in speaker emulation to go straight to a PA or FRFR cab, – alternatively, you can just bypass it to go straight into a power or guitar. The Mop Top Liverpool is perfect for a light to fit in your gigbag rig or backup option.

The onboard switchable treble boost is your gateway to Brian May-style gain glory here. A three-band EQ with mid shift and high control makes it a user-friendly way to dial in your sound. With the two channels at your feet this could handle a whole gig, not bad for just $99!

The Mop Top Liverpool might just be the dark horse bargain of Black Friday.

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It’s been just over a year since Brian May’s life took a turn for the worse.

In September 2024, the Queen guitarist revealed that he had suffered a “minor stroke” that left him temporarily unable to use his left arm.

He’s now offered a new health update in an interview with Alan Titchmash on ITV’s Love Your Weekend.

"I’ve been lucky, I get these things, but I seem to be able to get out of them,” May says. “They give you a wake-up call.”

The 77-year-old guitar virtuoso was likely referring to several other ailments he’s suffered in the recent past. He had a heart attack in May 2020 and subsequently nearly died when his heart medication caused his stomach to hemorrhage.

"That's the point where I nearly lost my life,” he told Good Morning Britain in 2020, “not the heart attack, strangely enough.”

In his new interview, May revealed that he's now giving more attention to his health by keeping active.

“I keep moving,” he explains. “I do my biking a lot of times a week. I do a hundred lengths in the pool once a week.

“To me, that’s what’s keeping me going. That's what's keeping me alive.”

He adds that his doctors have given him the thumbs up, telling him he's "doing the right things.”

“So, for now, I'm still here,” he says.

May first told the public about his stroke in an Instagram video in September 2024.

“They called it a minor stroke, and all of a sudden, out of the blue, I didn’t have any control of this arm,” he explained. “It was a little scary, I have to say.”

Since then, May has returned to performing, appearing twice with Benson Boone at Coachella and in London.

In that time, he has also become one of the loudest voices in the campaign against teaching AI with artists’ music. The guitarist raised concerns about the U.K. government adopting changes to copyright laws that would make it easier for AI developers to mine online songs.

“My fear is that it’s already too late," May said. "This theft has already been performed and is unstoppable, like so many incursions that the monstrously arrogant billionaire owners of Al and social media are making into our lives. The future is already forever changed."

May also recently revealed the “fireball” of an electric guitar player who blew his mind before Jimi Hendrix, saying, “He was incredible, nobody could play like that in those days.”

There’s no denying Jimi Hendrix changed the electric guitar game. But long before he ventured from New York City to London — where he sent shockwaves through the blues scene and nearly ended Jeff Beck’s career — another player sparked a revolution in the mind of future Queen guitarist Brian May.

May was in his early 20s by the end of the 1960s. Although Rory Gallagher would have the greatest influence on his guitar tone — inspiring him to adopt two hugely important pieces of gear into his rig — it was another British blues rock great who showed him what was possible with his instrument.

“He was incredible, nobody could play like that in those days,” May says of Deep Purple linchpin Ritchie Blackmore.

For May — who made his comments in the 2015 documentary The Ritchie Blackmore Story — it was the “wild and untamed” way Blackmore played that affected him most.

“It's hard to imagine,” he says. “It’s like going back to the time before there were wheels. People did not play like that in those days; you were looking at people who played jazz and were very safe and rather mellow.”

Blackmore's weapon of choice throughout the '60s was a 1961 Gibson ES-335, a guitar thrust upon him by future amp maker Jim Marshall,. That was the instrument with which he launched Deep Purple, and May was there right at the start of the journey, falling in love with their 1968 debut album, Shades of Deep Purple, while attending college.

Even then, Blackmore's reputation preceded him.

“Ritchie Blackmore already was a legend,” May explains. “I was together with [future Queen drummer] Roger [Taylor] at that point, and Roger had worked alongside Ritchie in his previous groups down in Cornwall.

“And Ritchie was a figure of mystery and wonder. He was able to play very fast, very accurately, and very passionately. He’s wanging the guitar all over the place, he’s using the tremolo bar, and making the whole thing into a completely different instrument.

“Ritchie came along and he's a fireball,” May continues. “He was beyond belief. His technique was incredible. Where that came from, I have no idea. And this was before Hendrix. Ritchie is a great creator and originator of the wild electric guitar.”

And yet, even with Blackmore’s sizable reputation, Deep Purple’s first few records had only middling success. It was only with the second line-up and the 1970 album In Rock that their fortunes began to turn. Coincidentally, it was the first record on which Blackmore played a Fender Strat, having made the switch after striking a deal with Eric Clapton’s roadie for one of Slowhand’s unused models.

The Mark II line-up came to a head with Blackmore as egos clashed. Although Blackmore had stuck around for a few more albums, he'd join forces with Ronnie James Dio in Rainbow before deciding life in the band wasn't what he'd expected.

Blackmore is now back out on the road after a series of health scares cast doubt on his future earlier this year. His rock days may be long behind him, but the impact he's had on the guitar world is still being felt.

Sometimes, public opinion elevates a song far beyond what its writers ever imagined. Scott Gorham admits he never saw Thin Lizzy's “The Boys Are Back in Town” as a single until American DJs put it on heavy rotation, and it spread like wildfire.

Similarly, Brian May has told Classic Rock he didn’t initially think “Bohemian Rhapsody” was anything extraordinary. But the public clearly had other ideas.

“People have such a hard time understanding how unsurprising ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was to us,” May says. “If you look at the first album, you’ve got ‘My Fairy King,’ which is very complex and goes all over the place.”

“Bohemian Rhapsody,” a mock opera penned by singer Freddie Mercury as a way of mashing three song ideas into one, was a quintessential Queen track. It didn’t stray from what the group had done on their first three albums.

May also points to “March of the Black Queen” from 1974’s Queen II as further evidence, noting that it is “way more complicated” than Mercury’s mock opera.

“So ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ wasn’t a surprise to us,” he says. “It was just, ‘We’ll do another one of these things.’”

The difference, he thinks, is down to producer Roy Thomas Baker, who took Mercury’s vision to the next level.

“We were going out to dinner one night, and I met Freddie at his apartment in Kensington,” Baker told Sound on Sound in 1995. “He sat down at his piano and said, ‘I'd like to play you a song that I'm working on at the moment.’ He played a bit and then stopped suddenly, saying, ‘This is where the opera section comes in.’ We both just burst out laughing.

“I had worked with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company at Decca, where I learned a lot about vocals and the way vocals are stressed, so I was probably one of the few people in the whole world who knew exactly what he was talking about.”

Soon the rest of the band were onboard.

“As we were constructing the opera bit, we were getting more and more wild,” says drummer Roger Taylor, speaking to CR alongside May. “‘Stick a bit more on, stick another bit in, it’ll all be fine when it gets to the heavy section.’ And it was.

“We were planting our flag in the ground: ‘This is really us — it’s a bit mad but it’s got everything in it,’” he continues.

The fact that it was written on a piano, rather than an electric guitar, presented some big challenges for May. Half a century after its release, the song still humbles him.

“It’s the most unnatural riff to play you could possibly imagine. It’s not a riff that a guitarist would naturally play, and that’s a double-edged sword,” he told Total Guitar last year.

“To be honest, I still don’t find it easy! I can play it at home okay, but in the heat of the battle, when we’re playing it live, and there’s huge adrenaline, it’s the climax of the show, and that riff comes along, it’s not the easiest thing to play.”

May has also likened part of the song's magic to the Beatles.

In related news, May revealed in September that Queen have been in the studio. Although he says his touring days are behind him since he suffered a stroke last year, he performed with his Red Special guitar in a surprise performance with Benson Boone at Coachella, and he notes Queen are "very keen" to play a residency at the Las Vegas Sphere. .

Earlier this year, he released his first-ever signature guitar, a Gibson SJ-200 embossed with a touching tribute to the late Mercury.

As “Bohemian Rhapsody” reaches the half-century mark, it’s not getting any easier to play, says Brian May.

The Queen guitarist says the hit song is so complex that he has to “keep my wits about me” every time he plays it.

Clocking in at nearly six mantes, and containing several sections, including May’s own guitar solo, the song combines elements of balladry, opera and rock in one of contemporary music’s most beguiling — and challenging — musical works.

May, who was present while singer Freddie Mercury composed the tune, says he was inspired as he heard the song take shape.

“The idea for all the instrumental stuff in ‘Rhapsody’ was growing while I was listening to him developing the song,” May tells Rolling Stone. “Freddie had some amazingly lateral thought processes.  It was always easier for me to play on his songs than mine, ’cause there was so much stimulation coming.”

Fifty years on, some stimulation is still required to play the song’s guitar parts. That includes his guitar solo. Recorded with his Red Special electric guitar into a Dallas Rangemaster treble booster, a custom-built Deacy amp and a "wet/dry/wet" setup of multiple Vox AC30 combos, May's big moment in "Bohemian Rhapdosy" is regularly cited as one of the greatest guitar solos in all of rock. Its presence in the song is entirely due to May saying he would like to, in effect, sing a verse on guitar.

But 50 years on, May says that, like the rest of the tune, it isn’t exactly ingrained in his muscle memory.

“‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is never that easy to play, even after all these years,” he admits. “I still have to keep my wits about me or I’ll fall off the train.”

Part of the complication is, no doubt, the layered vocal harmonies. As May reveals, they were inspired by none other than the Beatles, whose three-part harmonies on their recorded tracks were an inspiration for countless groups, from the Bee Gees to

Queen.In particular, May says the vocals in “Bohemian Rhapsody” were influienced by the Fab Four’s “Because,” a gorgeous, complex bit of sonic magic from 1969’s Abbey Road.

“We were transfixed,” the guitarist says. “I can feel the shivers going up my spine. We thought, ‘Oh, my God, that has to be the most daring piece of pure harmony we’ve ever heard.’”

In particular, May says the vocals in “Bohemian Rhapsody” were influienced by the Fab Four’s “Because,” a gorgeous, complex bit of sonic magic from 1969’s Abbey Road.

“We were transfixed,” the guitarist says. “I can feel the shivers going up my spine. We thought, ‘Oh, my God, that has to be the most daring piece of pure harmony we’ve ever heard.’”

The Beatles achieved the effect by stacking their vocal harmonies in the studio to create an even bigger sound than its three creators — John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison — could alone. May says that technique was behind Queen’s decision to overdub their voices countless times to create a chorale effect.

But it wasn’t just “Because.” Even an older track like 1964’s mesmerizing “This Boy” was behind Queen’s effort.

“It was everything the Beatles did,” May says. “We were able to sort of take up where the Beatles left off.”

Although the 50-year anniversary of "Bohemian Rhapsody" — and the celebrated album on which it appears, A Night at the Opera — seems ample reason for a celebratory jaunt, May says he’s not keen on touring. Now 78 years old, May — who had a stroke in 2024 — says he prefers to be home.

“ I’ve had 50 years of touring and there’s a part of me that thinks it’s enough,” he says. “I don’t like the idea that you wake up in your hotel room and you’re trapped.

“I had a few experiences recently where stuff happened at home with my family and I could not go home. It got under my skin and I just thought, ‘I’m not sure if I want this anymore.’ I feel like I’ve given up my freedom too many times.

“So my feeling at the moment is I don’t want to tour as such. I still want to play shows. I still want to innovate.”

To that end, May is eyeing a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas. He said the venue’s 360-degree visuals inspired his idea to perform there after he saw an Eagles concert there earlier this year.

“I sat there watching the Eagles, thinking, We should do this. The stuff that we could bring to this would be stupendous.

“So, yeah, I would like to do it. We’re having conversations.”

Queen’s enigmatic guitarist Brian May has been behind some of the greatest songs to come from rock's classic era.

These days, the guitarist is singing the praises of a tune from 2013 that he calls “one of the best rock songs ever.”

His passion explains why May has lent his talents — and the iconic tone of his Red Special guitar – to a special reworking of the song: “Could Have Been Me,” the breakthrough single from British glam-rockers the Struts.

May somehow missed the song’s initial release, when it became the lead single for the Struts’ 2014 debut album, Everybody Wants. When he did eventually hear it, he was taken aback.

“I wish I'd heard that song when I was a kid,” May tells Classic Rock. “It’s a classic.”

The Struts formed in 2012, combining shades of Led Zeppelin, Queen, AC/DC and — oddly — Leonard Cohen into their unique brand of glam. Luke Spiller, the band's singer and songwriter, even recalls imitating Freddie Mercury and Bon Scott in front of the mirror when he was just 11.

“Could Have Been Me” earned the band a slot supporting the Rolling Stones in Paris in June 2014, a month before their debut LP hit the shelves. Spiller says s the chance to rework the song with one of the band's heroes has only compounded the tune's meaning.

“This song is all about seizing your dreams and living life to the fullest, no matter the obstacles,” Spiller divulges. “It’s a powerful anthem that reminds us to chase what sets our souls on fire.

“Collaborating with Brian on this track is a dream realized, and I can’t wait for you all to feel the energy and inspiration behind it.”

Much of that energy comes from May’s harmony-rich contributions. His guitar sings throughout, at times growling like a V8 engine, at others sprinkling the playfully camp panache that underpinned Queen's legendary music.

“It's one of the best rock songs ever,” May declares, noting, “It was actually bigger in America than it was in Britain: it passed people by over here, and it shouldn't have done.”

The song gained traction in the U.S. two years after its release, thanks to growing prominence on the radio, eventually peaking at number five on the Alternative Songs chart.

Notes May, “It's a very inspirational song: I don't want to look back and think I didn't live my life and take all the opportunities that were in front of me. I love that sentiment. It says everything that a kid needs to know when they're growing up.”

Oddly, the band’s label, Interscope, warned the band not to let May add too many guitars to the track, saying guitars aren’t in vogue.

No one bothered to pay them any mind.

“I could hardly believe I was hearing that,” May scoffs. “It’s ridiculous. The guitar is very much parallel to a human voice, and that's what makes it immortal. That's why people express themselves through guitar as well as through their voice. I don't think guitars are on the way out just yet!"

While May arms himself, of course, with the Red Special as an extension of his voice, Spiller’s voice and the swagger with which he delivers his performance on the song feel very close to home for their guest star.

“Working with Luke, I'm often thinking of Freddie,” May confesses. “There are a lot of similarities. They both have this unstoppable belief. They have incredible voices, they’re great songwriters, but they have that extra ingredient: ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to let the world come to me.’ That’s what Freddie had, and that‘s what I see in Luke.”

“Hopefully, this song will go on to inspire many more people to take life by the scruff of the neck and drink it down deeply,” Spiller concludes. “Every day is a gift. Let’s celebrate them together.”

Mercury has been on Brian May’s mind a lot recently, with his first-ever signature guitar bestowed with a touching tribute to the late rock icon.

He’s also said he had to fight with him to get a guitar solo on one of Queen’s biggest hits — although another monster hit didn’t need one – and has discussed his favorite Queen deep cut. He says the band never plays the “magic” song live out of respect for Freddie.

Queen had their share of disagreements over the years that the original classic quartet was still together.

Guitarist Brian May and singer Freddie Mercury disagreed over whether or not to put an electric guitar solo on one of the group’s biggest hits. May also thought the singer was overdoing it when he pushed the guitar solo to the fore on the final choruses to “We Are the Champions” until it clashed with the vocals. Mercury replied that “the guitar is fighting with the vocal here, and that’s the way it should be.”

May was further displeased when the band recorded the backing track to their hit “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” in his absence.

But those were minor grievances compared to the interband controversy that continues over one of Queen’s cult favorites: “I’m in Love With My Car.” The song was penned by drummer Roger Taylor as a coy ode to drivers who feel too much affection for their automobiles.

Among its choice lyrics were the couplets, “When I'm holding your wheel / all I hear is your gear. / When my hand’s on your grease gun / oh, it’s like a disease, son.”

“Brian was like, ‘Is this a joke?’” Taylor recalls in an interview with Mojo. “I said, ‘Look at all those people out washing their cars on a Sunday morning, lavishing attention on them — they probably love their cars more than they love their wives.’

“It’s a valid lyric, I think, but kind of tongue in cheek, too, obviously... cars and girls — what else is there?”

But what really bothered May was the decision to place the song on the B-side to Queen’s monumental 1975 hit “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Because record sales royalties are split evenly between a record’s A and B sides, the arrangement meant Taylor’s joke of a song went on to earn a ridiculous amount of money courtesy of a song that was Queen’s labor of love.

“We were aware of the injustice of ‘I’m in Love With My Car’ making as much money as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’” May explained to Mojo. “It was a real sticking point for the band and it’s good we got through it.

“I think our sense of humor saved us. How long did it take me to get over it? Oh, quite a while.”

Indeed. The resentment even surfaced in the 2018 Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, where May’s onscreen twin complains about Taylor’s song getting an unfair advantage.

Apparently, May and Taylor have sparked on other occasions when the guitarist took a hand with the drummer’s songs.

“I think Roger would say to you that it’s very simplistic with him,” May says. “He thinks in barre chords on the whole. My contribution would be to come in and make the melodies work better.

“It’s a humble task but that’s what I’ve done on Roger’s songs — add a bit of color.”

Taylor is unhappy with the insinuation.

“Not really, no!” he snorts. “I don’t only think in barre chords — that’s a slightly arrogant statement to make.

“Brian’s a perfectionist and he will chase down the detail, but that didn’t mean I was going to let him fuck up my songs!”

