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.
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.
