Guitar review: Brian May Special

GloopyJon

Part One - Background

Introduction
I got my new Brian May Special guitar very recently and I thought I'd post a detailed review of it.  These have been around for a while in various guises, but there aren't that many reviews on the Internet so I thought I'd add my impressions.  I'll do this review in several posts to cover different aspects of the guitar, and I'll try to make it as complete as possible.  I will also post some photos of my guitar.

About Me
I am not a professional or a particularly good or experienced guitarist.  I've had guitars for most of my life but never really took it seriously until October 2012 when I got my copy of Rocksmith.  Since then I've been playing a lot and have improved a lot, although I have a long way to go.  Regarding guitars, I own six now (4 electric, 1 acoustic and a bass), including my BM Special, so those are my main basis for comparison (plus times when I've played other guitars in shops).

I am a big fan of Queen and of Brian May, as you might expect since I have this guitar.  One of the best evenings I ever spent was at the Hammersmith Odeon, watching Brian and his band in concert, perhaps around 1992.  His brilliance as a musician (not just as a guitarist) and the unique nature of his guitar have made me want to own a copy for some time, and now I've got one!  I freely admit that I was predisposed to like the guitar anyway, but I've tried to be as fair as possible in my review.

History
Brian May is the guitarist from Queen.  The group formed in 1970, released their first album in 1973 and released their most famous song, Bohemian Rhapsody, in 1977.  Queen recorded a total of 15 studio albums from 1973 to 1995, four years after Freddie Mercury's death, and then another album with Paul Rodgers on vocals in 2008.  Brian May has released a number of other albums, including two main studio albums (Back to the Light and Another World), a film soundtrack (Furia), and most recently a collaboration with Kerry Ellis called Anthems.

Brian May was fascinated with science and studied physics at university, eventually getting a doctorate in astrophysics.  His father was an electrical engineer, and when Brian was about 17 they worked together to make him a guitar.  This guitar was made out of all sorts of bits and pieces - the body was carved from an old mahogany fireplace, there were bits taken from a motorbike and even one of his mum's knitting needles.  This guitar was called the Red Special (also nicknamed the Fireplace or the Old Lady), and is the instrument that Brian has played for most of his career.

The guitar has some unique features (not least the knitting needle!).  The most individual feature is that it has two switches for each pick-up, one to turn them on or off and one to control the phase of the pickup (in phase or out of phase).  This gives a total of 27 different combinations of pickup selection (including "all off", which isn't very useful, and some duplicates, e.g. all in phase or all out of phase).  More on that during the review.

Due to the success of Queen and the unique nature of Brian's guitar, many people wanted to have copies (and Brian himself wanted to have copies as backup guitars).  These have been made by two or three different companies over the years, with varying degrees of success and quality. In the end, Brian decided to create his own company to manufacture and sell the guitars, so that he could be closely involved in the design and quality.  They make a replica of the Red Special (in a number of different colours), as well as three other models - an acoustic, a mini version of the Red Special, and a bass guitar.

You can find out more about the history online, and Brian May's company is at Brian May Guitars - The Official web site for Brian May Guitars  You can buy the guitars there, or from a number of other retailers around the world.  I bought my guitar from Anderton's in England (I recommend their videos, on their website or on YouTube).

My Guitar
My Brian May Special is not red, like Brian's.  Out of the various colours that are available, I chose Black and Gold.  I think it looks very classy, and a bit more individual than the red colour.  Here's a photo of it (sorry that the photos aren't brilliant; I didn't have studio lighting!).
                                                                                 

My review itself will start in the next post.  Thanks for reading this far, if you're still awake - I did say that this would be an in-depth review!