His grievances aside, the drummer takes comfort in knowing his royalty haul from “I’m in Love With My Car” continues to get under May’s skin.

“He’s never forgiven me,” the drummer says. “And I’ve never stopped laughing about it!”

Brian May accepted long ago that he'll never be able to shred like Steve Vai or Joe Satriani. As a result, he was forced to reassess his approach to electric guitar pyrotechnics to serve the song rather than his ego.

Despite this, he occasionally found himself at odds with Freddie Mercury when it came to Queen's arrangements. The two men famously disagreed on the need for a guitar solo in “Don’t Stop Me Now.” The band’s eccentric frontman deemed it was a “piano song,” while May thought it would benefit from a spot of lead guitar.

But when it came to “We Are the Champions,” the guitarist tells Total Guitar such a thought never crossed his mind. Ironically, though, Mercury felt the track needed an obtrusive guitar part to fight with his vocals, making the arrangement consistent with the song's theme.

“It’s a strange story,” May explains. “I’d done the rhythm part for that, and sort of forgotten about it. And then I think we were in Wessex Studios, and it came quite quickly to the time when we were going to mix it, and I suddenly realized... there’s not really any lead guitar on there.’”

In response, he says, “I put in those answering pieces — the lead guitar responses to Freddie’s vocal, particularly at the end. Also, those little bell chimes–type things in the second verse.”

Unfortunately, when May and Mercury sat down to finalize the mix, the guitarist says, his new lead parts clashed with the vocals.

“On that song, the last couple of choruses have guitar going through them,” May told Mojo in 2017. “We were very wary of that, because we liked order in our music. But the guitar in that case was kind of competing with Freddie’s vocal.

“In those days it was all manual mixing, and we both had our fingers in that mix. And strangely enough, Freddie had his hand on my guitar, and I had my hand on his vocals. He’s pushing up the guitar more and more, and I’m going, ‘Freddie, are you not overdoing it?’”

Mercury’s answer?

“No. The guitar is fighting with the vocal here, and that’s the way it should be.”

“That song doesn’t have a solo as such,” May adds, “and I don’t think it’s ever needed one.”

In retrospect, he says, a solo might have caused problems with their live show, since he would have to stop playing rhythm, depriving the song of its much-needed power.

“The bottom would drop out of it,” he says. “And I can do a lot with bluff on the night. I can make people think there’s still a rhythm guitar there. But not for very long…”

Indeed, last February, May revealed that, in the band’s early days, he made a pitch for Queen to employ a rhythm guitarist onstage. At that point, his thinking was solely based on confidence — “it took me a long time to feel confident about being the only guitar on stage,” he admitted — but in truth, such a move would only have facilitated more guitar solos.

Without another player to thicken up their sound, May took on a new approach and employed solos only when a track called out for them.

His stance on virtuoso playing harmonizes with comments made by Wolfgang Van Halen. The son of one of the world’s best-loved shredders isn’t averse to lighting up his fretboard, but he says his focus is on songwriting.

“I approach guitar playing more as a producer and more as a drummer than a guitar player,” he explains. “Rhythm is always the first thing for me, and melody is the second.

“A really core thing for me that my dad always instilled is that a solo should be melodically memorable.”

George Harrison, meanwhile, tracked four different solos for "Let It Be" over a one-year period, and today, its guitar tabs are the most viewed as players look to emulate his magic.

Sophie Lloyd has also opened up about the guitar solos that changed her life, and May has picked out his favorite Queen deep cut. It's a “magic” song the band has never played live out of respect for Freddie Mercury.

Brian May has the résumé of a rock god, but he doesn’t see himself as a dot on other players' fretboards, and that’s forced him to reconsider his approach to the electric guitar.

He was voted the greatest rock guitarist of all time in a 2020 Total Guitar poll, a feat he also repeated three years later. For that matter, his “Bohemian Rhapsody” guitar solo is deemed one of the greatest ever written. Yet he feels his playing is limited.

“I have none of that high-speed, high technical skill of a Steve Vai or a Joe Satriani,” he told MOJO in 2017, three years before his first poll-topping triumph.”

However, like David Gilmour, who has also admitted that shredding proved beyond his capabilities, May has played to his strengths.

“What I have is a connection between the mind and the fingers, which just serves me in a particular way,” he explains. “I find that I can connect what’s in my head through the fingers to what’s coming out, and it’s quite a smooth connection.”

His relationship with the guitar — in particular his one-of-a-kind Red Special — is almost telepathic.

“You get to the point where you can almost turn off any kind of thinking process,” he says. “You just allow what’s in your head to go through your fingers.”

Moreover, May believes that, contrary to some, tone isn’t solely about the gear someone uses.

“I think a huge amount of a guitarist’s sound is in the fingers, and in the body and mind, as well as the way it’s played,” he continues. “You own a guitar, play it, and it becomes a part of you more and more as time goes on.

“The sound that people mainly know me for is a guitar that sustains, and something happens to you when you hold a guitar like that in your hands.

“I always used to wonder about that when I was very first starting. I remember people used to sing and play at the same time, the same notes, and I thought: I wonder how that happens? And it happens through doing it for a lifetime.”

Of course, this is an instance where gear does play a role beyond being a conduit for noise making. His Red Special, handcrafted with his father over two years, features an irregular tremolo system that adds greatly to the instrument's sustain.

“The strings lock onto a milled steel plate, which pivots on a case-hardened knife edge,” he explains. “The tension of the strings is balanced by two motorcycle springs. There is very little friction in the system. I also designed a special bridge that has rollers that move, instead of the usual arrangement where the strings come over a fixed bridge.”

Still, while May understands that he can’t outgun the likes of Vai and Satriani, that hasn’t stopped him from letting fly from time to time. He 1983 collaboration with Eddie Van Halen — “Blues Breaker,” a whirlwind 13-minute solo fest — proves as much, even if Eric Clapton, to whom the song was dedicated, derided it as “horrible.” Most of the time, May's playing was more reserved, playing a small role in a much larger picture.

“I think the guitar, to me, is always secondary to the song,” he said during a Q&A at a Red Special fan event last year. “It's not an excuse to go in and show off. It's a way of enhancing whatever material you're using. So I'm always trying to coax different textures out of it — different sounds, different moves.”

That's why he says he had to fight Freddie Mercury to add a guitar solo to this Queen hit, feeling the song called for the texture some lead guitar would bring. It was but one piece of a much larger puzzle.

Such a mindset, he feels, outstrips fireworks for the sake of setting fire to something. But, like Gilmour, he was able to reframe a limitation to find a more unique voice on the instrument.

Meanwhile, Noel Gallagher has revealed the hilarious response he gave his son when he asked his dad why he couldn’t shred like the players on Instagram.

And in related news, May made a surprise at Coachella back in April, playing a Queen classic with Benson Boone. He has also criticized potential law changes that will favour AI companies, and discussed why Jeff Beck's playing was unmatched.

Mick Ralphs, founding guitarist with Mott the Hoople and Bad Company, died June 23, 2025, from complications of a stroke he suffered in 2016. His death comes just months before Bad Company is to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in November.

In 2024, ian Hunter, Ralphs' former Mott the Hoople bandmate, shared with us how Ralph's stolen guitar set in motion the group's 1973 hit "All the Way to Memphis." We present the story below in memory of Ralphs.

For Ian Hunter, the tale of a mislaid guitar has been the bones to Mott the Hoople’s 1973 classic All the Way From Memphis. But now, 50 years later, he wants to set the record straight about the forgotten “six-string razor” that sets the tale in motion.

“That was really a bit of poetic license,” Hunter admits. “[Lead guitarist] Mick Ralphs’ guitar was actually stolen at a gig in Long Island a little earlier on our American tour in late ’72, not left behind.” Ralphs also had a fear of flying, and Hunter worried he might skip the Memphis gig after his guitar got lifted.

“All he had to do was go back to England and it would have been all over,” Hunter says. “Which I figured he would do. But in the end, he did the gig.”

Memphis magic

Its U.S. roots aside, All the Way From Memphis was birthed in Hunter’s home in Wembley, London, in 1973. “I had just gotten married, and we had this old upright piano, with all the white notes gone,” he recalls. “So I started playing around with the black notes, and that’s how the music came together. But the lyrics took weeks.”

It was while musing over the dramas of that 1972 tour that Hunter suddenly happened upon the song’s subject matter.

“I remembered we’d done that gig in Memphis just before that Christmas, where Joe Walsh was opening for us,” he explains. “A lot of weird things happened. We were told nobody was going to be at the gig, but we hit the stage to a full house. It was kind of a magic night, so the lyric was based around that.”

The rollicking piano and sax interplay, as well as Ralphs’ lead guitar, reinforce the lyric’s “merrily we go to hell” attitude, as perfectly encapsulated in the line, “You look like a star but you’re still on the dole.”

Hunter agrees. “People don’t realize the investment that goes into it all, which the artist has got to pay off. All this stuff costs money, and the labels have to recoup it. That’s why, back then, you’d see an artist with a top-five single and a Platinum album, but they were broke.”

Mainly a Les Paul man

When it came time to record the song, the group entered Abbey Road Studios to lay it down for their next album, Mott. Ralphs recorded his blistering lead lines using his standard guitar-and-amp setup of a Les Paul Jr. into a Marshall amp. “Mick was mainly a Les Paul man,” Hunter recalls. “We had a great engineer in Bill Price, who improved everything we did. That helped a lot to make everything sound great.”

Columbia rules the airwaves

Mott already had a strong following in the U.K., where All the Way From Memphis climbed to No. 10 on the charts. In the U.S, the group’s record label prioritized it to album-oriented FM radio stations rather than the Top 40 AM stations, and the song failed to chart.

“Columbia Records really didn’t know how to market us,” Hunter says. “They thought we were an FM band, and so they weren’t pushing any AM singles. We said, ‘Well, it doesn’t seem to be doing the Rolling Stones any harm, as they’re getting pushed on both AM and FM.’ But for some reason they just pushed us to FM, and it never got airplay.”

Regardless, Mott – the album – hit an impressive number 35 on the Billboard 200 chart and helped All the Way From Memphis reach a wider audience than the band’s previous efforts. The song remains a fan favorite and has been covered by the short-lived early ’90s Michael Schenker/Tracii Guns outfit Contraband, and even by Brian May, who included it on his 1998 solo album, Another World, aided by Hunter.

“Brian was lovely to work with, a great guitar player and great person,” Hunter reveals. “And he’s a very serious kind of guy. We did the Astoria in London one time, and Brian was going to get up and play with us, but he’s very picky about his guitar, especially his Red Special.

“I was with him in the dressing room trying to explain something about the song. I said, ‘Here, wait a minute,’ and took his guitar off him to show him what I was trying to explain. And you should have just seen the look on his face! He was petrified. He was so scared. There’s just something about guitars and that song.”

In June 2024, a contingency of record labels — including three of the world's biggest, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Records — sued AI firms Suno and Udio for copyright infringements on an "almost unimaginable scale."

Now Bloomberg reveals that those very labels are in talks with the two businesses over a deal that would put the lawsuit to bed and establish a degree of cooperation between the opposing factions.

If successful, those negotiations will establish a framework that outlines how major labels make deals with AI bodies using the music they own for catalog training. That will see record labels profiting as AI increases its intelligence.

In short, the labels — 12 months after going on the attack — appear to have done a 180. It now remains to be seen if the artists whose intellectual property is being bargained over get a say in the make-up of any prospective deal.

Suno and Udio, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York, New York respectively, want to harness copyrighted music to learn at a faster level. The ongoing talks currently revolve around how that work is licensed, and the scale of compensation granted to artists whose work is analyzed.

However, as MusicRadar reports, the negotiations bear striking similarities to how, in the late 2000s, musicians were kept away from discussions between labels and streaming platforms as both parties thrashed out a deal relating to the money an artist receives per stream.

In 2025, Spotify pays on average $0.003 – $0.005 per stream, a figure countless musicians have derided. And of course, when a song is released via a label, there is another pair of hands for revenue to pass through before it reaches the people responsible for its creation.

In the U.K., two of rock's most prominent figures, Brian May and Jimmy Page, have been ardently speaking out against the government's proposed law changes regarding AI and copyright. The changes, which center on an "opt-out" policy, would rule in favor of AI companies and result in thousands of hours of copyrighted music landing in the crosshairs of AI learning machines.

May said that “nobody will be able to afford to make music” if “monstrously arrogant” tech companies are allowed to train technologies without requiring a license from the artist or their publisher.

He added that the U.K.'s decision could have a domino effect, impacting U.S. policies, where a great emphasis has been placed on investment into AI. The country wants to become a global superpower in that regard.

“My fear is that it’s already too late," May sighs. "This theft has already been performed and is unstoppable, like so many incursions that the monstrously arrogant billionaire owners of Al and social media are making into our lives. The future is already forever changed."

Page, meanwhile, tried to flip the situation the other way around to solidify his argument against the changes.

“When AI scrapes the vast tapestry of human creativity to generate content,” he had said, “it often does so without consent, attribution, or compensation. This is not innovation; it’s exploitation.

“If, during my session days, someone had taken my riffs without acknowledgment or payment, it would have been deemed theft. The same standard must apply to AI.”

Sharooz Raoofi, the founder of royalty-free audio firm Wavetick predicts the grim reality that any deal agreed between Universal/Sony and Suno/Udio might mean to the market. If the labels are invested in AI, he says, artists will suffer.

“You can imagine what the next step in this process will be,” he says via LinkedIn. “The further devaluation of music by flooding major label–controlled DSPs with major label–owned generative AI fodder fed by major label catalog.

“The end result — rights holders get paid even less, nobody has the right to opt in or out, and as artists we have zero visibility on what these license details will entail or whether we’ll even receive a royalty for being training fodder”

Speaking about what a deal could mean, Ivors Academy Chair Tom Gray theorized, “It appears recordings would be licensed to AI companies to ingest music-makers work without their permission and without reference to their personality or author rights.”

Moreover, in contrast to the U.K.’s suggested policy, “these licenses appear to not offer creators an 'opt-in,’ an ‘opt-out’ or any control — whatsoever — of their work within AI.”

It feels inevitable that record labels, once they sniff the money to be made, will begin to cozy up with the AI firms they once deemed a threat to their existence. The hopes that a fair deal that considers artist sentiment can be struck remains, but is to be seen to be believed.

Like many young guitarists in the early 1960s, Queen guitarist Brian May was influenced by the original wave of rock and roll. He was also more song-oriented in his approach, focused on rhythm rather than lead.

“I love playing rhythm and that's the way I started,” he told Guitar Player in our March 2012 issue. “When I was a kid I just played acoustic guitar and strummed and sang. I sang Everly Brothers songs, Tommy Steele songs, Elvis songs — so rhythm guitar is where I come from.”

But as music changed, so did May’s ambitions. His early lead work was influenced by the Shadows, whose electric guitar instrumentals were based in large part around the song's main melody. May said the group was "the most metallic thing out at the time.”

But by 1965, May had his head turned around by two new guitarists on the scene: Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. It was because of them that he began to look beyond the Shadows style of guitar playing he grew up on and got serious about developing his blues and rock chops.

He was particularly impressed by Clapton.

“Absolutely. Clapton from the very beginning, because I used to go and see the Yardbirds. We did a couple of their songs," he said.

“Clapton was unbelievable, just so sparkling and fluid. He was what turned me away from the Shadows style and sent me back to listen­ing to B.B. King, Bo Diddley and all those people who I'd heard.

“But I thought it was all the same: 12-bar blues, and that was it. I didn't realize the depth or emotion there was in it until I saw Eric Clapton doing it. That somehow made it accessible for me.

“After I went back and listened to his influences, I listened to Clapton very closely and people like Mike Bloomfield on the first album with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which had all those classics.

“Jeff Beck was an influence too, extremely. I couldn't believe what he could do. I remember seeing him put the guitar down, make it feedback. and play a whole tune without even touching the finger­board. That was the first time I saw a Les Paul guitar. I saw a gig at the Marquee soon after Beck had joined, and Eric Clapton came on and jammed at the end. That was pretty amazing; I'll never forget that.”

It was also around this time May caught a show by another newcomer on the London scene who would prove influential to him: Jimi Hendrix.

“I thought after seeing [Clapton and Beck], I'd seen it all. I had been playing all that time, and I could play that style. I was beginning to make the guitar sort of talk. I always wanted the guitar to play for people, to talk the same way a vocal did and have feeling in it. I didn't want it to be an accompanying instrument.

“Then when I saw Hendrix, I thought, Oh. my God. This guy is doing everything that I was trying to do. He just made me feel like I couldn't play.

“It’s a funny thing: It makes you feel very uncomfortable when you thought you knew everything that was going on, and then suddenly somebody comes along who seems to be doing all sorts of things which you hadn't even thought of, never mind find yourself able to play.

“I heard him play on a single of ‘Hey Joe,’ and on the flip side there's an amazing solo on ‘Stone Free,’ where he's talking to the guitar and it's talk­ing back to him. I thought, Well. he can't really be that good. He must have done that with studio technique.

“Then when I saw him for the first time supporting the Who at the Savoy Theatre in London, he just completely blew me away. I thought, He's it. The Who couldn't follow him in those days and they were really hot, big news in England. Any­body in the world would find it hard to follow Hendrix.”

Pete Townshend has attested to that. The Who guitarist told Guitar Player how Hendrix’s arrival in London in 1966 devastated his confidence as a guitarist. Ultimately, though, he said his inability to compete at Hendrix’s level pushed him to create more ambitious songs, which in turn led to the creation of the Who’s breakthrough album, Tommy.

