Josh Bakehorn's Homemade Electric Guitar

~ Josh Bakehorn's Homemade Electric Guitar ~

This is a webpage documenting the building of my very first electric guitar. It has been very exciting and fun so far and I can barely wait until it is completed. This guitar will be closely based on Brian May's famous Red Special guitar, featured in all of Queen's hits.

This is Brian May's homemade Red Special, built in the mid-1960's with his father Harold.

Progress Pictures Page One:

Josh with the neck and the blockboard middle.	The routed blockboard & mahogany veneer.
The top mahogany veneer is put onto the blockboard frame, and the electronics plate is placed into the routed space.	Compared to the Burns Brian May Red Special.

I made a paper pickguard to check how things should look. Not bad, eh?

- Progress Pictures Page Two -

Features:

Brian May's guitar features a neck which is thicker, and a fretboard that is wider than most electric guitars. The neck featured above, built for me by Doron Markowitz, has slimmer dimensions than the original. I will use that neck for now, but I will be building my own neck with the same dimensions as Brian May's original.

I will leave my guitar with a natural wood finish and only a light coat of gloss lacquer with a white pearloid pickguard until I have built the final neck. Once the proper neck is built, I will refinish the guitar and change the pickguard. The guitar will ultimately be translucent green and the pickguard will be black pearloid. The binding and the tuner buttons will be white pearloid.

The electronics are quite unique on the Brian May guitar. The 3 Burns Trisonics pickups each have their own on/off switch and their own phase switch. My guitar will have this same setup except I will use the bridge phase switch as a series/parallel wiring switch for that pickup. I knew nothing about guitar electronics before beginning this project, but I researched the subject enough to be able to do the electronics' configuring and wiring all by myself.

For the original Red Special, Brian May built an ingenious aluminum roller bridge with seperate saddles for each string. Each string passes over a small roller which minimizes any possible friction, making it particularly great with tremolo systems. Constructing a similar bridge would have been very complicated and require tools to which I don't have access. Buying a handmade replica bridge from one of the many Brian May fans who build guitars is extremely cost prohibitive. Since there's nothing like it on the market, I bought the closest thing I could find which was a steel roller bridge made for archtop guitars. It didn't cost too much and it works fairly well if you take it off of the wooden base it comes with. The height of it caused me to need to steepen the neck angle a little bit, but it worked out well.

My guitar will not feature the innovative tremolo system that May constructed for the Red Special, as I don't use tremolo enough to warrant the extra work it would take to build a replica tremolo. Instead, I have built a non-tremolo tailpiece for my guitar that closely resembles the Red Special's.

Let me know what you think of this or if you have any questions. I'd love to discuss the production of this guitar with anyone who is interested.

This is me playing my Burns Red Special at a club in Bloomington, Indiana in 2003.

- Click here for Progress Pictures Page Two !! -

Thanks for visiting!

Email me at: NO-SPAMjoshbakehorn@yahoo.com - (remove the NO-SPAM for the correct address)

Please do not use any of the text or photos here without Josh Bakehorn's consent!