GloopyJon

Part Two - Contents and Physical Appearance

Contents
My guitar came well packaged in a box from Brian May Guitars, which was inside another box (with some packaging material to stop it from moving around) from Anderton's.  The guitar was wrapped in a protective bag and was inside the case, and shows no signs of damage from the journey.
The full contents were:
- The guitar
- A gig bag, with the Brian May signature logo
- A guitar cable (one straight and one right angle plug, looks like 2.5m although I haven't undone it
- Three Allen keys
- One spare spring (yes, that's a P, not a T)
- Tremolo arm
At the time of writing (December 2013), if you buy the guitar from Brian May Guitars they throw in a t-shirt and a Queen guitar strap.  I would have liked the guitar strap, but it was 50 pounds more than at Anderton's, and someone else was actually buying the guitar for me so I went for the cheaper option.
The gig bag is really nice.  It has thick padding and looks like a very good quality bag.  Even though the BM Special is a small guitar, it also easily holds a normal sized guitar.  It's not big enough for my (full scale) bass guitar, though.  It has handles on the side and front, back straps on the back, and two pockets on the front.  Full marks to BM Guitars for including a good quality bag like that.
                                                                                 

The Guitar
As I mentioned in the first post, my guitar is Black and Gold.  The black finish is a glossy coating, completely covering the wood.  The pick guard and other gold touches (plate behind the bridge, and a little triangle on the headstock) look like plastic with a gold coloured coating.  A nice touch is that most of the other parts are also gold, including the tuners, the pickups, the bridge surround and the volume/tone knobs.  The saddles are normal metal and the switches are white plastic, but that's ok.  Even all of the screws (on the front) are gold coloured.

The black body is outlined with white edges.  There are virtually no visible or touchable joins, and the whole thing looks really good, even up close.  There were plastic protective covers on the pickups, and I think also on the gold decorative part on the headstock although I haven't tried to remove it yet.

If I'm being very picky, there are three things that are very slightly imperfect (with pictures - if you can't see the problem from the pictures, then that shows how picky I'm being!):
- One of the screws on the bridge plate is off centre, and sunk in a bit too much
                                                                                 

- The nut does not marry smoothly with the end of the fretboard (this picture also shows the zero fret quite clearly)
                                                                                 

- The tone knob is slightly inclined to one side, making it not 100% flat against the pick guard (I didn't get a good photo of this)

These are very minor points, though, and only evident upon close inspection of the guitar.  Two of them are just slight imperfections on my guitar and probably aren't on others; the nut is the only thing which one might criticise as less than perfect design, but it's really not a big deal.

I go into more detail on the main elements below.  Overall, I think that the guitar looks great - it's very smart in this colour combination.  I've seen it in the standard red colour in a shop, which also looks nice, but I haven't physically seen any of the other colours.  It comes in 11 different colours.

The guitars are made in Korea (which is cheaper while apparently maintaining good quality).  Each one has a serial number on the back of the headstock, and mine is BHM13956.

Specifications
For reference, I have copied the technical specifications from Brian May's website.  One thing that I would highlight is that this is a short scale guitar, being 24" (I measured the string length, bridge to nut, at 62cm compared to 65cm on my other two main electric guitars).  I didn't take much notice of this before buying, but it is one of the elements that makes this guitar feel quite different from my other ones.  It's also noticeably lighter (I haven't weighed it), even though Brian's original is reportedly quite heavy.

> Mahogany body (with acoustic chamber) with Pinstripe binding
> New two-piece scratch plate
> Mahogany neck
> 24" scale (Depth: 22mm at 1st fret ... 24mm at 12th fret)
> 24 fret  - ebony fingerboard (width 45mm at 0 fret ... 57mm at 24th fret)
> Grover GH305 locking tuners
> Dual truss rod
> Graphite nut
> Wilkinson bridge with brass saddles
> BM Custom tremolo arm
> 3 x Brian May retro style , series wired , single coil pick-ups
> Master Volume & Tone controls
> Original BM switching system
> Individual pickup IN/OUT phase plus Individual pickup ON/OFF

Setup
The guitar came ready to play and there are no obvious faults in the setup.  I don't feel that I need to change the action, and it was even more or less in tune.  I haven't checked the intonation yet - I'll do that and update here later.