“And what that actually did was provide me with records that sold in America, somehow,” Townshend said.

As for May, he would eventually find his own path and develop a signature style that remains one of rock’s most stylistically and tonally unique. As he’s explained, some credit is due to Rory Gallagher, who turned him on to the virtues of a Vox AC30 combo amp and a Dallas Rangemaster Treble Booster when May met the guitarist backstage at London's Marquee club following Gallagher’s performance.

“I found a Treble Booster,” he said. “I plugged it in with my guitar, turned it all the way up and it just melted my stomach. That’s my sound.”

Queen have had so many hits that their greatest-hits album could easily be released as an anthology. Brian May and Freddie Mercury, aided by the songwriting talents of Roger Taylor and John Deacon — and further helped, of course, by May’s standout Red Special guitar — achieved huge success together.

So picking one song as a cut above the rest was never going to be an easy task.

In their homeland, the band has broken into the Top 40 on 54 occasions, topped it six times, and produced 10 number-one records. In the U.S., they've made the Billboard 200 on 30 occasions, with nine top 10 hits and a singular track reaching number one.

Yet, when asked by the BBC’s One Show what his favorite Queen track is, May chose a song that's unlikely to feature on any collection. He shuns the anthemic, chart-smashing, and wedding party mainstay “Bohemian Rhapsody” which he recently performed at Coachella with Benson Boone. And he’s looked past other titanic hits like “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Don’t Stop Me Now”.

In fact, he splits his answer into two parts: the song on the band’s setlist that always gets his blood pumping, and another song that has never made it to the stage.

As for the first song, May says (via the Express), “I still love playing them all, I have to be honest. But I would have to say ‘We Will Rock You.’ It always gives me a good feeling."

As for his favorite song which remains forever off set lists, May revealed it during a Q&A session on the Queen YouTube channel. He says it’s his personal and emotional connection to the song that gives it special resonance.

“I’m going to pick a song that not everybody knows out there, which is called ‘The Miracle,’ which Freddie wrote that I always thought has a strange, unique magic to it,” May says.

“Especially because Freddie wrote it at a time when it was very hard for him to be optimistic,” May adds, referring to Mercury's AIDS diagnosis, “and it’s just very beautiful. I’ll go for that.”

"The Miracle" was released on Queen's 13th album of the same name, which would prove to be the penultimate Queen album released in Mercury's lifetime. All four members are said to have contributed to a song that began with Mercury and Deacon.

The song, which references cultural icons as wide-ranging as Captain Cook, Cain and Abel and guitar hero Jimi Hendrix finds the singer praying for the ultimate miracle: peace on Earth

Mercury started showing symptoms of HIV/AIDS in the early '80s, and as the decade closed out, his health was deteriorating. Yet his perspective was always positive-minded and outward-looking.

"The Miracle" is a song that represents the kind of character Mercury was, with doses of his flamboyancy pushing the progressive rock track along. It has never been played live as a mark of respect to their late frontman.

The song wasn't a success, commercially. May even went as far to say that “everybody hated it for some reason,” but it's a track he still holds dear.

"It’s very uncool to be idealistic in Britain, I suppose, at the moment,” he theorized in the wake of the song's release in 1989. “They said, 'How can they talk about peace’, and all that sort of stuff, then of course, China happened and everything [the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre]. It seems very relevant to us.”

May, however, has previously cited other Queen tracks as some of his favorites. On one occasion, he turned to a song completed four years after Mercury's death and featured on the posthumous album, “Made in Heaven”.

“It’s a quintessential Queen track,” he said of the title track (via Far Out). “It’s one of the biggest we ever did. It was never a single, strange enough. ‘Made In Heaven’ is so enormous.”

Another contender previously cited by May is “I Want It All,” a song he felt captured the band's desire to sing about the struggles of the everyman.

“The song was about reaching out and grasping what you want in life,” he had said, “A lot of Queen’s music was about normal people, with normal dreams and normal frustrations trying to grab the kernel of life. ‘I Want It All’ sums that up quite well.”

Mercury now lives on in a touching tribute featuring Brian May’s first-ever signature guitar, which comes after he became a Gibson artist. That announcement has led to speculation that a Gibson-made Red Special could be in the works, and he’s done little to downplay those wagging tongues.

Since Queen’s debut album was released in 1973, plenty has been said about Brian May’s guitar tone, and rightly so. Yet, while most look to his handcrafted Red Special guitar, alongside a Vox AC30 combo and a treble booster as the secrets to his tone, a Queen expert has pointed out a lesser-known but equally significant element: sixpence guitar picks.

Guesting on the Booked on Rock Podcast to promote his new book, Queen & A Night at the Opera: 50 Years, author Gillian G. Gaar has spoken about the big impact the unusual guitar picks have on his overall sound.

“He didn't like a pick,” Gaar explains. “And Brian, being ever so meticulous about this stuff, was saying that the older six-penny pieces, which would probably be a type of pence coin these days, had more nickel in them.

“So, they were a bit softer, and the serrated edge would help him get different tones from the guitar. He always has a stack of older six-penny pieces he could rely on. I think he said people mail them to him as well.”

According to Gaar’s book, May isn’t just after any old coin; he has a very specific criterion any would-be pick needs to meet.

“He said, 'Sixpences expenses are very soft metal, which doesn't hurt the guitar strings. But if I turn that serrated edge at an angle to the string, I can get that kind of articulating percussive, consonant sound,’” the book states.

“‘Before about 1950, they had a high content of nickel. Which makes them really soft. So, I especially like a 1947 sixpence, the year that I was born.'”

While the six-penny piece is now consigned to the history books, the coin, which was first minted in 1551, remained in circulation until 1980, nearly a decade into Queen's career. May likely had a sizable number of the coins set aside by that point.

The coin is so important to May that he has a custom made "Maydusa" six-pence glued to the headstock of his Red Special. The legend on it reads "Brian May: Back to the Light."

Billy Gibbons is another iconic guitarist who ditched traditional picks for currency, finding a Mexican peso far better for the job. Speaking of the switch to Guitar World in 2005 he said, “Tommy Carter of Jimmie Vaughan's Dallas band the Chessmen used a quarter to play bass. He described the serrated edge of the coin as producing a delightful scratchiness as he scrubbed the strings.

“That gave me the idea, and our love of the Mexican border is what drew us to the peso. The peso coin is a rarity, but we've still got a few filed down for the ready.”

Of his famed Vox AC30 and treble booster loyalty, Brian May took inspiration from Rory Gallagher, having seen him perform at London’s Marquee back in his Taste days.

“I managed to stay behind at the Marquee when everyone had gone home," he recalls. “I asked him, ‘Rory, how do you get that sound?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s easy, I have the AC30 and this little box, and I turn it up and it sings for me.’ The next day, I went to a guitar shop and found two secondhand AC30s for £30 each.”

May, now a signature Gibson artist, says it’s “not out of the question,” that his Red Special could receive a Gibson-made reissue in the near future.

Of the guitar’s DIY origins, the guitarist revealed that “everyone told us it was never going to work,” but says, upon hearing the band’s first album played back in the studio, it was a guitar he knew he could conquer the world with.

The guitarist made a surprise appearance at Coachella this weekend, starring in Benson Boone’s set during a rousing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” although the crowd’s lack of appreciation for the guitar legend has been met with derision by the Queen fanbase.

“Surprise” is the name of the game at Coachella, and this year’s event didn’t disappoint when pop singer Benson Boone tapped Brian May for a thrilling finale to his festival set, which included his take on Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

The guitarst was making one of his first appearances back on the big stage after he suffered a minor stroke last September. May made his initial showing the following month at a Red Special Guitar Meet-Up in Reading, U.K.

But Coachella was, of course, an entirely different thing. The guitarist teased his appearance at Boone’s performance earlier in the day on his Instagram.

“Who's gonna be there tonight? Who's gonna be streaming it live?” May wrote.

“This guy will shake the world. Trust me ! Bri”

Boone was clearly psyched for the show, appearing onstage — Freddie Mercury–like — in a blue-and-white jumpsuit and cape. His performance of “Bohemian Rhapsody” commenced with Boone singing while standing on a grand piano.

But when it came time for the guitar solo, the big reveal was made as Boone flipped off of the piano and May rose from stage high above him, wearing his Red Special electric guitar and proceeded to play.

The song reach its conclusion with May centerstage as the lights onstage flashed around and above him. Afterward, May stuck around to perform on the set’s closing number, Boone's chart-topping hit, “Beautiful Things.”

The guitarist reported back on social media about the event the following day: “I'm still reeling from last night at Coachella. Thanks to all of you folks who made it feel so special… this particular way of concluding 'Bohemian Rhapsody' will be hard to beat in the years to come! I'm awestruck.”

Boone was somewhat less thrilled — with the Coachella crowd that is. Apparently he thought the audience didn’t fully appreciate the significance of May’s appearance or his importance in the world of rock music.

Afterward, he posted a TikTok video of himself miming to “Bohemian Rhapsody” using a banana as a microphone. Superimposed over the image, he wrote, “Me trying to get the crowd at Coachella to understand what an absolute legend Brian May is and the cultural impact he has on music and the world.”

Queen's best-known song, "Bohemian Rhapsody" also features what is perhaps May's best-known solo. As he told Guitar Player in 2021, he heard the entire thing in his head before he played it.

"I basically sang it," he said. "I regard the guitar in that situation as a voice. I could hear this melody and I had no idea where it came from. That melody isn’t anywhere else in the song, but it’s on a familiar chord sequence, so it dovetails in quite nicely.

"And of course the job of the guitar solo is to bring that extra voice in, but then it’s a link into what everybody now calls 'the operatic section.' You know you’re into something very different.

A British teenager has channeled two of his guitar heroes, Brian May and Randy Rhoads, to built a Flying V–shaped electric guitar out of scrap wood.

Sam Golder spent 18 months building the guitar from scratch with wood from his grandfather’s stock. The results resemble the Jackson Rhoads, with its modified Flying V body shape and sharply angled head stock.

The project was born after the 18-year-old Golder saw his grandfather’s scrap material and realized the potential within it. He worked tirelessly to shape the guitar drafted in a school friend who 3D-printed a tool to help his cause.

The guitar’s unique inlays are sculpted from a mother-of-pearl button, and while the electronics were sourced online, they had to be dismantled and rebuilt.

Golder says Brian May and his Red Special were the impetus for his creation.

“Brian May was a huge inspiration for this project,” he tells his local paper, the Bristol Post.

“I grew up listening to Queen music, thanks to my dad, Robert. And last year I played lead piano in the band that provided the live soundtrack to our school production of We Will Rock You, which is, of course, based around Queen’s music and May’s iconic guitar sounds.”

Undoubtedly, May would appreciate Golder's fortitude, having famously built his Red Special by hand with his father, using a similar resourcefulness. The neck on May's guitar came from a fireplace mantel, while oak was scavenged from an old table for its body.

May — who was 19 at the time, just one year older than Golder — would also identify with Golder's decision to purchase pickups, considering his plight when he attempted to build his own pickups for the Red Special.

The May family’s faithful build, which looks set to receive a Gibson-built reissue, took two years to build, meaning Golder’s turnaround time is a little quicker. Yet it wasn’t any easier, even if parts are more readily available today.

Golder's guitar journey began during the COVID lockdown when he turned to YouTube videos to help him learn to play guitar. He hopes that the guitar’s creation marks the start of a long career in the music industry.

“I wouldn’t be where I am without the band, my friends, and our head of music, Mrs. Williams,” he says. “One day, it is my dream to share my music onstage to millions of people, whether that be guitar, piano or even both.”

It would be heartwarming to see May’s reaction to the instrument. The guitarist was suitably impressed by a meticulously fan-made Red Special copy when he viewed it an event last year.

Meanwhile, May has revealed a touching tribute to Freddie Mercury that sits at the heart of his first signature model — a uniquely strung JS-200 12-string acoustic guitar.

He’s also opened up on his very short-lived experimentation with Marshall amps. He could only get the stack to sound like “an angry wasp” before Jimi Hendrix stepped onto stage and turned the same amp into a “cataclysm.”

It’s been roughly 48 hours since guitarist Olly Pearson owned the stage and blew away the judges on Britain’s Got Talent, and in that time he’s no doubt received countless invitations from bands across the globe in need of a new shred monsters.

Whether he’ll be able to entertain any such offers remains to be seen. Pearson, you see, is all of 11 years old.

The diminutive guitarist admitted that he was nervous as he strolled onstage with what appeared to be a Patrick James Eggle guitar. Pearson, who first picked up the electric guitar at age seven, said that his favorite guitarist is AC/DC’s Angus Young, to which judge Simon Cowell responded, “Okay. Now you’re talking.”

That’s when Pearson put it all out there, telling the judges, "My dream for the future is to become the best guitarist in the world.”

With the cheering crowd already on his side, and his proud grandfather Lee looking on, Pearson paid tribute to Angus by kicking things off with a crunchy slice of “Highway to Hell.” In the blink of an eye, AC/DC morphed into Van Halen as the young picker nailed some of Eddie’s spunky licks on “Jump.”

But the kid – and the crowd – was just getting warmed up. He concluded his star-making spot with a smashing, note-perfect performance of Brian May’s solo on Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

All of which brought the crowd, and the judges, to their feet.

“Oh, my god, Olly. Literally, a star is born. I have never, ever seen anything like that in my life,” said a stunned Amanda Holden, who presented Pearson with the “Golden Buzzer.”

Next came Cowell’s verdict: “You already have your own distinct sound, which normally people take decades. You’re that good! That was brilliant.”

Still basking in his triumph, Pearson appeared on Britain’s This Morning broadcast with his grandfather Lee, who recounted the moment his grandson was bitten by the guitar bug.

“Olly said to me, ‘I saw a guy playing in the street, and I wanna do that.’"

Guitar became their bond, as grandpa, a player in his youth, relearned the instrument while Olly blew past him.

“I didn’t so much teach him,” Lee said. “I just opened the door and out it came.”

Brian May has joined the growing chorus of musicians voicing concerns about AI and its effects on music.

Speaking to the U.K.s Daily Mail, May railed against AI, saying “nobody will be able to afford to make music” if “monstrously arrogant” tech companies are allowed to develop and train the technology that uses copyrighted works without requiring a license from the artist or their publisher.

The guitarist is concerned about the U.K. government’s plans to adopt changes to copyright laws that would ease restrictions on AI developers. Under the law, they could use online songs without license for “text or data mining,” unless the rights holders chose to “opt-out,” something artists have call an unrealistic expectation to place on artists.

If passed, the law could set the stage for similar changes to copyright in other countries, including the U.S., where investment in AI is a high priority.

“My fear is that it’s already too late," May says. "This theft has already been performed and is unstoppable, like so many incursions that the monstrously arrogant billionaire owners of Al and social media are making into our lives. The future is already forever changed."

The guitarist says he’s heartened by a new silent album released on February 25 by Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien, Damon Albarn, Kate Bush and more than 1,000 other musicians, to raise awareness of AI’s dangers and protest the proposed changes to copyright law. Titled Is This What We Want?, the album includes recordings made in empty studios and performance venues to signify what will be lost if humans are edged out of music creation.

“I applaud this campaign to make the public aware of what is being lost,” May says. “I hope it succeeds in putting a brake on, because if not, nobody will be able to afford to make music from here on in.”

May first voiced his fears of AI in a 2023 interview with Guitar Player.

“I think by this time next year the landscape will be completely different,” he told us. “We won’t know which way is up. We won’t know what’s been created by AI and what’s been created by humans. Everything is going to get very blurred and very confusing, and I think we might look back on 2023 as the last year when humans really dominated the music scene.“

May — who was recently honored with a signature Gibson SJ-200 acoustic guitar — has been vocal about how much he’s gained from fellow musicians over the years. In addition to being influenced by the tones of artists like Jeff Beck, May said he was originally set on the path to find his electric guitar tone by Rory Gallagher, whom he met backstage at London’s Marquee club.

Indeed, all that human interaction will be lost for future guitarists if the barriers against AI are lowered.

AI’s rising impact on the music industry has led to predictions that it will greatly reduce artist’s incomes. A report released last December by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) said AI reduces opportunities for musicians, who are likely to lose a quarter of their income to AI over the next four years.

Because of his deep-rooted love for his self-made Red Special guitar, it’s taken Brian May half a century of noise-making to get his first official signature guitar. His Gibson SJ-200 12-string is the result, and it a heartfelt tribute to the late great Freddie Mercury that’s easy to overlook.

May turned heads when he joined Gibson’s family of artists last year, ushering in rumors of a Gibson-made Red Special, which the guitarist added further fuel to with his comments several months later.

However, a different signature guitar has come first, and it satisfies more immediate and pressing needs for the guitarist, thanks to the 12-string’s quirky setup.

Discussing the guitar’s origins in a celestial-themed promo video, May says: “The 12-string I was accustomed to wasn’t performing. Gibson kindly said, ‘We’ll make you something special,’” and it’s met his key request.

“One of the things I asked for,” he explains, “was for the octaves to be placed around the other way from the way it's usually done because I like to pick upwards and hear the top notes when I'm doing it.”

For the uninitiated, 12-string guitars feature the regular six strings, but strings E through to G are joined by a double of the string tuned an octave higher, while the high E and B strings are given a partner string in the same octave. This creates a bigger, more ringing sound than regular acoustic guitars.

