Fig. 4 - My Burns Marquee Pro offers an excellent range of tones from the Tri-Sonic pickups but it isn’t designed to match Brian May’s sonic pallet.
Tri-Sonic Brian May Signature, plus a new Mini Tri-Sonic, which will fi t a Strat scratch plate. For this exercise, I ‘borrowed’ the Tri-Sonic pickups from my Burns Marquee Pro. (Fig. 4). Don’t worry, no Burns guitars were harmed in the making of this article!
The Liberator
A couple of questions that might be on your mind: 1) How would this wiring scheme work with say, Fender Strat pickups, instead of the Tri-Sonics? 2) If a 500k volume pot is best for humbuckers
The completed Red Special wiring with Seymour Duncan Liberator handling volume and primary connection duties. (Unused fl y leads taped between treble and middle pickups). Although the pickup spacing looks ‘all wrong’, it is correct to Brian May’s guitar. More about this in the pdf on
www.playmusicpickup.co.uk
and a 250k is best for single coils, what value do I use for a guitar that has both single coil and humbucking settings?
The Seymour Duncan Liberator system helped me to speed up swap-outs, and I found it doesn’t make much difference when your volume is fl at out. But go to the Playmusic website and you can hear Burns and Fender pickups wired the Brian May way! To be honest, I’m pleased but slightly knackered at this point! So many of the contact points are in-circuit all the time, you have to be ultra-careful about your wiring. But it’s worth it in the end.
For me, I’ll probably work out a schematic that keeps the simplicity of the Burns Marquee layout but adds some Brian May options. I’ll post it on the Playmusic web site. Let me have a think though. I’m not going to rush to ‘improve’ on an already great guitar.
When you take into account the massive amount of pickup combinations the Red Special offers and then multiply that by two different sets of pickups, as well as changing the pot values… well, there’s a lot to look at and listen to at the Playmusic web site this month. PM
BUILDING YOUR OWN GUITAR
those typical guitarists’ conversations with Playmusic’s editor Tim Slater. It was along the lines of: “If someone’s booked you for a gig but
S
tarting this month, a real-life project that shows you how to create a custom guitar to your own specification.
A while back, I was having one of
combination you’re after. Firstly, draw up some sort of visual mock-up of what the finished guitar will comprise (Fig. 5). Secondly, list out all the parts you’ll need and put a realistic cost against each one, so you have a fair idea how much the completed guitar is going to come to. Also, it’s worth remembering that not all parts
engineered. But Trev Wilkinson is not just a brilliant guitar designer, he’s a really nice bloke. Massive thanks to Trev for sending me a box of parts to put this guitar together! By the time you read this, I’ll have started
working on the guitar, so please keep checking the web site to see how it’s going. PM
YOUR ON-LINE LIBRARY
Fig. 5 - Tim Slater said my fi rst mockup looked like ‘a tart’s handbag’. He probably had a point. When I saw the fantastic parts Trev Wilkinson had sent me, I realised I needed to up my game. From here on the mission was ‘King of Nashville’, not ‘Slag from Blingtown’.
you have no idea what you’ll be asked to play, what’s the ultimate electric guitar you would you take with you?”
Most players have one stock instrument
they’d pick but there’s also a “and if I could have”. So here comes my ‘building you own guitar’ project, which you can follow on the Playmusic web site. There are two initial stages I’d suggest anyone thinking about a self-build guitar to go through, once you know the sort of pickup and wiring
are the same just because they look similar. The width of neck heels, string spacing at the bridge end, and the dimensions of machine heads are all variables you should check before you buy. My basic idea was a Tele treble end on a Strat
shaped body with a mini-humbucker at the bridge, with some extra useful tones from combining the three coils within the two pickups. (And there’s a little bit of visual flash…) I definitely wanted to use Wilkinson hardware because I think it’s phenomenally well
If this all sounds like techno-babble to you – or you’d like more technical detail – please download my Hot-Mod Pickup Primer and Brian May Guitar Tones pdfs from the Playmusic web site -
www.playmusicpickup.co.uk.
Also, if you like the sounds you hear in
the accompanying videos - on our Hot Mods page - but you don’t have soldering skills, you might want to ask a guitar tech to mod your existing guitar. Or try a Brian May Red Special guitar – it’s a relatively affordable and high-quality instrument.
pickup41
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