GloopyJon

Part Three - Main Parts of the Guitar

Body
In this post, I go into more detail on all of the main parts of the guitar.  The body is made of mahogany, although on the black & gold one you can't see the wood at all, as the finish is a glossy black.  The body is chambered, apparently, to make it lighter and to help the resonance of the guitar.

It's actually quite an unusual shape.  It's very round, with short, double cut-away shoulders.  These make it easy to access all 24 of the frets, but the unusual shape makes the concave curve on the bottom of the instrument further forward (i.e. towards the neck) than on a conventional guitar.  This in turn actually makes it a bit awkward to sit the guitar comfortably on your lap, so it's not the ideal guitar for playing while sitting down, as it feels like it's going to fall off to the right (if you have a right-handed guitar).  I felt that I needed to put my strap on it to keep it secure while playing it seated.  That is possibly my biggest criticism of the guitar, and it's not an issue at all if you will play it standing up.

The pick guard and bridge plate, which appear to be plastic with a metallic covering, look very smart although I fear that they might easily get scratched or otherwise marked.  I'll update this in time if it happens.

On the back of the body there is just a single back plate that covers the chamber for the springs.  This plate has a slot with holes through which you can push the strings when you are restringing the guitar.  Lastly, there are two strap knobs (obviously), which seem very secure.
                                                                               

Here's a photo of the back - taken with the flash, so you can actually see the balls at the end of the strings inside the holes that you poke them through!  Nice, easy restringing, by the looks of it.
                                                                                 

Bridge
The bridge is a floating bridge, for the tremolo arm, but it isn't a Floyd Rose (the specifications state that it is a Wilkinson bridge).  I can't really say whether it's better or worse than a Floyd Rose for playing purposes, but it's much more practical for maintenance purposes.  You don't have to take the balls off the strings when you restring the guitar, which makes much more sense to me, and the adjustment screws for the intonation are reachable from the end, meaning that you don't have to slacken the strings as you do with an FR bridge.  My impression is that this is a much better design than the normal FR bridge that I have on another guitar.
                                                                               

Gubbins
By 'gubbins' I mean the electronics and controls.  The pickups are specially designed single coil pickups, made by Burns and branded with the Brian May signature.  They are connected in series, which means that each pickup adds to the output volume.  Hence if you select two (or three) pickups, the signal will be stronger (=louder) than if you just select one.  This can be seen as a weak point, since it means that if you change the number of pickups, you need to compensate by changing the volume somewhere.  If you want more information on the history of the pickups, look at Brian May Tri-Sonic Pickups, Burns Guitars London.
                                                                               

As well as the pickups, there are six switches - two for each pickup.  One is for on/off (up is off, down is on), and the other is to select in or out of phase.  Changing the phase, which you can't do on most standard guitars, changes the sound quite dramatically, as I will discuss further in a later post.

Finally, there are two knobs: a tone knob (the one closer to the switches) and a volume knob.  The tone sounds rather poor if you turn it all the way down; very muffled.  I suspect that it'll stay at or near the maximum setting most of the time.
                                                                               

The electronics are all passive so there's no battery or equaliser etc.  The only other thing worth mentioning is the guitar jack socket, which is on the side of the guitar, where it should be (I hate guitars with the socket on the front!).

On the Brian May Guitars website, there's a downloadable PDF that gives some information on the pickups and how Brian uses them - http://brianmayguitars.co.uk/userfiles/pdf/brianmay_manualsheet1.pdf.

Neck and Fretboard
For me, the neck is a real highlight of this guitar.  It's wide - about 2mm wider than the necks on my reference guitars (i.e. my other two main electrics, a Lag Arkane and a Fender Pawn Shop '72, which is fab).  In fact, the strings are not really any further apart, but there's a bit more space on the edges of the guitar, next to the E strings.  For me, this is a good thing - on my Lag guitar, the top E string in particular is too close to the edge and occasionally my finger slips off the side of the frets.  That isn't going to happen with this guitar.