However, where typical 12-strings place the higher octave strings above the standard string, May’s unique model flips them around to make the higher octave strings more prominent and to match his picking style.

Beyond that, the spirit of Queen’s legendary frontman, Freddie Mercury, lives on in a guitar that both serves as a tribute to May’s two biggest loves in life — music and space — and stands as a symbol of Mercury’s legacy because of how the guitar is set to be used live.

May has taken to performing “Love of my Life” from 1975’s A Night at the Opera solo — but backed by audio and video of Mercury — during the band’s live shows in recent years. During those performances, his 12-string playing — previously delivered on a Godin or Ovation model — shines.

“Love of my Life was written by Freddie on a piano,” he explains. “I played harp on it, and in the intro a Japanese koto.”

However, the band chose to revise the song for the stage after May “picked up a 12-string and found that I could make it sing with Freddie quite easily”.

“But probably even more importantly than that,” he adds, “it became a staple feature of our set. We would always quit the bombast, come down very small, and just Freddie and I would play together. It was always a lovely feeling.

“When we lost Freddie, I wanted to play 'Love of my Life' just the way we used to, so it became an audience thing where they all sing it and I hardly need to sing it at all. It just seemed right to involve Freddie.”

And so, when designing the guitar, he made sure there was a little Freddie flair in its chic stylings.

“I believe that the best science is done artistically, and the best art is done with a knowledge of the universe. Look at the science of this guitar,” he muses. “Look how much technology and craftsmanship has gone into this.”

He then points to the guitar’s beautiful pickguard design, which features a constellation of stars and planets.

“They were able to put the universe here in some figurative way,” he says. “And look what's right here in the middle: The planet Mercury. That's a little nod to a friend of mine.

“Freddie's always with me because he was like a brother. The relationships in Queen lasted longer than any of our marriages. It was a big, big thing.

“We still carry Queen around with us, even though we don't have Freddie,” he concludes. “But I have a Mercury on the guitar now, which makes me very happy.”

Meanwhile, Brian May has revealed that guitars were illegal at his school, and in the same interview, he admitted that he had doubts about his Red Special guitar at first. However, after hearing the band’s debut album, 1973’s “Queen I” for the first time, we changed his mind and set his eyes on taking over the world with it.

Brian May admits he once doubted whether his Red Special guitar was good enough to cut it in Queen. Built by the guitarist when he was teenager, with assistance from his dad, the guitar was constructed from repurposed materials, including wood from an old fireplace mantle.

Despite sneers from guitarists who were convinced he’d never make it without a commercially made instrument, May fought through adversity to make the one-of-a-kind instrument the band’s secret weapon.

Speaking to Guitar World to promote the special anniversary reissue of the group's debut, Queen I, May addressed the guitar's various issues and tonal challenges.

“The Red Special held up surprisingly well,” he says. “I did have doubts in the early days because I knew it sounded different from what everybody else was using. It was different from a Strat: it’s warmer. It’s different from a Gibson: it’s got more top-end. It’s got a very wide sound.”

As the story goes, May and his father teamed up to make a guitar after the youngster was priced out of the market.

“At that time. we thought it would be interesting to make a guitar, seeing as I couldn't afford a Stratocaster,” May explained in Guitar Player's January '83 issue.

it’s body shape was plucked straight from May’s 15-year-old imagination.

“It's not exactly like any other guitar,” May explained. “We did a lot of experiments, and I played some of my friends' guitars, like Stratocasters and Hofners. It's pretty small. but the sort of shape that the semi-acoustic guitars had in those days, like the Gibson ES-335.

“But it's not symmetrical. I wanted it cutaway more on the underside so I could genuinely get up to those top frets."

Building the guitar required resourcefulness. The wood for its neck came from the fireplace mantel, while the body woods included oak scavenged from an old table.

"We made everything totally from scratch with hand tools,” May said.

It was up to his father, an electronics draftsman, to wrap his head around the electronics and craft the guitar's pickups.

Not surprisingly, the amateur luthiers came across challenges and problems as they set to work. The pickups were the first to be dealt with.

“[They] sounded pretty good except they had one bad fault,” May admits. “When you would squeeze the strings — bend them across the fingerboard — they would make this kind of rushing sound because the pole pieces went north-south, north-south, north-south, instead of north, north, north, north, north, north.”

“I eventually bought some Burns pickups,” he continued. “Burns were making guitars in England at the time, and they made some of the stuff for the Shadows.”

May and his dad had better luck building the guitar's vibrato. May says “it's better than anybody else's."

“The strings lock onto a milled steel plate which pivots on a case-hardened knife edge,” he details. “The tension of the strings is balanced by two motorcycle springs. There is very little friction in the system. I also designed a special bridge that has rollers that move instead of the usual arrangement where the strings come over a fixed bridge. It really performs quite well."

Even so, he admits it has one major flaw.

"The only big problem comes if you break a string; the whole thing goes out. It's hopeless. You just have to put it down!”

Although it looks like a solidbody, the Red Special is hollow. May had intended to cut f-holes in the top but couldn't bring himself to do it after he saw how good it looked as it was.

In the end, it took two years to build the Red Special — May was 17 when it was completed — as well as a fair amount of persistence and faith.

“Everyone had told us, ‘Nah, it’s never going to work,’" May recalls. "But hearing it back through the speakers was thrilling,” he says smiling as he recalls hearing the guitar on the playback of Queen's debut. “We thought, ‘We can conquer the world.’ That self-belief has to be there. It has to be the source of your power.

“The Red Special was designed to make that kind of noise. We wanted it to sing. We wanted it to feedback. That’s why it’s got the acoustic pockets in the body. I still don’t know if it was all thanks to our design or luck, but it just made that sound. Still does.”

Part of that is undoubtedly down to May's use of a Rangemaster Treble Booster into a Vox AC30, a setup he copied from Rory Gallagher. As he tells Guitar World, he’d met the Irishman after he played a London show with his early band Taste.

“I saw Rory Gallagher and managed to stay behind at the Marquee when everyone had gone home,” May reveals. “I asked him, ‘Rory, how do you get that sound?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s easy, I have the AC30 and this little box, and I turn it up and it sings for me.’

“The next day, I went to a guitar shop and found two secondhand AC30s for £30 each. I found a Treble Booster. And that did it. I plugged in with my guitar, turned all the way up, and it just melted my stomach. That’s my sound.”

Interestingly, Gallagher’s booster of choice, a Number 1 Rangemaster, now belongs to Joe Bonamassa. It is believed to be the same pedal that informed May’s now-iconic guitar rig.

“I started off on acoustic, and I was on acoustic for a long time,” Brian May recalls. “All I did was sing and play accompaniment. It was a long time before I became clever enough to play what I call single notes. I could hear people doing it on records but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to do it myself.”

Brian May would go on to develop a guitar tone that is among the most identifiable in rock music. But discovering the ins and outs of guitar playing would take some time for May. As he explains to with Music Radar in a new interview, guitars were “illegal” contraband at his high school, Hampton Grammar. Long before he dared to play single-note lines on electric guitars.he had to sneak around to learn his craft.

“In the lunch hours, we would hide behind the cycle sheds because it was illegal to have a guitar at my school,” he says. “Seriously, things were very different in those days! [At] Hampton Grammar School, you would get suspended for even having a guitar, let alone possessing one at school.

“So behind the cycle sheds, we would hide, and we would play, and go, ‘Hank Marvin’s done this, y’know. And this…’ All these wonderful things were happening. Elvis was happening. Buddy Holly was happening. And we were finding out what they do, how they do it. That’s what we wanna do!”

Of course, May would eventually electrify his playing and has spoken at length about the trials and tribulations that came with building his iconic Red Special guitar that would come to define his career in Queen.

Along the way, a half dozen of those records he loved as a teen became essential to his quest to refine his tone. Here, in his own words to Guitar Player in 2004, are May's self-described "Six Tones That Changed My Life."

"Hello Mary Lou" — Ricky Nelson 

"James Burton's incredible crackling and wiry sound — and the squeezing of the unwound third string across the fingerboard of a Telecaster to make the guitar growl like a cat — is spine chilling! We all rushed out and replaced our wound third strings with Clifford Essex Banjo strings from the BMG Music store on Earlham Street, Cambridge Circus, in London. For me, this solo changed the path of history."

"Bold As Love" — Jimi Hendrix

"Hendrix's tone is enormously fat, yet incisive. It's almost clean, yet tinged with a gluey edge of overdrive. He launches into the solo, tears it up, and you think you have heard it all. But then, after a wonderful, galloping reintroduction by Mitch Mitchell that's deep in tape phasing, Hendrix's guitar bursts back in — also deep in the phasing — with what must be the most searing and ethereal epilogue ever recorded. It truly reaches for the stars."

"Where Were You" — Jeff Beck 

"This, in spite of my lifelong devotion to Hendrix, might just be the greatest recorded piece of guitar in the world. Ever.

"Beck has no match. All through his life, he has made our jaws drop. I think we we guitarists regard Jeff in the way Mozart's contemporaries regarded him. We do not understand where this magic comes from. What Jeff is doing here is colossal, but that wonderful sound — born of a particular way he plays harmonics, and what is in his fingers as he plucks a string — makes it utterly beautiful.

"This track inspired me to make what I resolved would be the last U-turn I would ever make, during a period of deep crisis in my life. It led me to a rebirth of my spirit, and it's the closest thing I have heard to a divine revelation."

"Key to Love" — John Mayall and the Blues Breakers 

"Writing these appreciations reminds me that sound is pretty much everything for a guitarist. Without it, even the most inspired bit of ax wielding goes for nothing.

"You can hear Eric Clapton's guitar all the way through this track, underpinning, and darkly hinting at what will eventually come. After what seems like an awful lot of verses, the young Clapton hits an open B string at the end of the main riff, and the beast is unleashed at last. The very first double-Unison note screams in, and a hail storm of passion ensues. Nobody could hear this and not get chills."

"The Frightened City" — The Shadows 

"Hank Marvin is the master of rich guitar tones — 'Wonderful Land,' 'Atlantis,' 'Foot-Tapper' — but this track from his early days is full of passion. The sound is almost a snarl, but still with an underlying beauty.

"It might sound clean next to 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' but, believe me, it symbolizes just as much the rebellion and swagger of Hank's generation. A glorious sound.

"Looking for Someone to Love" — Buddy Holly

"A mighty clang. Raw power that made me and a million other kids want to make that noise."

Long after his school days were through, May continued his furtive guitar studies. He recently recalled how he snuck into London's Marquee Club in the late '60s to meet Rory Gallagher and ask him about tone.

That led to him forging a relationship with Vox amplifiers and treble booster pedals. He admits to having had one brief flirtation with Marshall amps since, although that led to a humbling at the hands of Jimi Hendrix, which saw him return to Vox and never look back.

In other news, May has just released his first signature guitar since signing on with Gibson last year: : a limited-edition SJ-200 12-string made in Gibson's Bozeman, Montana Custom Shop. The guitarist says a Gibson-made Red Special isn't out of the equation.

Brian May has revealed how meeting Rory Gallagher backstage in the late 1960s inspired one of his now-iconic gear choices, and says he wanted Queen to have a rhythm guitarist when they first formed.

The Red Special–toting guitarist has been on the promo trail for the recent reissue of the 50th anniversary Queen I box set and has reflected on the band’s early days with Guitarist.

From that first album to their last — 1995’s Made in Heaven — May’s three-pronged attack of his Red Special guitar, a Vox AC30 combo amp and a Dallas Rangemaster Treble Booster pedal has been a quintessential part of Queen’s sound. Yet had he not met Gallagher backstage at London's Marquee club and taken his words of advice to heart, May would have likely ended up with a very different-sounding rig.

As the guitarist explains, he lingered at the club after Gallagher's band Taste completed their show.

“I managed to stay behind at the Marquee when everyone had gone home," he said. “I asked him, ‘Rory, how do you get that sound?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s easy, I have the AC30 and this little box, and I turn it up and it sings for me.’ The next day, I went to a guitar shop and found two secondhand AC30s for £30 each.”

Importantly, though, while May was inspired by the tones coming out of Gallagher’s little box — most likely with a little help from his heavily worn ‘61 Stratocaster — he didn’t aim to replicate it.

“I found a Treble Booster,” he goes on. “I plugged it in with my guitar, turned it all the way up and it just melted my stomach. That’s my sound. And it’s different from Rory’s. His is much more bright.”

May has fond memories of meeting Gallagher and recounted how it all came about in the documentary What's Going On — Taste Live at the Isle of Wight.

“We were boys and we hung around and hid when the Marquee was at turning-out time, and then we strolled over as if we ought to be there,” he explained.

“He was incredibly patient. He was packing up his own gear — that’s the kind of man he was... and he had the grace to speak to us. He didn’t go, ‘Get out of here!’”

Gallagher’s influence on the band’s sound cannot be downplayed. But if May had his way, their sound would have changed in another way.

“Very early on, we arrived at this view that being a live act was not the same as the studio. Actually, it was simpler because there’s only four of us onstage and no overdubs,” he says.

“It took me a long time to feel confident about being the only guitar onstage. I always felt like I needed a rhythm guitar. But gradually I got into this habit of playing lead and rhythm at the same time — and I realized that nobody noticed the lack of it.

“So we had enough. You could fashion that live performance to make people feel they’d heard an orchestra.”

May is currently recovering from a stroke he suffered last summer and has made limited public appearances since. However, while on a nostalgia trip with Guitarist, he did explain how he had a brief flirtation with Marshall amps later on in his career, only for a tonal disaster “that sounded like an angry wasp,” and schooling from Jimi Hendrix saw him double-down on his loyalty to Vox.

Some guitarists are inherently connected to certain guitars and amplifiers. David Gilmour has played numerous electric guitars and oddball instruments throughout his playing days, but he will always be associated with his Black Cat Fender Stratocaster. Likewise, AC/DC’s guitarists wouldn’t look right onstage without a wall of Marshall amps behind them.

For Brian May, his unique Red Special guitar and an unwavering allegiance to Vox AC30 amps have underpinned his entire career. However, he has now admitted that he did have a brief flirtation with a different kind of amplifier. But after Jimi Hendrix left him redfaced, he headed back to the safety of his familiar Vox.

The Queen guitarist’s pairing of his Red Special and a Vox AC30 is one of rock and roll’s most iconic duos. However, in a new conversation with Guitarist, he reveals that he broke that partnership up — for one night only.

Marshall stacks were commonplace in the early 1970s as the loudness wars — waged in part by the much-reported Ronnie Wood and Pete Townshend rivalry — raged on. May was well aware of these ear-splitting shenanigans and admitted that he had wanted a piece of the action. Then the perfect opportunity to experiment presented itself.

“We played one show at Olympia [in London],” May says, setting the scene. “Top of the bill was Jimi Hendrix and everybody essentially played through the same gear. So I plugged into a Marshall stack with my guitar and treble booster. I turned it all the way up, and it sounded so awful. I could hardly play.”

May isn’t the only guitarist to have struggled to hit the ground running with a new piece of gear, but this wasn’t exactly a setting with much room for error.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he continues. “It sounded like an angry wasp. It didn’t have any depth or articulation, I couldn’t play chords. It was a really hard experience for me.”

But getting a brilliant tone proved no trouble for the headline act: Jimi Hendrix.

“After we’d played,” May says, “I stayed behind backstage and I looked through between the amps as Jimi came onstage, plugged into that same amp — and it sounded like a cataclysm.” He's remained a Vox loyalist since.

May is still recovering from the stroke he suffered last summer and has now opened up on the experience, which led to inevitable questions regarding his future as a guitar player.

“It went through my mind,” he accepts. “When I suddenly couldn’t control this left arm, it was quite scary. I had no idea what was going on. I phoned my doctor and she said, ‘Okay, I think you’re having a minor stroke. Dial 999, get in the ambulance and I’ll see you there.’

“But even at the worst time,” he goes on, “although I couldn’t control where the arm was, I could control my fingers. So I thought, ‘I’m probably not really in danger.’ I’m all right now. I’m just taking it slow.”

And in the spirit of Marshall stacks, Ritchie Blackmore says he got the loudest Marshall ever made but had to keep two secrets.

The angels may have wanted to wear his red shoes, but Elvis Costello has no concerns that AI is coming for his voice.

The guitar-slinging songwriter weighed in on the subject in a recent interview with The Telegraph. Asked what he thinks about AI replicating and exploiting his signature style, Costello had a simple answer

“There’s no money in it!" he says, cutting straight to the heart of the matter. “Nobody wants to be me anyway, so I don’t see them conceiving of an algorithm that’s specifically trying to track me down.

"I live in a different universe to AI. So they can get on with that whole fantasy — get on your rocket ship and don’t fucking come back!”

Not everyone shares his outlook. AI's ability to create songs using faithful impersonations of an artist's style has many concerned. Brian May recently told Guitar Player he’s “apprehensive” about AI’s impact on the music industry. “By this time next year the landscape will be completely different," he said. "We won’t know which way is up. We won’t know what’s been created by AI and what’s been created by humans.”

Sting voiced his concerns as well, saying artists will have to “fight” against its dangers, which include taking jobs from performers, recording engineers and videographers.

Others have viewed the new technology more positively.

The Beatles used it to bring one last song, "Now and Then," to completion by separating John Lennon's voice from a vocal-and-piano home cassette recording made in the 1970s. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were then able to combine their new contributions with performances recorded by George Harrison in 1995, creating the first "new" Beatles recording involving all four members since "Real Love" was released in 1996.

