Red Special  The Red Special is the electric guitar designed and built by Queen's guitarist Brian May and his father, Harold, when Brian was a teenager in the early 1960s. The Red Special is sometimes referred to as the Fireplace or the Old Lady by May and by others. The name "Red Special" came from the reddish-brown colour the guitar attained after being stained and painted with numerous layers of "Rustins Plastic Coating". The name "Fireplace" is a reference to the fact that the wood used to make the neck came from a fireplace mantel. A guitar that would define May's signature style, it was intentionally designed to feed back after he saw Jeff Beck playing live and making different sounds just by moving the guitar in front of the amplifier. He wanted an instrument that would be alive and interact with him and the air around him. May has used the Red Special almost exclusively, including on Queen albums and in live performances, since the band's advent in the early 1970s. In celebration of the instrument's 50th anniversary, a book about its construction and history, "Brian May’s Red Special: The Story of the Home-Made Guitar that Rocked Queen and the World", was written by Brian May with Simon Bradley. Unlike the primary instruments of most musicians, the Red Special was built by its player, May, along with his father. They began to work on the guitar in August 1963, with the project taking two years to complete. The neck was constructed from wood from a "hundred-year-old-ish" fireplace mantel that a friend of the family was about to throw away. The neck was hand-shaped into the desired form, a job that was made more difficult by the age and quality of the wood. According to May, there are worm holes in the neck of the guitar that he filled in with matchsticks. The neck was finished with a 24-fret oak fingerboard. Each of the position inlays was hand shaped from a mother-of-pearl button. May decided to position them in a personal way: two dots at the 7th and 19th fret and three at the 12th and 24th. The body was made from blockboard (strips of softwood sandwiched between two plywood skins) with oak inserts in the top and bottom layers sourced from an old table. It was covered with mahogany marquetry veneer on the top, bottom and side to give it the appearance of a solid-body guitar.