In terms of construction, the neck is very good.  The shape is very comfortable, and the glossy surface is extremely smooth and easy to move up and down.  I first thought that it was a single piece of wood, but upon very close inspection it does appear that the fretboard is a separate piece, but the join is only perceivable from a slight difference in colour (the glossy black changes to the woody black of the ebony fretboard).  The base of the neck where it joins the body is curved to allow easy access to the highest frets.

When playing, I find the fretboard very comfortable and easy to use - it's super for bending.  The fretboard has inlaid buttons marking the frets - one on frets 3, 5, 9 and similarly in the 2nd octave, two on fret 7 (and 19), and three on the octaves (12 & 24).  I like this, personally - it's more helpful than just a single dot or whatever.  There are also similarly numbered dots on the top of the fretboard so that you can see them looking down on the neck even if you can't see the surface of the fretboard itself.  Maybe expert guitarists will sniff at this and only need the octave to be marked, but for someone like me this is ideal.  The buttons themselves aren't anything special; I think they are just white plastic, but they do the job and I presume that fancier fret markers would add significantly to the cost.

The other notable feature of the neck is a zero fret, i.e. there's a fret just in front of the nut.  I don't know if this conveys a particular benefit; please feel free to comment if you know something about this that I don't!

Headstock
The headstock is quite an appealing diamond shape, with a 3   3 arrangement of the tuning heads.  These are Grover GH305 locking machine heads.  This means that when you insert a string, the head will grip it inside the peg, so you don't need to wind the string around the peg at all.  On my guitar, the strings are cut just outside the peg, and only turned around a quarter or half turn for tuning purposes.  They look very good and feel very stable, not loose at all.  Again, like the bridge, this looks like a smart, very practical choice of fitting.

The nut is graphite and there isn't much else to say about it!  The headstock has a decorative triangular plate and the Brian May signature logo.  I think it looks fine.

Front of headstock:
                                                                               

Back of headstock:
                                                                       

GloopyJon

Part Four - Playing the guitar

Playing
This is where the review becomes very subjective, since it's how it feels to me to play this guitar. As I mentioned in the first post, I don't have a lot of experience and I would welcome any comments from other owners of a BM Special in this thread.

I have already mentioned some points in this area. The peculiar shape of the guitar makes it a little awkward to play seated - not impossible, but you need to adjust your position compared to a standard shape of guitar. I don't think it's really designed to play in that position. You can say that about some of the other shapes of guitar bodies, such as flying Vs, so it's an observation rather than a criticism.

The short scale of the guitar also makes a big difference. It's 24" (that's 60cm although I measured 62cm from nut to the point where the string goes over the saddle) compared to a regular guitar scale of 25.5" (I measured 65cm on my other guitars). That makes quite a difference to the feel of the guitar in your hands, and it took me a while to get used to it. However, by the end of an evening of playing with the guitar I was getting quite comfortable with that.

I found the neck really nice to play on.  The fretboard is ebony, which feels great - very smooth.  It's a little wider than my other guitars and I like to have a little extra space on the outside of the top and bottom strings.  In particular, I found bending to be very easy on this neck.

Regarding the picking side, there's not a huge amount to say, but I will note that the bridge doesn't have any uncomfortable or sharp protruberances, so it's quite comfortable to rest your picking hand there for palm mutes or general muting.  The pickups stand out a bit from the body, in case any players like to use a pickup as an anchor point for their picking hand (more common for bass players, but maybe some people do this - I did actually find myself occasionally resting my little finger on the bottom of one of the pickups).

In summary, it took me a little while to get comfortable with this guitar since it's noticeably different from my other guitars, but by the end of the first evening I was quite happy with the comfort of playing it.  My only reservation is about the shape of the body and the consequent position and balance of the guitar if you want to play while sitting down and resting it on your legs.

GloopyJon

Part Five - Sounds (1)

In this (long) section, I will go through all of the different combinations that you can get from this guitar.  I've never seen any review of the BM Special that does this, so I think this is absolutely unique.  I would like to add sound files for each combination too, but I don't yet have the necessary equipment.  I hope to add those in some time later.