The results left McCartney suitably impressed.

“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” he said. “And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording.”

“It was the closest we’ll ever come to having him back in the room,“ Starr added. “It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.”

Longtime Hendrix producer Eddie Kramer wants to follow in their footsteps, admitting, “There are tapes I’d love to get me hands on.”

Alex Van Halen, meanwhile, has approached OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, with the hope of fleshing out piecemeal Eddie Van Halen recordings.

The technology would analyze “the patterns of how Edward would have played something,” and fill in the blanks. The drummer says what currently exists are “all little pieces,” adding that, “a bunch of licks don’t make a song.”

Former Van Halen bass player Michael Anthony said that the band “recorded every idea we had,” during their time together, and so if the project does come to fruition, there is a lot of material to work from.

Alex released the final song he and Eddie Van Halen worked on together last month.

The thorny subject of the greatest guitar solo of all time has long been a fiercely contested debate, probably because every solo is different. How do you compare, say, “Comfortably Numb” with “Crazy Train,” or “Stairway to Heaven” with “Sultans of Swing”? It’s impossible. Still, public opinion ebbs and flows, and we wanted to find out which solos currently rank among our readers as the greatest of them all.

So we ran a poll on GuitarPlayer.com to find out and here we present the results. We’ll take a look at the stories behind the songs and find out just what made those lead guitar breaks so great through conversations with Brian May, Kirk Hammett, Michael Schenker and others.

20. Gary Moore | “Still Got the Blues”

GUITARIST: GARY MOORE (1990)

The definitive blues guitar ballad.

Presented as the title track from his 1990 album, this wistful tune in A minor became Gary Moore’s calling card fairly late in his career, when he reinvented himself as a blues artist. There’s a point in the solo where you can hear the Belfast great switch from the neck humbucker to the bridge on the 1959 Les Paul Standard he nicknamed Stripe and start deviating from its main theme, mainly sticking within the A minor pentatonic scale, with a few notes from the Aeolian and harmonic minor scales.

Moore was plugged into his prototype Marshall JTM-45 reissue head with one of the company’s newly designed Guv’nor distortion pedals out in front. More than 30 years later, this remains one of the most raw and expressive blues tracks, with Moore almost fighting his guitar at points, yet never failing to deliver the goods

19. Metallica | “Fade To Black”

GUITARIST: Kirk Hammett (1984)

Metallica’s first ballad features some of Kirk’s most epic playing.

Recorded at Flemming Rasmussen’s Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen in February and March 1984, Ride the Lightning, Metallica’s sophomore album, was more progressive and stylistically greater in scope than the all-out thrash assault of their debut, Kill ’Em All. That change is evident on “Fade to Black,” which features acoustic guitars and a nonstandard structure more akin to the “Stairway to Heaven” school of songcraft. But it is the song’s timeless melodic solo that most vividly signals a stylistic shift in guitarist Kirk Hammett’s playing. And the signature element he employs for the last solo is arpeggios.

“I have been playing that song for so long now,” Kirk tells our sister publication Total Guitar. “For the very last solo, I know how I want to start it, but then I am in an area where I can improvise for 16, 18 or 24 bars, and then [drummer] Lars [Ulrich] will hit a certain fill, which means that it’s up and it’s time for the arpeggio part. And then I just slide right into those arpeggios.” And they are arpeggios played on two strings, Hammett specifies. “When guitar players first started incorporating arpeggios into their playing, before the whole Yngwie sweep-picking thing, arpeggios were played on two strings – not three or four strings,” he explains. “And that was what the vogue was at the time in the 1980s, so I have been playing those for a long time. I use my middle finger just to anchor my position on the neck.”

That’s a great tip from the man who plays the solos. But how should you tackle them yourself? First, there are two essential scales you’ll need to know: the B natural minor scale and the B Phrygian mode, both shown below. These cover you for the entire opening 30 bars, which, let’s face it, is a lot of music, so this is a good reason to learn a couple of shapes if ever there was one.

To make it simpler, most of your time is spent in the natural minor scale. Not until around bar 20 will you find yourself briefly landing on the C note, which appears in the Phrygian mode. The bottom line is that Hammett improvises this part of the solo live – and these are the shapes he uses.

Up next are those two-string arpeggio shapes, and they’re 16th notes – all of them! At 142 bpm, it’s pretty fast, but Hammett doesn’t pick every note, opting to use pull-offs to make those rapid licks easier. It’s definitely something to experiment with and if you’re still struggling, you could try adding in an occasional hammer‑on, too.

18. Steely Dan | “Kid Charlemagne”

GUITARIST: Larry Carlton (1976)

Messin’ with the “Kid.”

Steely Dan’s catalog is filled with remarkable guitar solos, but Larry Carlton’s brilliant work on The Royal Scam’s “Kid Charlemagne” remains the most celebrated. Carlton strings together a series of tasty phrases that follow the underlying chord changes with a blend of inside and outside playing that is technically mind bending and emotionally satisfying.

“I was pretty familiar with the tune, so I just improvised,” he tells Guitar Player. “People think I’m kidding when I say that, like I had worked the solo out beforehand, but I didn’t. It was straight improv, and it worked.” Very well, in fact. Perhaps more has been written about his solo than of the song itself.

Despite the acclaim, Carlton was, and remains, nonplussed. “When the record came out, there was a wonderful review of the tune in Billboard and they raved about the solo,” he says. “I put the record on and listened to it with my wife, and at the end of it I said, ‘I don’t know. It just sounds like me.’”

17. Cream | “Crossroads”

GUITARIST: Eric Clapton (1968)

The finest rock and roll cover of an acoustic blues song.

It started as a blues tune called “Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson and became one of the finest examples of natural ability, soulfulness and showmanship from a virtuosic 22-year-old guitarist named Eric Clapton. His reimagining of the song as “Crossroads” further cemented a legacy that by then had earned him the nickname God.

Famously recorded at San Francisco’s Fillmore West venue for supergroup Cream’s Wheels of Fire album, Clapton’s arrangement retains the soul and spirit of Johnson’s original but updates it for a contemporary audience raring to cut loose and be entertained by dazzlingly quick, passionate musicianship.

Remarkably, Clapton is no fan of the performance: He complains that the band lost the “one” in the first verse of his second solo break, thereby throwing off his phrasing. That’s perfectionism for you. For everyone else, this four-minute track remains a source of fascination more than 50 years on.

16. Eric Johnson | “Cliffs Of Dover”

GUITARIST: Eric Johnson (1990)

Heavenly tones from the Texan great.

This instrumental won Eric Johnson a Grammy for its exquisitely tasteful guitar playing and jaw-dropping tones. For the recordings, the Texan musician mainly stuck with his early ’60s ES-335, though he chose to use his 1964 “Virginia” Strat for the opening lead and parts of the main solo. The guitars were fed into a 100-watt Marshall Super Lead, with an Echoplex and BK Butler Tube Driver to help achieve those smooth, violin-like tones and warm sustain.

“I first heard him in 1986 on Live at Austin City Limits,” Joe Bonamassa told us in 2015. “It was ‘Cliffs of Dover,’ and it was just terrifyingly good guitar playing. I wasn’t even sure if it was real! Then I saw him live, and his tones were the best I’d ever heard. I wondered how this guy was getting all of these sounds out of his Strat. I’d never seen anybody have such a forward-thinking rig like that.”

15. Prince | “Purple Rain”

GUITARIST: Prince (1984)

The Purple One’s defining guitar moment.

The epic outro to “Purple Rain” – which takes up nearly two thirds of the song itself – stands out as some of Prince’s finest work on the six-string, wailing away in G minor pentatonic and occasionally including some more modal notes, like the minor 6th. There’s also that repeating motif that dances around the 2nd and minor 3rd intervals.

It’s simple and effective, setting things up for the vocal melody that comes in toward the end. It’s not a busy solo by any means. Rather, the Purple One chose to leave a lot of space in between the lines he played and focus on big hooks instead of monster licks.

Prince would extend the solo for up to 15 minutes in live performance. While there are many great live renditions of this track, his half-time performance for 2007’s Super Bowl in Miami is the stuff of legend. Shredding alone onstage in the middle of a storm, Prince seemed to be living the moment for which this song was written.

14. Deep Purple | “Highway Star”

GUITARIST: Ritchie Blackmore (1972)

Race with devil on English highway.

“I wrote that out note for note about a week before we recorded it,” Ritchie Blackmore said of his remarkable and most definitely memorable solo to “Highway Star.” “And that is one of the only times I have ever done that. I wanted it to sound like someone driving in a fast car, for it to be one of those songs you would listen to while speeding. And I wanted a very definite Bach sound, which is why I wrote it out – and why I played those very rigid arpeggios across that very familiar Bach progression – D minor, G minor, C major, A major. I believe that I was the first person to do that so obviously on the guitar, and I believe that that’s why it stood out and why people have enjoyed it so much.

“Over the years, I’ve always played that solo note for note, but it just got faster and faster onstage because we would drink more and more whisky. [Keyboardist] Jon [Lord] would have to play his already difficult part faster and faster, and he would get very annoyed about it.”

13. Guns N’ Roses | “Sweet Child O’ Mine”

GUITARIST: Slash (1988)

A game of two halves.

Slash’s solo on this Guns N’ Roses breakthrough single is rock guitar at its finest. The first half is laid-back and modal, built around the Eb minor scale with a few major 7ths thrown in for a harmonic-minor flavor. The second half is much more aggressive and bluesy, and sticks mainly to position one of the pentatonic scale an octave up the neck in the same key. The bends feel that much wider and the vibrato more pronounced.

Slash plays the first section on the neck pickup for thickness and warmth before switching over to the bridge for more bite, with his Cry Baby engaged. Perhaps most impressive is his off-the-cuff sense of feel and how he strings it all together, which is the mark of any great guitar solo. Remarkably, although Slash’s riff was responsible for the song’s creation, he wasn’t fond of the song originally. “We were a pretty hard driving band, and that was sort of an uptempo ballady type of a thing,” he said. “So it’s grown on me over the years.”

12. Ozzy Osbourne | “Crazy Train”

GUITARIST: Randy Rhoads (1980)

Fretboard fireworks galore on Ozzy’s Blizzard of Ozz comeback.

The Double-O has often cited Randy Rhoads as the man who saved his career – and when you hear the solo on “Crazy Train,” you understand why. Although Rhoads’ classical- and modal-based approach was far from Tony Iommi’s blues leanings, he was, like Ozzy’s old bandmate, a true inventor.

There’s a section toward the end of this solo that actually sounds like a train squealing off the tracks, thanks to the use of a chromatically ascending trill that then descends in key. Rhoads concludes the solo with a fast-picked F# minor pentatonic phrase before a rapid Aeolian legato run ending with a big bend on the 19th fret.

The shredder performed the solo with his customized Jackson guitar through a Marshall and a couple of 4x12s while sitting in the control room. “We’d plug the guitar directly into the console,” recalls Blizzard of Ozz engineer Max Norman. “We’d preamp it in the console and send it down to the amp from there. That way we could control the amount of gain that hit the amp.”

11. Michael Jackson | “Beat It”

GUITARIST: Eddie Van Halen (1982)

Breathtaking results from an unlikely pairing.

Asked to contribute guitar to Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, Pete Townshend declined but offered a suggestion: How about Eddie Van Halen? Jackson and producer Quincy Jones thought that was a great idea, and got Ed onboard to play the solo to “Beat It.” But after hearing the part where he was asked to solo, the guitarist was unhappy with the chord changes and had the engineer edit the tape to create a new pattern that better suited what he had in mind.

Ed knew Jackson might be surprised and possibly unhappy with his executive decision. “So I warned him before he listened,” he told CNN in 2012. “I said, ‘Look, I changed the middle section of your song.’ Now in my mind, he’s either going to have his bodyguards kick me out for butchering his song, or he’s going to like it. And so he gave it a listen, and he turned to me and went, ‘Wow, thank you so much for having the passion to not just come in and blaze a solo but to actually care about the song and make it better.’” And he did it for free.

10. The Beatles | “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

GUITARIST: Eric Clapton (1968)

An uncredited Slowhand makes a rare guest appearance with the Fab Four.

By 1968, George Harrison was penning compositions that rivaled those of his bandmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was every bit as good as anything his musical partners wrote, but no one could get up the enthusiasm for it, so Harrison invited his pal Eric Clapton to play on the session, knowing it would put the Beatles on good behavior.

Using Harrison’s 1957 “Lucy” Gibson Les Paul through a Fender Deluxe amp, Clapton doesn’t so much mimic the haunting, aching main melody as he creates a harrowing song within a song. His descending bends and release notes, and that inimitable vibrato, are on full display and are appropriately tear-jerking, weaving a dramatic narrative that builds to a shattering climax.

9. Chicago | “25 OR 6 TO 4”

GUITARIST: Terry Kath (1969)

Wah-drenched ecstasy.

This magazine once described Terry Kath’s “25 or 6 to 4” solo as “Wes Montgomery meets Jimi Hendrix,” and it’s a fair point, as Kath was influenced first by jazz and, later, hard rock. As a founding member of the jazz-rock band Chicago, he held down guitar duties for the group until his tragic death from an accidentally self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1978.

Though his superb playing graced many tracks – notably “Introduction” and “Free Form Guitar,” both from the group’s 1969 debut, The Chicago Transit Authority – there’s no denying the power of his soloing on the group’s early hit “25 or 6 to 4.” Kath uses his wah generously to add emotion to his lines, giving them at times a frenetic despair.

Kath most likely played his Gibson SG Standard, as pictured on Chicago Transit Authority’s inner sleeve, using his favored string set, as revealed to GP: the high E string from a tenor set and a standard set for the rest, moved down one string (i.e. high E for the B string, B for the G string, and so on).

8. Lynyrd Skynyrd | “Free Bird”

GUITARIST: Allen Collins (1974)

The Bird is the word.

As it happens, the four-minute-and-24- second guitar solo that closes “Free Bird” was originally added to give singer Ronnie Van Zant a chance to rest his vocal cords during Lynyrd Skynyrd’s relentless performance schedule. At 143 bars long, the solo is far and away the most epic offering here (in fact, it’s 286 bars of recorded music because the whole thing is doubled).

The tune appeared on the group’s eponymous debut album in 1973, and guitarist Allen Collins delivered the lot on his 1964 Gibson Explorer. As Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gary Rossington once told Guitar World, “The whole long jam was Allen Collins himself. He was bad. He was super bad! He was bad-to-the-bone bad. When we put the solo together, we liked the sound of the two guitars, and I could’ve gone out and played it with him. But the way he was doin’ it, he was just so hot! He just did it once and did it again, and it was done.”

7. Dire Straits | “Sultans Of Swing”

GUITARIST: Mark Knopfler

An understated guitar hero fingerpicks his way to glory.

Right when the world was crowning Eddie Van Halen the new King of Guitar, along came the rather unassuming Mark Knopfler – schooled in rockabilly, blues and jazz – who demonstrated that you didn’t need walls of distortion to turn heads.

Knopfler composed this pub-rock classic on a National steel guitar but thought it sounded “dull” – that is, until he picked up a Stratocaster, at which point the song “came alive.” Using nary a hint of grit on a Fender Twin, he fingerpicks not one but two standout solos.

The first features a lyrical section of elegant, Chet Atkins-style single-note and chordal bends that sigh and swoon with dreamy romanticism. In itself, that would be enough, but the outro solo is the real attention-grabber, on which Knopfler builds to a dazzling set of spitfire 16th-note arpeggios – cleanly played, precise and rousing every time you hear it.

6. The Jimi Hendrix Experience | “All Along The Watchtower”

GUITARIST: Jimi Hendrix (1968)

The greatest solo in a cover version.

This song tops any list of covers that are better than the original. Guitarists invariably refer to it as a Hendrix cover rather than a Bob Dylan original, proof of how much Hendrix made it his own. Jimi’s rhythm playing is astounding, both in the intro and in the deft chord/ melody work of the verses, and of course, there’s the small matter of four guitar solos to consider. The man many refer to as the best of all time makes the most of his Strat and Marshall rig here, but it’s his offering at the 2:20 mark that we’re interested in. Following an opening run of octaves, he gets into his stride with a typically blues-based minor pentatonic approach in C#.

At 2:32, the main solo explodes into a trademark combination of rhythm and lead, plus funky scratching on muted strings. It’s worth playing along with the scratches, trying to keep a loose wrist and consistent down-up strumming. Those few beats alone will teach you a lot about Jimi’s groove and feel.

To get the sound, select a bridge-position single-coil pickup, dial in delay at around 350ms, add compression for sustain and opt for a Vox wah pedal or something similar. You’ll hear the wind begin to howl.

5. Eagles | “Hotel California”

GUITARISTS: Don Felder & Joe Walsh (1977)

Those iconic twin-guitar harmony lines took the Eagles to new heights.

The title track from the Eagles’ fifth album, and without doubt the song the band will be most remembered for, “Hotel California” frequently tops greatest guitar solo polls. The solo begins at 4:20, forming an extended coda, over which guitarists Don Felder and Joe Walsh trade licks before joining together to play those iconic harmonized licks at 5:39.

As it turns out, those harmony lines work in a relatively simple fashion. Felder and Walsh play an arpeggio of every chord, and the harmony is created by one of the guitars always playing one note lower down in the chord. For example, the notes of the Bm chord are B, D and F#, so, if the higher guitar plays an F#, the lower guitar will play a D, and so on.

This nugget of information can take you a long way to mastering those descending arpeggios. We won’t go as far as to say you could easily work it out by ear, but if you know the chords to the song, it’s possible to jam along. And you can’t say that about many of the solos on this list!

4. Queen | “Bohemian Rhapsody”

GUITARIST: Brian May (1975)

It might just be the biggest rock song of all time.

Following Freddie Mercury’s 1991 death and a cameo moment in 1992’s Wayne’s World, “Bohemian Rhapsody” became a trigger point for a worldwide outpouring of affection and respect for Queen. Their renewed popularity would continue into the new millennium as Ben Elton’s We Will Rock You musical and the band’s discovery of a different way to exist behind frontman Adam Lambert brought their music to a new generation.

And “Bohemian Rhapsody”? Unsurprisingly, it’s Queen’s best-known song, and its brief nine-bar solo is a short and sweet musical interlude, bridging the verses to lead into what’s become known as the song’s “operatic section.” Those two words alone should warn you that this song shouldn’t work. There’s no chorus and, aside from two verses, no repetition. But of course it does work, and Brian May’s solo is the perfect melodic break.

His phrasing is loose and natural, moving across the backbeat rather than sticking to a rigidly timed grid. The fastest licks are expressive bursts, rather than repetitive noodling, and his articulate pre-bend and vibrato technique demonstrates his beautiful touch. Somehow, within the confines of the complex structure of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” this solo is made to order.

3. Led Zeppelin | “Stairway To Heaven”

GUITARIST: Jimmy Page (1971)

Heaven-sent soloing.

From the moment Jimmy Page plays the opening run on his ’59 Fender Telecaster, right through to the flurry of notes and the wailing bend that completes it, this is guitar-solo perfection – a masterpiece of composition. Rather than wander aimlessly, Page creates a song within a song.

The opening phrases set the scene, as he adds notes to the pentatonic scale to follow the song’s final chord progression. A rapid mid-solo repeating lick raises the bar before a game of question-and-answer with a haunting overdubbed guitar leads into that last flurry and bend. As we say, it’s all about the composition: licks that track the chord changes, the contour of the melody and the pacing of the widdly bits all take the listener on a journey.

Three takes were recorded (the other two allegedly still survive, presumably locked in a Led Zeppelin vault somewhere), all of them improvised, although Page has reportedly said that he had worked out the opening line. But while we’re all certainly curious to hear those solos, let’s face it: They’re not going to be any better than the one we’ve come to know and love all these years.

2. Van Halen | “Eruption”

GUITARIST: Eddie Van Halen (1978)

Eddie’s iconic solo that shook the world.

With its mix of fast legato hammer‑ons and pull-offs, pinched harmonics, whammy-bar dives and two-hand tapping, Eddie Van Halen’s mind-blowing instrumental guitar solo inspired a generation of guitar heroes. While the tapping gets the attention, his tone, blistering legato and creative note choices are all equally important. Amid all that virtuosity, Eddie still played with joyous rock and roll abandon.

Remarkably, Ed was never completely happy with the released recording. “I didn’t even play it right,” he told Guitar World. “There’s a mistake at the top end of it. Whenever I hear it, I always think, Man, I could’ve played it better.”

His admission aside, the track is a technical opus. The first eight bars are a bluesy affair, whose virtuoso legato licks perhaps recall the mojo of Jimmy Page’s breakdown solo in Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” It’s a theme Eddie develops over the following eight bars, taking notes from the major and minor pentatonic scales to add chromatics.

His tapping finale is probably one of the least understood solo sections in rock history. Eddie’s taps are not always on the beat, which makes for tricky timing changes as he switches from tapping the first and fourth sextuplet notes to the third and sixth notes. From start to end, “Eruption” is a masterpiece that would take most guitarists a lifetime to perfect.

1. Pink Floyd | “Comfortably Numb”

GUITARIST: David Gilmour (1979)

Gilmour’s greatness comes through in waves.

In a 1992 interview with MTV’s Ray Cokes, Gilmour was asked what he thinks of Keith Richards’ theory that songs, lyrics and guitar solos are “just out there in the air and you sort of grab them.” Gilmour agreed. “I think he’s right. They sort of appear as if they are out there in the air. But I don’t know how they get there.” But the best ones he said, just happen. “The best ones do, but often you work very hard and struggle over them.”

Gilmour's two "Comfortably Numb" solos are certainly among his best, and it’s easy to understand why our readers voted his efforts to be the number-one pick in our poll. But the real question is, which of those two solos qualifies for inclusion? Whichever way you go — and granted, most fans prefer the first solo to the second — there's certainly plenty to justify the song's position at the top.

The tone is legendary. Gilmour’s signal chain consisted of his iconic black Strat, then featuring a DiMarzio FS-1 bridge pickup, into a HiWatt DR103, with the essential EHX Ram’s Head Big Muff pedal. The FS-1’s fatness and the Big Muff’s smoothness leave no hint of the harsh treble that can plague Strats. With some extra help from an MXR Dyna Comp, Gilmour had so much sustain that he could hold notes as long as he wanted. As in his live rig, he combined a WEM 4x12 cab with a Yamaha rotary speaker lower in the mix, to add subtle modulation. The epic delay was added in the mix.

The first solo, in D major, uses the Strat’s neck and bridge pickups together, permitted by a custom switching arrangement. His phrasing here is the more unconventional of the two, with arpeggios and sliding passages. Gilmour’s use of the bar for vibrato – aided by its shortened tremolo arm – again distinguishes him from typical bluesers, inspiring many a fusion player in the process. He rakes into the beginning of many of the phrases, similar to Brian May, extracting all the excitement he can from every note.

By comparison, the outro solo’s licks are more standard, with phrases similar to Hendrix’s. The passages at 4:57 and 5:12 could be from “All Along the Watchtower” or “Foxey Lady,” but in this epic track few listeners would make the connection. It sounds both masterful and improvised at the same time. Gilmour has explained he created this impression by recording five or six takes and compiling the finished solo from the best bits of each. The result is stunningly well written, with a combination of repetition and development that keeps the excitement building for two minutes. The Hendrix-style blues lick returns at 5:27, longer and more intricate than before. The aggressive double-stops first appear at 5:15, and by 5:35 he has turned that idea into a motif.

For the climax, Gilmour shoots up an octave just when it seems he’s wrung every inch of expression from his maple neck. He descends back down the neck, incorporating one of his spectacular three-fret bends on the way, and finishes with another take on that double stop motif. It has all the excitement of an improvised performance, and all the structure of a careful composition.

Both solos share brilliant rhythmic awareness. Gilmour uses triplets, sextuplets, 16th and 32nd notes freely, within the same phrase. And check out the effect at 5:10 when he plays a lick in 16th notes and then immediately repeats and expands in sextuplets. A good solo can have great tone, rhythms, melody or expression, but only a work of rare brilliance features them all to this degree.

Brian May delighted fans this past Saturday by turning up unannounced at the Red Special Guitar Meet-Up in Reading, U.K., to help celebrate the 60th anniversary of the famous guitar he built with his father, Harold, as a teenager.

The event, held annually in Reading, U.K., is — as you would imagine — a haven for all Red Special enthusiasts. However, this is the first time Brian May has stopped by in person.

"I just wish my dad could see this — it's amazing, it's incredible," May told the crowd after entering to a standing ovation.

The event marks the Queen guitarist's first public appearance since he suffered a minor stroke back in early September of this year, telling the audience, "I've been a bit unwell, as you might know, so I haven't been getting out much."

Brushing any health concerns aside, May looked very much himself as he reportedly stayed at the event for more than three hours, sharing stories of the guitar's history, interacting with fans, and even plugging in to play a few notes.

"It's all come full circle now. The band did quite well, but you guys are here today because of her — the Red Special," May said. In his talk, May revealed how the guitar that he's lovingly referred to as "The Fireplace" and "The Old Lady" helped generate media attention during Queen's early days. "We had a publicist named Tony Brainsby, and he told me, 'The only way I can get you interviews is if you talk about the guitar you built.' So, that's what I did — the guitar became famous before I did!"

May said, "You know, this guitar is precious to me," before jokingly adding that the iconic instrument will "last just about as long as I do as a functional unit."

Clearly emotional at times as he discussed the instrument's significance, May reflected on the "hundreds of hours" he and his father spent in the spare room of their house, creating the guitar that would go on to appear on dozens of hit records.

"I always think of my dad when I play this guitar," May said. "He understood electronics, and he taught me everything about how signals worked. We both made mistakes — sometimes the chisel would slip — but it was all done by hand. We didn't have any electric tools, so it was all chisels, spokeshaves [a hand tool for shaping and smoothing wood] and sandpaper. It was a true labor of love. We even stained it red to cover up the imperfections. That's how you know it's the real deal — something the replicas can't quite replicate."

Ultimately giving in to repeated requests to play something for those in attendance, May said, "Now, I'm a bit rusty, and I don't know how much I can play, but I'll give it a go," before plugging the original Red Special into Luke Timmins' celebrated Brian May–inspired Vox AC30 replica stage rig.

Playing some riffs and spacious chords, May even jammed a few bars of "We Will Rock You" with young attendee Josh Cottrill on drums.

May would later reveal in a blog post on his website that this had been the first time in two months that he'd played the guitar. He also thanked those in attendance for the "huge boost of confidence," adding that he wasn't too sure about going due to him being "really low on energy — but so glad I did."

You can also watch a longer clip of May's appearance at the Red Special Guitar Meet-Up in the video below.

Late-night talk shows have long been a great source for classic live performances from music's biggest names, particularly in the 1980s and ‘90s, when the likes of Leno and Letterman would battle it out nightly for supremacy. One music legend making an appearance was reason enough to tune in — but when two show up, well, that's must-see TV!

That's what happened when Brian May invited Slash to stop by The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on April 5, 1993, to trade solos on the Queen classic track “Tie Your Mother Down.”

May was on The Tonight Show to promote his debut full-length album, Back to the Light, which (although officially released in September of the previous year) had only just dropped in the U.S. market to align with the now solo artist's supporting tour.

Performing two songs on the night — with a short chat in between — May kicked off his appearance with a solid rendition of the album's title track. Jump to around the one-minute mark if you'd rather skip Leno's questionable Cockney accent in the intro.

Backed by Cozy Powell on drums and Neil Murray on bass, as well as Jamie Moses and Spike Edney providing guitar work and keyboards, respectively, May delivered his trademark treble-boosted tone through several Vox AC30s. However, things really get interesting during the second song of the night: the May-penned cut “Tie Your Mother Down,” from Queen's 1976 album A Day at the Races:

With the song powering toward the solo section, May encourages the audience to "Please welcome Mr. Slash!" The Guns N' Roses guitarist enters, with a Les Paul slung low and a cigarette hanging from his lip, and delivers some slippery and sleazy pentatonic phrases throughout the performance. The pair even treat the audience to a good old-fashioned guitar duel to bring matters to a close.

At the time, Slash was performing on the Skin N' Bones leg of GNR's Use Your Illusion tour, one that had seen Brian May open for the band on some of the dates.

In the interview section of the clip, May sheds some light on the creation of the Red Special, the guitar he famously built in his teens with help from his father. "It came out of pieces of the old fireplace," May explains to Leno, confirming the story that apparently had some doubters. "People think it's a wind-up, but yeah, it was made from pieces of fireplace, tables and motorbike valve springs. It's a piece of junk, really, but it works."

Following the performance, May supported Guns N' Roses on 14 dates of their European tour, revealing at the time how the support slots took the pressure off him while he was finding his footing in the new role of frontman. Although the tour was riddled with injuries, dramas and controversy for GNR, May praised the band, telling MTV, "You hear all these stories about Guns N' Roses, but these people are professionals." The tour would be Slash's last with the band until he rejoined in January 2016.

May and Slash were no strangers, of course, with Guns N' Roses playing their part in the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium in April '92, as well as May later joining the L.A. rock band onstage for a couple of tracks during their own show at the London venue.

Earlier in 2024, the Queen guitarist dropped a couple of hints regarding a new partnership with Gibson that seems likely to result in a signature run of the Red Special. "We have spoken about such things, and it would be lovely to have an edition of the Brian May guitar based in the States," May told Guitar World, before mentioning that he has a "great relationship" with Gibson.

No more information on the release has been revealed as of yet; however, we may not have to wait too long for an update.

Queen's Brian May is synonymous with the Red Special electric guitar, to the point where it's double-take-inducing to see anything else strapped 'round his shoulder.

There are the sentimental reasons for May's love of the model, of course – he built the original with his father while still in his teens – but he also simply struggled to connect, sonically, with two of guitardom's most common weapons of choice.

In Queen's early days – before they were stealing the spotlight at the biggest concerts in the world – May didn't have backup copies of the Red Special, let alone a company that manufactures replicas of it, leading him to occasionally turn to Strats and Les Pauls as a plan B when needed. Neither guitar, however, was to May's liking at all.

Speaking to GP in 2012, May explained, “I only used [the Strat and Les Paul] as spares because I didn’t have a decent copy of my guitar at that time. Neither of them really worked for me, though they work just fine for other people.

“The Les Paul,” he elaborated, “was too dull, the pickups whistled, and it had no trem. The Strat sounded painfully thin and didn’t sustain the way I wanted.

“I kept thinking, ‘It worked beautifully for Rory Gallagher with a similar [Vox AC30] amp setup.’ But for me it was just frustrating. In time we got the BM guitar copies going, and my problems were solved.”

Even before his Queen days, May had great admiration for Gallagher, recalling in a 2015 documentary that he'd be left “open-mouthed” by not only the latter's virtuosity and tone, but by his showmanship, which in particular would clearly inform Queen later on.

“We’d go and see Rory every week and [be] open-mouthed at the way the guy played, the person he was, and the way he interacted with his audience – the way he could just hold people by tapping his foot or his fingers or whatever he did,” May said. “He was just a magician as far as we were concerned, as an entertainer, and funny enough he probably wouldn’t think of himself as an entertainer.”

Incidentally, Gallagher's setup happens to be in the news at the moment, with his family's recent decision to sell his gear – including his iconic '61 Strat – at auction.

The Strat in particular is legendary enough that its impending sale attracted the attention of no less than some of the most prominent names in the Irish government, who have publicly expressed their desire to keep the guitar in the late blues guitar titan's home country.

In the rock world, Queen's Brian May has stood out over the last half century not only for his unique brand of guitar heroism – it can be argued that no guitarist on the planet can quite match his flair for the dramatic – but for his homemade Red Special electric guitar.

May famously built the original with his father while in his teens, crafting its neck with wood from an antique fireplace. Impressively, May and his father even originally built the guitar's pickups themselves, though on that front they faced some headwinds.

“We made the original pickups, which sounded pretty good except they had one bad fault,” May told GP in a 1983 interview. “When you would squeeze the strings – bend them across the fingerboard – they would make this kind of rushing sound because the polepieces went north-south, north-south, north-south, instead of north, north, north, north, north, north.

“I eventually bought some Burns pickups,” the Queen guitarist continued. “Burns were making guitars in England at the time, and they made some of the stuff for the Shadows.”

Having already worked on the Red Special before, May turned to Burns – after initially working with Guild – to create Red Special replicas for the wider market. Eventually though, May created his own firm, Brian May Guitars, to produce the unique guitar worldwide.

Following May's surprise appearance earlier this year at the opening of the London Gibson Garage though, there's been ample speculation that Gibson may take up the mantle of producing more upscale Red Special replicas in the United States.

For his part, May has done little to dampen the rumors, publicly voicing his support for a potential collaboration.

“It’s not out of the question,” May told Guitar World in a recent interview. “We have spoken about such things, and it would be lovely to have an edition of the Brian May guitar based in the States. After all, that’s where I started with Guild.

“Guild made the first Brian May models, and then I went with Burns in [the UK]. And then things changed, and I just wanted to do it myself. Now we have our own Brian May Guitars company here, but to have the facility to have some made in the States would be wonderful.”

Tone-chasers all over the world often find themselves gushing over what Brian May can coax out of his Red Special electric guitar and a Vox AC30 guitar amp. 

While a high-end Gibson-made Red Special may be in the works, May has put forward a budget alternative for replicating his sound. 

The combination of his Red Special, carved from an 18th-century fireplace with the help of his father, and a Vox AC30 is one of the most coveted and iconic in rock history, but replicating it like-for-like isn’t cheap. 

In the era of digital modelers and amp-in-a-box pedal solutions, however, a raft of May-channeling products have hit the market, like Victory's V4 The Copper preamp.

Speaking in the new issue of Guitar World, the Queen guitarist has singled out the one that does the best job. 

“I’ve tried modelers, and there are some very good ones now,” he relays. “There’s a great simulator, [The Catalinbread Galileo] – it’s a pedal that really does a very good job of simulating my sound.” 

As one would expect from such a name, the Catalinbread Galileo is marketed on its May-like imitation. However, it isn’t a traditional amp-in-a-box pedal, rather it’s an overdrive pedal designed, with the help of May, to cram “his entire rig” into a standard-sized pedal. 

As Catalinbread says, May “never turns the treble booster off, accessing a wide range of tones simply by manipulating his volume knobs and pickup settings” which helps transform his rig into “a singular musical instrument.”   

With this in mind, the Galileo can excel, encouraging users to dial in “jangly AC30 cleans” and “aggressive-yet-focused rhythm” tones via the volume control alone.