Pickup Combinations
To repeat what I mentioned earlier, each pickup has two dedicated switches.  The higher switch (closer to the strings) turns the pickup on or off (up = off, down = on) and the lower switch puts it in or out of phase.  Now, I'm not a sound technician but what I understand from that is that it reverses the polarity of the signal, which means that similar signals will cancel each other out instead of reinforcing them.  Typically, this seems to reduce some of the lower harmonics, which makes the guitar sound higher and harsher.  Again, I welcome any comments from anyone who has a better understanding of this.

With three pickups, and three states for each pickup (Off - In phase - Out of phase), that gives 27 combinations.  That's huge compared to the five combinations that you get on a typical guitar with three pickups (bridge / bridge   mid / mid / mid   neck / neck).  The main differences are that you have two more combinations available (bridge   neck, and all three), and you can put pickups out of phase.

Of those 27 combinations, one is everything off, so that's not particularly relevant.  In the 26 remaining combinations, there are essentially 13 variations, each of which is duplicated by reversing the phase selections.  I'm assuming that if you reverse the phases of all selected pickups, the sound will be the same (i.e. if you have in - in - out, that will sound the same as out - out - in).  I will test this hypothesis as I go, but that's why I intend to look at those 13 different combinations.  That's still a lot more than five, and you'll see that there are some wildly different tones available.

The combinations will be examined in the next post!

GloopyJon

Part Five - Sounds (2)

As mentioned before, there are 13 materially different pickup combinations. Here are some impressions on all of them.

For the phase switches, up is out of phase and down is in phase. I have noted the positions in brackets (there are two opposite configurations for each combination, swapping the phases of all activated pickups). For the three pickup combinations, the brackets document the position of the switches in the order Bridge - Middle - Neck. If this isn't clear, tell me and I'll try to explain it better.

I have tested each combination on two different settings on my amp (a Line6 DT25), without any pedals or other effects, and I left the volume and tone on the guitar at maximum.  The DT25 has two channels, each of which can be fully configured with its own separate set of knobs (top row and bottom row).  Here I have configured channel A as a clean sound and channel B as a dirty one, but you can have two different dirty sounds or two different cleans, or whatever you want (unlike many amps which give you a single clean and a single dirty channel).

The first setting that I used is a very clean, neutral tone on amp model I (Fender Blackface), intended to let me hear the guitar on its own.  The EQ is set to the middle position for all three (bass, mid and treble), and everything else is turned off (drive, presence and reverb).  The second uses the amp’s Vox AC30 setting (amp III), with the treble boosted and a fair amount of gain to try to get close to a typical Brian May sound.  The settings are shown in the photo below.  I couldn’t push the volume up very far because of neighbours etc. but I think I got a fair idea of the resulting sounds.  I used a 1.0mm Dunlop plastic pick – not very authentic but I don’t have any sixpences.
                                                                               

I found that a few of the different combinations required some tweaking to get a good clean sound out of them.  Where I've made that comment, I generally used a setting like in the photo below (channel A, the top row of knobs), with the bass turned down a bit, mid down a little, and the presence turned up quite a lot.  This usually balanced the sound out a lot better, and I think is at least a good starting point for experimentation.
                                                                               

I don't have the equipment (yet) to record guitars in the "studio" way, i.e. with microphones recording the sound from the amp.  The only option available was to record via USB from my Line 6 HD500X straight to the PC.  I installed Audacity to record the clips, as it looked relatively simple and it worked very well.  I tried to program the same settings as I had used when reviewing the sounds: for the clean sound I picked the Fender Blackface Double Normal amp, using the settings in the first picture above; and for the dirty sound I took the Class A-30 TB (Vox AC30), with settings as above.  I picked the first reverb option (Plate) but I dialled the settings down to about half of their original values because the defaults were a bit too strong.

I know that my playing isn't exactly top drawer, so I apologise for that in advance!  I decided to play (more or less) the same thing in every sample, consisting of a short sequence of chords and then a scale up and down on the top three strings, to give some idea of the tone for solos.  I drew my own conclusions, but I hope you can draw your own from the sound clips.  I hope that the quality is good enough for you to tell the difference - listening to it from my amp, they are quite striking but sometimes it's harder to tell on a recording.

I've put links to the clips in each mini section but here's a link to my SoundCloud homepage where you can see all of them together - that may be easier than clicking on each link here.

OK, here goes...

Single Pickup
Bridge pickup (in or out of phase)
The bridge pickup on its own sounds quite brash on the clean setting (channel A), as you’d expect.  The top strings are quite jangly. It’s not as harsh a sound as you sometimes get from a single coil neck pickup.  On the Vox AC30 setting (channel B) it’s fairly piercing, and better suited to solo work than chords.

In or out of phase doesn’t seem to make any difference, as I expected.  Unless I note otherwise, you can assume that this is always the case from here on.
BM Special, bridge only, clean by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds
BM Special, bridge only, dirty by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Middle pickup (in or out of phase)
The middle pickup on the clean channel produces a very agreeable acoustic-like tone.  It’s a bit bass-heavy, and adjusting the EQ by putting the bass down and treble up makes a big difference, and gives the higher strings a bit more bite.  On channel B (dirty) it’s a fairly basic driven sound; nothing startling.
BM Special, middle only, clean by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds
BM Special, middle only, dirty by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Neck pickup (in or out of phase)
The neck pickup on its own, as you would expect, gives an even more acoustic sound than the middle.  It’s a little duller, and you’d probably want to tweak it a bit to get a nice clean-ish sound out of it – remember I’m deliberately using as clean a sound as I can, but you’d probably up the treble a bit and add a little bit of drive and reverb anyway – I tried that and got a nicer and more balanced tone out of it.  On the AC30 setting I’d say it would need some work – the sound I got with my settings wasn’t that great either for rhythm or lead.  I’m sure you can tweak a good sound out of it but I don’t think it’s the best use of the guitar.
BM Special, neck only, clean by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds
BM Special, neck only, dirty by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Two pickups
Bridge   middle (in phase, i.e. in - in or out - out)
This is the combination that Brian uses most often, and it’s probably the most rich and mellow tone on the guitar.  His website says that this most closely emulates a modern middle-heavy humbucker (let’s not forget that the original guitar was designed in 1963).  It produces a very pleasing, full tone, which still needs some treble boosting to balance it but not too much, otherwise the top strings start to sound a bit twangy to my ears.  Dirtied up it gives a great tone that’s usable for both chords and solos.  This is a great combination, seemingly whatever you want to do with it.
BM Special, bridge and neck in phase, clean by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds
BM Special, bridge and middle in phase, dirty by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Bridge   middle (out of phase, i.e. in - out or out - in)
Putting one of these two pickups out of phase changes the sound dramatically, and I really liked it.  The reduction of the low tones together with a change to a more twangy, almost country-like tone make a very pleasing combination, great for chords on the clean channel.  On the dirty channel it produces a very nice soloing tone, with a bit of a mellow feel but a bit of bite without getting too squealy and harsh.
BM Special, bridge and middle out of phase, clean by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds
[Forgot to record the dirty sound, I'll add that later!]

Middle   neck (in phase, i.e. in - in or out - out)
What I said about each of these two pickups individually counts even more when they are used together – it’s a nice acoustic-type tone, but it needs work to nudge it into something usable.  For example, I turned the presence most of the way up and put the bass down a bit, and that was a lot better.  On channel B it gave a slightly muffled dirty sound.  I didn’t play around with that a lot but I think there’s a lot of potential for finding some really good tones there.
BM Special, middle & neck pickups in phase, clean by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds
BM Special, middle and neck in phase, dirty by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Middle   neck (out of phase, i.e. in - out or out - in)
This is the combination used for the solo in Bohemian Rhapsody, with the amp turned up to 11!  Again, flipping one of the pickups out of phase makes a dramatic difference to the sound, turning it from mellow to quite metallic (not as in heavy metal, but as in a steel-stringed acoustic, I think).  Lots of potential here for getting a really edgy sound.
http://soundcloud.com/jonathan-oakey/bm-special-middle-and-neck-out/edit
BM Special, middle and neck out of phase, dirty by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Continued in the next post...