Priced at $180, it comes in at a fraction of the price of the real-deal, or the slew of digital modeling rigs currently available. 

It's a recommendation that will no doubt have the boffins at Catalinbread will no doubt rub their hands with glee at this mention. But he adds that, away from his guitar, amp, and treble booster setup, a certain, tangible magic is lost. 

“There’s nothing quite like the original when it comes down to it,” he believes. “In the heat of the battle, all those tiny little peculiarities count, and when I’m at top level and top volume, there’s nothing quite like those amps.

“They have a personality of their own, and I couldn’t swap it for anything. I wouldn’t like to be on stage with the amps someplace else.

“I need my amps to interact with my guitar – physically, in the air – and interact with me because I feel it in my body as well,” he concludes. “I don't think I could do the modeling thing live on stage.”

Last month, the sleuths at Guitar World helped identify the mystery Texan guitarist who inspired the tapping techniques he later employed on It’s Late, from 1977’s News of the World. This would, in turn, hugely influence Eddie Van Halen’s playing style.

In February, when Gibson guitar legends like Jimmy Page and Tony Iommi gathered for the launch of the London Gibson Garage, Brian May was a surprise special guest. 

Rumors of a Gibson-made Red Special began to circulate almost immediately after May was announced as the firm's latest family member at the event, and have since intensified as guitar fans contemplate what this new working relationship could spell.  

Now, the Queen guitarist has revealed that talks about a production run have indeed taken place. 

May's iconic Red Special, a home-made solidbody carved partially from an 18th-century fireplace with the help of his father, has been the guitarist's ever-reliable sidekick throughout his career. 

There have been several production variations of the design produced over the years – including one finished in the “world’s pinkest pink” in 2020 – released under the Brian May Guitars moniker.  

The firm has been producing Red Special copies for the past two decades. It even expanded its range with a non-Red Special signature model for Arielle in 2021.  

Going off comments made by the rock icon in the latest issue of Guitar World, it appears that Gibson and its Murphy Lab, which specializes in making brand-new builds seem like vintage guitars, will take the reins of production. 

“It’s not out of the question,” says May. “We have spoken about such things, and it would be lovely to have an edition of the Brian May guitar based in the States. After all, that’s where I started with Guild. 

“Guild made the first Brian May models, and then I went with Burns in [the UK]. And then things changed, and I just wanted to do it myself. Now we have our own Brian May Guitars company here, but to have the facility to have some made in the States would be wonderful.”

Gibson, which celebrates 130 years of business in 2024, is certainly well qualified for the job. The Gibson Custom Shop and Murphy Lab have, in recent years, reproduced Kirk Hammett’s legendary Greeny Les Paul and Jimmy Page’s EDS-1275 double-neck with painstaking accuracy. 

Jason Isbell’s 'Red Eye' Les Paul, previously owned by Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ed King, and Blackberry Smoke’s Charlie Starr’s beloved 1956 Les Paul Junior are two of its latest faithful rebuilds. 

Both models have utilized the latest technological advancements to achieve a near-identical likeness to their original counterparts, right down to their wear. Could the Red Special be next in line? 

Brian May Guitars was launched in 2004, with May working in partnership with his long-standing technician, Pete Malandrone. Its lower-end Red Special replica currently sells for a fairly modest $849, but with Gibson at the helm, the world's most musical fireplace could soon get a more high-end and realistic replica.  

“The Gibson Garage is great,” May says, reflecting on its grand opening event. “Some people were saying, ‘Well, what the hell are you doing at Gibson? You’ve got your own guitar company.’ But actually, I have a great relationship with [Gibson] now.”

Naturally, May’s comments will whet the appetite of Queen lovers, and there are hopes that a US-made Gibson Red Special may not be too far away. 

Keep an eye on Gibson for further updates.  

Contrary to the belief that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, during a 2021 interview with Guitar Player, Brian May spoke about being inspired to learn two-handed tapping techniques after seeing a performance by a then-unnamed Texas electric guitar virtuoso. 

The Queen guitarist was enjoying a day off on tour in Texas in 1977 when he came across the guitarist in question performing in a bar. 

“He would be bending strings, like we all do, but then he’d put his right hand onto a fret and make this kind of singing sound,” he recalls. “And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a beautiful thing to do; he creates a completely new dimension.’”  

“I went up to him after the show and I said, ‘I’m telling you now, I’m going to nick that from you.’ He said, ‘Great, go for it. I got it from Billy Gibbons.’” 

May added that he wished he knew the identity of the guitarist, who he referenced again in an interview with Classic Rock two years later, proving that his influence on May's playing was far from fleeting. 

Now, the sleuths at Guitar World have put a name to the talent, revealing the guitarist to be Rocky Athas. 

The Texan native honed his skills jamming with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Johnson, with Gibbons and late Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell said to be admirers. 

Speaking to Guitar World, Athas said his “phone blew up” when the interview was published, saying “My friends all knew it was me.” 

Queen were traveling across the US with Thin Lizzy at the time of the chance meeting, with Athas and his band, Lightning, already well on their way to establishing a reputation as one of Texas's best live rock bands. 

Over the course of their career, the band opened for The Kinks and Alice Cooper, along with a long list of other big-name acts. But it wasn’t just Athas’s fretboard acrobatics that got tongues wagging – apparently, the band's drummer would punctuate their set by doing a back flip. 

Showmanship, it seemed, was second nature to the band. 

May caught them at the height of their powers, and promptly incorporated Athas’ tapping techniques into his repertoire. In particular, it was used on It’s Late, from 1977’s News of the World, kickstarting a domino effect of inspiration, as Eddie Van Halen would later cite that song as a key influence in him forming his playing style. 

May and Athas haven’t spoken in the 47 years since, but says he “would love to have a chat with him now [and] hear how he remembers that night.” Of course, neither guitarist knew the chain reaction that show would cause in the coming years.

Guitar World is due to publish its full interview with Athas in the coming weeks.   

Talking to a rock star usually isn’t rocket science. Unless you’re talking to Brian May – er, that would be Dr. Brian May to you.

The Queen guitarist – who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II – is a bona fide PhD astrophysicist. He was studying at London’s Imperial College as his group was forming and launching in the early 1970s, then returned to his education in the mid ’00s, receiving the advanced degree in May 2008. Since then, he’s been as active in the scientific realm as he is in music. “I do stereo-photography for various unmanned missions to the objects in the solar system,” he tells GP via Zoom from his home in England. “So I’m hooked into various NASA and ESA [European Space Agency] missions, which is great.”

He pauses and offers a slight smile. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, ’cause it was a dream when I was a kid that I would work with people who are real astrophysicists and space explorers. But now I get to do it, which is wonderful. It takes up a lot of time, a lot of energy, but I wouldn’t lose it. I wouldn’t walk away from it for the world.”

May, at 76, is actually a case study in being able to have it all – including, of course, the music. Since the death of singer Freddie Mercury in 1991, he and Queen drummer Roger Taylor have kept the group’s legacy alive in other permutations – with Paul Rodgers, from 2004 to 2009, and, since 2011, with American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert, who has demonstrated an astounding ability to channel Mercury’s flamboyance and vocal chops onstage. As a result, Queen remain a going concern, even 15 years since their last new music, 2008’s The Cosmos Rocks, with Rodgers.

Queen and Lambert are back on the road this year, but May is celebrating another part of his past as well. Forty years ago, during a band hiatus, he stepped outside of the Queen confines for Star Fleet Project, a three-song EP recorded over two days – April 21 and 22, 1983 – at the Record Plant in Los Angeles by a troupe dubbed Brian May + Friends.

And what friends they were. First and foremost was Eddie Van Halen, riding high on the multi-Platinum success of his band’s first five albums. REO Speedwagon drummer Alan Gratzer, latter-day Doors bassist Phil Chen and keyboardist Fred Mandel (Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, Elton John and Queen) rounded out the core band, while Queen bandmate Roger Taylor contributed backing vocals.

The sessions yielded three songs: the sci-fi flavored title track, which was inspired by the Japanese TV series X-Bomber (released as Star Fleet in the U.K.), which May’s then-young son Jimmy favored; the bluesy, Queen-styled rocker “Let Me Out”; and “Blues Breaker,” a nearly 13-minute band-composed opus dedicated to Eric Clapton. Star Fleet Project came out on Halloween of that year and was May’s first foray outside of Queen, which would be followed by two solo albums during the 1990s (Back to the Light and Another World) as well as the 2000 soundtrack to Furia.

For the album’s 40th anniversary May has put together a box set, remixing the three tracks and adding alternate takes and jams from the sessions. For aficionados, The Complete Sessions disc offers a lot of May and Van Halen playing, and a deep look at how the august ensemble worked together and brought the songs into shape.

Grinning widely, May talked to GP about this trip down memory lane.

What does Star Fleet Project mean to you 40 years on?

It’s a very important part of what I am, and it’s something I really wanted to be buttoned-up and safe and out there for all time. It’s a precious moment that I felt was getting lost on some shelf, and I wanted it to be out there so that people could experience it the way I experienced it. Luckily the analog tapes are still there. Hearing that stuff is not just nostalgic – it’s inspiring, and very emotional. So it means a lot to get it out there, just so it will always be there.

How did the whole project come to be?

Back then, I was absolutely engrossed in Queen. For years we went into the studio for three months, and then we went on tour for nine months. It was completely all-encompassing, and this was a point where we took a break, ’cause we really needed to get away from each other for a while. Suddenly, I had the opportunity to open a different door. And it was an adventure, ’cause I had no idea what would happen. I’d put all these people in the studio together with me, and maybe nothing would happen. And then I went in to do it, and it was the experience of a lifetime. 

Did it take long before you realized that it would work?

The first day was so full of adrenalin and a good kind of nerves, and just the joy of discovery – the discovery of each other and creating in a different arena, a different universe almost. We all go in there and suddenly it’s happening, and the tape is rolling. And it’s kind of a bluff, ’cause we don’t really know what we’re doing, and gradually we do it a few times and it comes together. We eventually sound like a band, which is a miracle, really, because I don’t think I ever expected it to gel quite that well.

It’s the outtakes that are the most valuable for the listener. You really get a chance to hear the five of you evolve and learn to play together, in a very short time, too.

It’s nice that you say that. We’d never played together before. There was no rehearsal period. What you hear in the Sessions part of this box set is exactly what happened the first time we ever got together and switched on the amps and tape machines. Every single take, every mistake, every laugh, a lot of funny stuff. You can hear that chemistry evolving.

We did have a little bit of preparation, because I had a couple of demos which we circulated to the guys. I didn’t want to go in there completely unprepared, so I sent a little demo of the title track to each of them – a little cassette with me singing and playing acoustic guitar, demonstrating the chord sequence and the development of this song. And there was also a very rough version of “Let Me Out.” So they all knew kind of what was in my head, and Ed popped around to my house in L.A.

Just like that?

[laughs] I’d recently got a house there, ’cause we were effectively being Californians for a short period. My little boy went to nursery school there. So Ed came around, we plugged our guitars into a Rockman and played to each other and experimented a little bit. I wouldn’t call it “rehearsing,” but we had some fun, and I showed him what was in my mind. Phil Chen came around and we did the same thing with the bass. And Alan was my neighbor. We saw quite a bit of each other, so we had a chance to talk about it, but we never, until [Star Fleet Project] played with each other. So Alan was a good friend by that time. Fred Mandell is a virtuoso piano player that we’d just gotten to know in connection to Queen. I thought, How great would it be to get all these guys in the studio and see what happens?

How tight were you with Eddie at that point?

Ed I knew as a friend, but I’d very seldom had the chance to hang out with him. I got very drunk with him one night, ill-advisedly, ’cause he could drink and I couldn’t. So I tried to match him and it was a terrible mistake. I ended up falling over in his bathroom in his hotel room… That’s another story. [laughs]

One of the great services of the box set is to give us more Eddie Van Halen playing.

I set him up. I gave him that break in the middle of ”Star Fleet,” the bit where Ed steps forward and does his own thing, unfettered by anything. That to me was the climax of the whole song. He steps in, and it comes completely out of his head. That’s not an overdub – he just does it. Every time he does it, it’s different, ’cause his brain’s constantly creating new stuff, which to me is one of the great joys of the [box set]. I love to hear the different version of what he came up with. What an extraordinary player he was. Just incredible.

Is the box set a tribute to Eddie in a way?

Yes, it is, but I did hesitate. At the time when I was starting to think about it, it was just about the time Ed passed away, and I couldn’t do it. I just didn’t feel right about it. So I embarked on the first two solo albums proper, Back to the Light and Another World. And then a few years passed and I got to talking to Alex Van Halen, who’s a great inspiration and also a wonderful musician. He’s become a trusted friend, and I have enormous admiration for him. He’s been through such a terrible time because, of course, the two brothers were completely inseparable. For Alex it’s like losing half of himself.

So I wanted Alex’s blessing to do this, ’cause I didn’t want to do anything that felt distasteful. Now I’m more conscious than ever that I kind of stole Ed for a day or two days, and that wasn’t something that happened very often. Van Halen were a family and they operated as a family, always in the same space as a group. And, to be honest, Queen were pretty much the same way.

There’s a lot of blues on Star Fleet Project, in that Queen sort of way, in “Let Me Out” and, of course, in “Blues Breaker.” I guess whenever you get a group of musicians together, it can tend to go there, right?

Twelve-bar blues is a great place to learn to play with people. And Ed, like me, was inspired by Eric Clapton, and that’s why when everything else had been attempted, we lapsed into this blues jam, which became “Blues Breaker” and was inspired by those days. And by that time we were very relaxed. We’d gotten over our nerves and we’re not regarding each other like foreigners anymore. We’re just enjoying playing, getting in the groove and really hearing and playing off each other. It was the most relaxed we got in the studio during those two days.

Eric is on record as not particularly complimentary about it, however.

I think he hated it! [laughs] But he’s entitled. Eric could do anything and he’ll still be our hero. There’s probably lots of things I disagree with Eric about, but that doesn’t change anything. He’s been one of the greatest inspirations of my life, and that’ll never change.

So will there be a Bohemian Rhapsody sequel?

No. I think if by a miracle the right script was created by somebody, that would be a different story. But for now we don’t see a way to do it.

What about new Queen music?

Not at the moment, ’cause we’re so busy doing the other stuff. We love playing live, and Adam’s given us the ability to do that, and he kind of keeps us young, because he’s so full of energy. So we’re very engrossed in honing the live stuff, trying to introduce new elements to that. We did actually get into the studio a couple times to do various bits and pieces, but we never felt there was anything right.

There’s a lot being made about AI right now, and its potential use in the music world. That’s a technology you’ve probably been involved with and even used in your scientific pursuits, no?

It is, and my major concern with it now is in the artistic area. I think by this time next year the landscape will be completely different. We won’t know which way is up. We won’t know what’s been created by AI and what’s been created by humans. Everything is going to get very blurred and very confusing, and I think we might look back on 2023 as the last year when humans really dominated the music scene. I really think it could be that serious, and that doesn’t fill me with joy. It makes me feel apprehensive, and I’m preparing to feel sad about this. 

I think a lot of great stuff will come from AI, because it is going to increase the powers of humans to solve problems. But the potential for AI to cause evil is, obviously, incredibly huge – not just in music, ’cause nobody dies in music, but people can die if AI gets involved in politics and world domination for various nations. I think the whole thing is massively scary. It’s much more far-reaching than anybody realized – well, certainly than I realized.

Does it scare you off or fuel you to do more as a human creator?

I’m always doing bits and pieces. I do a lot of guesting on people’s tracks; I quite enjoy that. But it’s like the universe is a different place now, and there are echoes of us in that place. But where we actually stand as artists, I’m not sure. We still have something to say, but methods and media are so different now. It’s kind of a struggle for us to stay on top of that, I think. We have young people around us, thank God. We ask them what to do. [laughs] The combination between different generations can produce a lot of powerful stuff. So we still have our methods, and our methods are acquired through years and years of experience, both in the studio and on the road.

The funny thing is they’ve forgotten the old methods, so sometimes when I go to someone else’s studio I say, “What if you did this?” and I’ll suggest doing something everyone would have done 40 years ago. And they’ll go, “Oh, yeah. We never heard of that!” So there is that value in the combination of the old and the new that gives you great power, and I value that. But I have to swim quite fast to keep it up. Even being able to turn my TV on! [laughs] Put it that way.

In the October 2023 issue of Guitar Player we catch up with Brian May as he releases his expanded Star Fleet Project box set featuring fellow guitar legend Eddie Van Halen.

In this essential interview, the Queen guitarist expounds on Eddie’s role in the 1983 EP and why he wanted Alex Van Halen's blessing before releasing this epic 40th anniversary tribute.

Elsewhere, Doctor May reveals his thoughts and feelings on the future of Queen and explains the dangers AI poses for music.

There’s a lot being made about AI right now, and its potential use in the music world. That’s a technology you’ve probably been involved with and even used in your scientific pursuits, no?

It is, and my major concern with it now is in the artistic area. I think by this time next year the landscape will be completely different. We won’t know which way is up. We won’t know what’s been created by AI and what’s been created by humans. Everything is going to get very blurred and very confusing, and I think we might look back on 2023 as the last year when humans really dominated the music scene. I really think it could be that serious, and that doesn’t fill me with joy. It makes me feel apprehensive, and I’m preparing to feel sad about this.

I think a lot of great stuff will come from AI, because it is going to increase the powers of humans to solve problems. But the potential for AI to cause evil is, obviously, incredibly huge – not just in music, ’cause nobody dies in music, but people can die if AI gets involved in politics and world domination for various nations. I think the whole thing is massively scary. It’s much more far-reaching than anybody realized – well, certainly than I realized.

Does it scare you off or fuel you to do more as a human creator?

I’m always doing bits and pieces. I do a lot of guesting on people’s tracks; I quite enjoy that. But it’s like the universe is a different place now, and there are echoes of us in that place. But where we actually stand as artists, I’m not sure. We still have something to say, but methods and media are so different now. It’s kind of a struggle for us to stay on top of that, I think.

We have young people around us, thank God. We ask them what to do. [laughs] The combination between different generations can produce a lot of powerful stuff. So we still have our methods, and our methods are acquired through years and years of experience, both in the studio and on the road.

The funny thing is they’ve forgotten the old methods, so sometimes when I go to someone else’s studio I say, “What if you did this?” and I’ll suggest doing something everyone would have done 40 years ago. And they’ll go, “Oh, yeah. We never heard of that!”

So there is that value in the combination of the old and the new that gives you great power, and I value that. But I have to swim quite fast to keep it up. Even being able to turn my TV on! [laughs] Put it that way.

Read the rest of this fascinating interview in the October 2023 issue of Guitar Player, out now.

As a guitarist and songwriter who brings pop melodicism to a bombastic rock template, Billy Squier was one of the 1980s’ biggest rock stars. Far from hiding his influences, he wore his Led Zeppelin and Queen reverence proudly on his sleeve. In fact, Squier was described on several occasions as “a one-man Led Zeppelin,” an appellation that Jimmy Page himself seemed to agree with. Squier tells GP about hanging with the Zep guitarist one night in New York City.

“We were at the China Club, talking about doing a project together, and he asked me about a song from my album Hear & Now,” Squier recalls. “On the album, there’s a song called ‘Don’t Say You Love Me,’ which has this cool, funky riff that introduces the verses. Jimmy asked me, ‘Who came up with that?’ When I told him it was me, he turned his head away and muttered ‘Fuck!’ He was like, ‘So this guy is not only a singer, but he’s also doing my bits too – he’s the guitar player and the singer’. And I will always remember that because it was the greatest compliment.”

Squier first came to prominence in the late 1970s as vocalist and guitarist with pop-rockers Piper. After signing to A&M Records, the group released its self-titled debut in 1976 and its 1977 follow-up, Can’t Wait, before splitting up soon after. In the aftermath, Squier kickstarted his solo career in earnest. His 1980 debut album, The Tale of the Tape, displayed his knack for writing hook-laden, guitar-heavy tunes that would bring him a mass audience via his 1981 follow-up, Don’t Say No.

Featuring his calling card, “The Stroke,” the album pushed Squier into commercial and artistic overdrive. A swath of additional hits and albums solidified his success through that decade, but a change in the musical landscape, a lack of record label support and his own disenchantment with the music scene saw Squier walk away from the industry after the release of 1993’s Tell the Truth, his last album with a major label.

His 1998 acoustic outing, Happy Blue, was a huge musical departure and proved to be the last the public heard from Squier for some time. Away from the spotlight, he continued toiling away whenever the musical muse called, making sporadic appearances with his band and on his own. In 2006 and 2008, he did stints as a member of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band touring group.

Then, in early 2023, Squier resurfaced with the gritty, blues-infused scorcher “Harder On a Woman,” showing he hasn’t lost his knack for writing great songs. The time away has been beneficial, as Squier sounds revitalized, inspired and firing on all cylinders, but he says the song was far from an attempt to get back in the game.

“I’m not doing this to start a comeback,” he states. “I wrote it because the song was important for me to put out, and it gave me the chance to make my voice heard in a way I’ve been known for doing. It has brought me back to something which was near and dear to me for a long time but hadn’t been a big part of my life in recent years. But when I did it, it all came back.”

All things considered, this seemed the perfect time to catch up with Squier to discuss gems from his vault.

1. “Calley Oh” from ‘The Tale of the Tape’ (1980)

“This is a good example of the time I was really honing the Billy Squier guitar sound. The concept is simple: Plug a great guitar into a great amp, and don’t let anything get in between. On ‘Calley,’ it’s a 1960 Telecaster Custom through a Marshall Lead 100. On the Piper records, I had two great guitars; a ’57 Fender Strat, and a ’56 Gibson Les Paul Special, both of which I still have, and an early ’70s Marshall Lead 100. I’ve always taken a tremendous amount of inspiration from the guitars I’ve played.

“I had a big breakthrough when I was in Piper when I met Frank Levi, who was a guitar-amp wizard working at S.I.R in New York City. I told him that I wanted to expand on the classic Marshall sound: I wanted more brilliance on the top end and more crunch on the bottom, but without losing any of the midrange characteristics. So after rehearsals, we would sit in the shop at S.I.R, and he’d tweak the components until we got what I wanted – a Marshall on steroids!

“The first channel emphasized the brilliant aspects of the sonic spectrum, and the second focused on the deep end. I’d jumper the two channels together, and it became a tremendous asset for me. If I was playing one of my Fenders, I might push the low-end channel, and with the Gibsons, I’d alter the balance to favor the first channel. The results were spectacular!

“On this song, I used a 1960 Fender Telecaster Custom. When the guitars come in, you can hear it’s jangly and bright, but still fat. It doesn’t sound like a Gibson, but it holds up against it. You can put that guitar against a Les Paul, play them together, and you’ll have a really good dialog going. So ‘Calley Oh’ was a really good introduction for what I would become known for.”

2. “In the Dark” from ‘Don’t Say No’ (1981)

“A lot of this album is that Telecaster again. The difference was that, on this record, we started recording at the Power Station in New York, which had this spectacular, big wooden cathedral room with a sound that was unmatched for what I was doing, and you can hear it all over that record. I also had a phenomenal producer/engineer in Reinhold Mack.

“Originally, I wanted Brian May to produce the record, and Brian was keen, but Queen had gotten a bit over-extended on their recording and touring commitments, so in the end it wasn’t possible, and Brian suggested I ask Mack.

“When I heard The Game, I knew I’d found my man. Before he produced Queen, he had engineered a lot of the ELO records. That drum sound on the ELO records was incredible, and the presence on Jeff Lynne’s voice, that was Mack, too. And what Mack did for Queen on The Game, sound-wise, he opened everything up.

“So I got him over from Munich, and off we went. We had a great relationship that worked well together because his strength was more on the technical end, and mine was more on the writing and musical end, but we were able to switch roles when the situation called for it.

“This song is a great example of what I think I do best. Although I come from a pop background, I always wanted to rock. ‘In the Dark’ has a lot of swagger, a great riff at the beginning, great melodies and musical hooks. It’s a pop-rock hybrid.”

3. “The Stroke” from ‘Don’t Say No’ (1981)

“Obviously, the biggest song of my career. I knew that it was special, musically, and that the title was going to be provocative and controversial. I also knew that the song had a deeper meaning that wasn’t readily apparent on first listen. I was able to capitalize on the controversy and get a lot of attention while writing something that I was proud of from a lyrical standpoint.

“And the reverse-snare sound – that was something we came up with in the studio, not in pre-production. I suggested that we flip the tape and have [drummer] Bobby Chouinard play to the tape running backward. Mack heard it and immediately said, ‘Do another track.’ Bobby ended up playing it half a dozen times, and that’s how we got that sound.

“I’m playing my ’57 Strat through the Marshall. I always liked the ‘Volga Boatmen’ [Russian folk] song, and including that as a countermelody in the song’s break was a bit of cinematography that I came up with. I actually recorded a guitar solo on the track, but I took it out when we mixed it, because I didn’t think it was necessary.”

4. “G.O.D” from ‘Hear & Now’ (1989)

“It’s very unique. I hadn’t done anything else like this before. When I was in the middle of doing Hear & Now, my production manager went out on the road with Def Leppard. They had just released Hysteria at the time, and he called me and said, ‘Boss, they’re stealing your shit!’ Interesting observation from someone who knew me about as well as anybody. How’s the saying go: ‘Amateurs borrow, professionals steal’? We’re all influenced by somebody.

“But after hearing that, I decided I was going to do something that none of these guys could do, that they couldn’t steal if they tried, and that’s what got me onto the expanded approach for the song. ‘G.O.D’ came about one morning when I woke up and something was bothering me, and I went, ‘Oh God!’ A light bulb went off in my head: How many times do we say, ‘Oh God’? We’re talking to God when we say that, aren’t we? We’re looking for some help, but he never talks back to us. And that’s where the idea came from.

“It sounds more like a sensual, edgy rock song, but it’s really about searching for answers and coming up empty – beseeching a higher power who remains elusive in the worst of times. Where is God when you need him?

“That song has so many bits and pieces to it. It’s funky, it’s got gospel, and it rocks like hell, along with a great solo, which I played on my ’59 ’Burst through that classic Marshall stack. The song takes you through a lot of changes. I wouldn’t call it a pop song, but it’s got a catchy chorus and a lot of hooks.”

5. “Harder on a Woman” single (2023)

“The big difference between this song and what I’ve done before is that I wasn’t concerned about sounding like Don’t Say No or creating a lavish production. I wanted it to be all about the song. I wanted it to be in your face, like we were playing the song right in your living room. There’s very minimal processing on it. We tracked in a small room using small amps. I’m playing through a fantastic Bluesbreaker-style amp that’s made by Bob Reinhardt, who builds amps and racing cars.

“I didn’t spend much time on the guitar sounds. We really went for the performance. Simon Kirke played drums, and I was very fortunate to grab my old bass player, Mark Clarke, when he was in town. Plus, I had G.E. Smith lurking in the wings. It’s a no-frills recording, very simple and direct. Mike Chapman laid that approach on me when he produced Tell the Truth, my last full-blown rock record, in 1993. He got me into bringing everything more upfront and direct.

“There are at least three hooks in the song. The guitars, which are driving the song, are really playing as one. To me, it sounds almost like a Stones song in places. The guitar I used is a James Trussart resonator. I think it might have been the first one he ever did. It’s basically got a steel guitar body with two pickups, like a standard two-pickup guitar, but also has a candy-box pickup in the guitar underneath the plate. It’s got one volume control for the two pickups with a toggle switch, one volume control for the candy box, and one tone control for the lot.

“You can use it like a regular electric guitar, or you can use it as a resonator or both. I’m using it as a hybrid on this song. When I got the idea that I wanted to play this with a drop D tuning, I thought of that guitar right away. I’d never recorded with it before but had the feeling that it was going to do the job, so I brought it in and didn’t play anything else.

“I did the six-note mini-solo with my ’59 ’Burst Number One, which I threw down upstairs in my carriage house, directly onto GarageBand as a demo so the guys could hear it, because we didn’t have time to rehearse. I had a little Vox Brian May amp lying around, so I just plugged it in, turned it up a bit, and ran off the tracks.

“When I was in the studio getting ready to re-record the solo properly, we put up the demo and noticed that it had this unique sound to it that we might not beat using conventional means. The carriage house has a high ceiling, a wood floor, a bunch of glass and no damping, and it turned out to have a great live sound to it. It’s a cool sound, and there was no way I was going to do it any better, so I just used the demo.”

Brian May doesn’t recall particulars about every Queen show. But there is one – roughly 50 years ago at London’s Imperial College, where the guitarist had previously studied physics as an undergrad – that sticks with him.

Why?

For one, it was Queen’s first gig to be reviewed in a newspaper – and if you’re wondering, yes, it was a positive write-up.

For another, because, in the 75-year-old guitarist’s words, “We had our full complement – we knew we finally had the right people in the band.”

These people, of course, were drummer Roger Taylor, with whom May had previously played in the late-’60s rock-pop-blues-progressive outfit Smile, Zanzibar-born singer Farrokh Bulsara, who by that time was answering to the name Freddie Mercury, and fresh-faced bassist John Deacon.

“So that was a big deal, for starters,” May says. But beyond the good reviews and winning combination of players onstage, May also recalls that performance being a standout thanks to the audience’s reaction.

“We had our first album coming out, and it felt like, for the first time, people knew what to expect from us,” he says. “The effect was phenomenal, because instead of going onstage and trying to persuade people that they might like what we do, we went onstage to a crowd of people who knew our music and wanted it. And they were giving us the energy to propel us to make those sounds that they’d cottoned on to.

“The feeling was incredible – it was like having your finger in a dam and a little trickle of water is coming out, and then suddenly the whole thing breaks down and you have this great, wonderful flood of energy.”

Today, Queen may not look quite the same – Mercury passed away from AIDS-related complications in 1991, and Deacon retired from music toward the end of that decade. But that flood of energy persists, with May and Taylor continuing to rock arenas the world over with current singer Adam Lambert.

50 years after the release of their self-titled debut album in July 1973, Queen remain as resonant, beloved and popular as ever. The 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody smashed box office records to become the all-time highest-grossing music biopic, with worldwide receipts of nearly $1 billion and a quartet of Academy Awards to its name.

As for the music? Using just one metric, Spotify, as an example, “Bohemian Rhapsody” has racked up well over two billion streams on its way to becoming the most-listened-to classic-rock song on the service, but Queen’s next four top-streamed tracks – “Don’t Stop Me Now,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Under Pressure” and “We Will Rock You” – all handily dwarf the numbers of anything by the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and many of their other rock-legend peers.

It’s a “phenomenon,” as May puts it, and one that seemingly has no end.

As for how he explains it? Despite Queen’s much venerated flair for grand and wildly dramatic musical gestures, “our songs were never elitist,” May says. “At their core, they were songs about the joys and the sorrows and the pain that every man, woman and child feels.

“They express the extreme emotions of non-extreme people – people that think they’re ordinary. And I think that’s why they have aligned with listeners.”

Voted by Guitar Player readers as one of the greatest solos of all time, May’s sonorous lead tone in “Bohemian Rhapsody” was created using a Rory Gallagher-inspired rig comprising a Vox AC30, a Dallas Rangemaster Treble Booster and little else.

“I used delays and stuff, but the fundamental tone that you hear is the [Red Special] and the treble booster and the AC30,” May told GP.

During the recording session, the 28-year-old maestro tracked rhythm guitar parts as the song came together in distinct sections. Along the way, the team felt a solo was needed to inject a different melody into the work and May decided he would approach it as if he were singing a verse on his instrument.

Although he has no idea where the melody came from, the guitarist recalls that he could hear the idea in his head long before the red light came on. And as is so often the case, after a few passes it was clear the first take was the best.

So how might today’s guitarist go about recreating that kind of magic? One approach could be to take some inspiration from the effects units in May’s current live rig as used during the epic Queen + Adam Lambert concerts.

Greg Fryer has been custom-building guitar gear for the Queen legend since the mid-‘90s, and his Treble Booster Touring unit was recently spotted in the live rig. Described as having “a balanced sound with sweet harmonic detail and smooth treble definition,” a new batch is currently in the pipeline, according to the Fryer Guitars website.

Other effects units in May's rig include a Dunlop DCR2SR Cry Baby Rack Module and a TC Electronic G-Major 2 multi-effects rack unit.

And if you're looking for some official Brian May gear including electric guitars and amplifiers you need look no further than the Brian May Guitars website. There you can find a plethora of Red Special-style six strings along with the new Vox signature series amps.

This week sees the anniversary of Steve Vai’s groundbreaking shred album, Passion and Warfare. Though the guitarist was initially unsure about how it would be received, Vai’s 1990 sophomore effort was a turning point in his career.

For many fans, the appeal of Passion and Warfare lies not only in its merits as an outstanding example of virtuosity and melodic sensibility, but also for its unique production (Vai famously fasted for ten days during the recording process to get into the zone!)

A touchstone of electric guitar style, this monumental long-player took the instrument forward into uncharted territory and remains an inspiration for countless guitarists today.

But who were Vai's greatest inspirations?

In the following interview extract from the March 2020 issue of Guitar Player, he reveals his “biggest influences,” along with his “favorite rock song in history,” and explains why Jimi Hendrix’s rhythm playing is “like an encyclopedia.”

I know you were a big fan of Led Zeppelin. “The Animal” [from Passion and Warfare] seems to channel some of the Jimmy Page swaggering riff approach and feels a little like “Black Dog” with its rolling, propulsive groove.

Funny you mention that song. I was listening to that today and came to the conclusion that it’s my favorite rock song in history. It’s probably worked its way into a lot of my riffs.

Jimmy and Brian May are my biggest influences. The way Page plays with so much attitude – I could never play like him. No one comes close to him. He had direct access to the greatest riffs of all time.

As for “The Animal,” it was the last song for the album that I recorded, as when I listened to what I’d recorded, I felt that the record still needed something aggressive.

I’d just received one of the first Digitech Whammy pedals and that partly inspired me to come up with the riff.

I always thought I heard a bit of a Hendrix “Little Wing” connection on “Sisters” [from Passion and Warfare]. Was he an inspiration here?

That is absolutely Hendrix. My first chordal influences when I started were in the jazz idiom. I was learning chord-melody solos, but there was something kind of predictable and stagnant in that, to a degree.

There is this unbelievable depth to the chordal playing underneath virtually any Jimi Hendrix song. 

I tried to learn every song on Axis exactly the way that he played it. It wasn’t stiff and jazzy; it was fluid, and I declared that this would be my go-to inspiration for chord playing.

His rhythm playing is like an encyclopedia.