GloopyJon

Part Five - Sounds (3)

Bridge   neck (in phase, i.e. in - in or out - out)
This is one of the combinations that’s not possible with a standard guitar, and in fact on the clean channel it’s one of the nicest straight out of the box, i.e. with the very neutral settings.  The higher harmonics that you get with the bridge pickup pull the higher strings up into more prominence, and I think there is the basis of a really great clean tone in here.  It’s also good on the dirty channel, both low down and high up.  Again, I think this is a combination that you can do a lot with.
BM Special, bridge and neck in phase, clean by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds
https://soundcloud.com/jonathan-oakey/bm-special-bridge-and-neck

Bridge   neck (out of phase, i.e. in - out or out - in)
This is actually fairly similar to the in-phase sound, just a bit thinner with less of the lower harmonics.  It’s another good clean tone, warm but not too mellow.  On channel B it’s definitely got some edge and you can get a real scream out of it, which could be great for an aggressive solo.  I’m really impressed with the bridge   neck combinations, and they certainly add a lot to the possibilities that you have with this instrument.
https://soundcloud.com/jonathan-oakey/bm-special-bridge-and-neck-out
https://soundcloud.com/jonathan-oakey/bm-special-bridge-and-neck-1

Three Pickups
All in phase (in - in - in or out - out - out)
Of course, this is another of the combinations that’s not possible with a standard guitar.  A clean sound here echoes what’s been said before – it’s a bit heavy and needs some work.  It’s possible but honestly I preferred the dual pickup settings.  It’s much better on the dirty setting where you get a great, gnarly, grindy rock sound out of it with a bit of buzz and noise – a real dirty sound if I ever heard one!
BM Special - all in phase - clean by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds
BM Special - all in phase - dirty by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Bridge out of phase (out (B) - in (M) - in (N) or in - out - out)
This one isn’t bad – it’s a better clean tone than the in-phase version, with a bit of twang added to the top strings again.  Drop the bass (and mid) down a bit and add some presence, and this is quite usable.  The dirty sound is a little clearer than the in-phase sound, but again has loads of potential.
BM Special - all pickups with Bridge OOP - clean by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds
BM Special, all pickups, bridge out of phase - dirty by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Middle out of phase (in - out - in or out - in - out)
Quite similar to the previous tone, but a little more twangy.  Again, quite good with the same adjustments (which seem to be universally necessary to get a balanced clean tone out of this guitar).  On the Vox setting this is surprisingly different from the previous setting.  It’s hard to describe – it isn’t such a heavy metal sound, it’s a bit clearer but still very edgy.
BM Special, all pickups with middle out of phase, clean by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds
BM Special, all pickups, middle out of phase, dirty by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Neck out of phase (in - in - out or out - out - in)
The clean tone here is quite good without adjustment.  It’s funny – there is a clear progression as you switch through the bridge, middle and neck pickups being out of tone – the sound gets progressively clearer and more balanced.  This one is a bit fresher than the others.  On the dirty channel, like the last one I find it very hard to describe.  Again, there’s a progression as you swap the different pickups out of phase.  Again, it’s a hard, dirty sound, but whereas the bridge one is quite growly (albeit less than the all in phase sound), this one is twangier.
BM Special, all pickups, neck out of phase, clean by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds
BM Special, all pickups, neck out of phase, dirty by Jonathan Oakey on SoundCloud - Hear the world’s sounds

Overall impression
Wow!  I don’t know how you feel – or how many readers will have actually made it this far – but my overall impression is mainly one of surprise at the variety of tones you can get from this guitar.  It’s so hard to put it into words, but I hope you’ve got some kind of an impression from what I’ve said above.  Of course, I’ve only stroked the tip of the iceberg by just using one dirty setting here, but it’s clear that there is a huge amount of potential in this guitar for finding some great and quite unique tones.  Indeed, reversing all of the phases didn’t seem to make any difference, so effectively you’ve got thirteen distinct pickup configurations on this guitar, which is huge.  I would highly recommend it to someone who wants to experiment with a lot of different sounds from a single guitar.

Pickup selection for Rocksmith
I and many others here on AVForums play Rocksmith, and so I thought it would be useful to suggest which pickup combination works best for the game. Rocksmith generally recommends that you use the bridge pickup, but when I played it on the first evening I preferred the combination of bridge   middle, in phase. I will try some others and update this if I find a better one.

GloopyJon

Part Six - Conclusion

Well, this has been a marathon review, and my thanks to anyone who has made it this far without skipping down to the end!  If you did skip, that's ok too but I won't respect you as much in the morning.

I've really enjoyed exploring this guitar and I'm looking forward to playing it for many years to come.  I bought it for the wrong reasons - i.e. because it's Brian May's guitar - but it certainly won't just stay on display hanging on the wall.

The great thing about this guitar is that it's really different from any other guitar that I've played.  Admittedly that's not a huge number, but they are still representative of the major types of guitar that are sold these days.  This one has an individual shape, it's short scale and it has a tremendous variety of pickup combinations.  Once I got used to the slightly short scale, it's very comfortable to play, aided by a great neck.  The whole guitar has clearly been designed with some care, and while I'm sure that some of the components such as the bridge and the machine heads are not exactly the same as Brian's originals, they are definitely good quality components that elevate this guitar above the herd.  I particularly like the Wilkinson bridge in comparison with a Floyd Rose bridge, for example.

As an instrument in its own right, I think it's well worth the asking price (generally £599 to £649).  Given the association with Brian May, I think they could easily increase that to something like a thousand pounds, and many people would still buy them.  However, I think that Brian isn't in it to make lots of money out of this, but wants to provide reasonably priced, good quality copies of his guitar to the many people that want them.  I applaud him loudly for this.

The real highlight of this instrument is its versatility, which I can't emphasise enough.  The difference in the tones that are available has to be heard to be believed (I hope that comes through in the sound clips - you'll probably need to use decent speakers or headphones), and I doubt whether you'd find another guitar (apart from modelling guitars, which are cheating!) that would give you more variety.

My only niggles are one or two aspects of the build that could have been slightly better (particularly the integration of the nut with the neck), and the shape of the guitar which makes it hard to settle in your lap when you're sitting down.  Putting the strap on helps this, though, and it's certainly not unplayable in that position, but you do need to adjust to it.

One extra remark (added later, when rereading my review) is that I really like the attention to detail on this model, the Black and Gold, where all of the accessories are in a gold colour, which is not the case on all of the models.  In fact, if you check out the pictures of the 11 different colour combinations, each of them has appropriate colours for things like the pickups, the knobs and the tremolo arm.  I chose black and gold, and I'm really happy with it as I think it looks great.

Overall, then, this is a very well equipped and versatile guitar, which stands out as being different from most other guitars, in a good way.  I think it would enhance anybody's guitar collection, and with 11 different colours there's certainly a model to suit most people's preferences.  In the UK at least there are plenty of shops that stock them, and there are also many international dealers (see the Brian May Guitars website for details), so go and try one out!

If you've enjoyed reading my review, or if you have any other comments - or if you own a BM Special yourself and would like to add your own thoughts - please do post below.  I'd love to hear from you, and more opinions can only enhance the review as a resource for anyone who is interested in this guitar.

Philly112

Thanks for the review. As comprehensive as one could hope for! Now get the pics up!!!

Cheers
Phil

GloopyJon

Pictures should be coming up on Sunday...