Brian May is perhaps the biggest dichotomy in the rock universe. With his nerdy qualifications, his friendship with monacled astronomer Patrick Moore and his marriage to Z-list soap star Anita Dobson, with whom he shares the same hair; he doesn’t fit the usual criteria for a rock god. Just like his old pal Patrick, Brian May is the quintessential English eccentric. Anyone who gets to peel off riffs while standing on the roof of Buckingham Palace, however, has earned their place in the lexicon of rock legends as far as we’re concerned.
The Red Special pedal is a weighty wah-wah sized unit which has been designed to mirror the look of Brian’s Red Special guitar - an instrument, which May fashioned himself from a 19th century fireplace, using part of a bicycle frame for the whammy bar (he also famously uses a sixpence instead of a plectrum – did we mention eccentricity?) Ironically Brian May never used that much in the way of outboard effects when he was performing with Queen: a treble booster, a Foxx phaser and a battery operated amp, designed by Queen bassist John Deacon, or a number of customized Vox AC30s, were the key players in his effects set up. Even so, he was able to conjure up a myriad of weird and wonderful sounds, all of which are undeniably his own.
Just like the Hendrix pedal, what the Red Special does is to take a selection of May’s defining moments as a guitar superhero and condense them into a single rotary control labelled one through to seven as follows: 1 – Keep Yourself Alive, 2 – Bohemian Rhapsody, 3 – Tie Your Mother Down, 4 – We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions, 5 – Crazy Little Thing Called Love, 6 – Brighton Rock, 7- A Winter’s Tale. As these are simply numbered rather than labelled, it can be confusing trying to remember which setting is supposed to sound like which song. A Guitar/Control rotary then fine tunes the classic Queen tone you’ve chosen. According to Digitech, the Guitar part of the rotary ‘transforms your guitar tone to sound more like Brian’s’. It has three settings depending on whether your guitar uses humbuckers, single coil pickups or is a Red Special replica. The Control part of it is a little more involving as what it does changes depending on which emulation you’re using. For the most part it behaves as a midrange boost but for example with the Brighton Rock setting it controls the delay time.
The expression pedal element of the unit also serves two functions, depending on whether it is switched on at the front (toe) or at the back (heel). Like the control rotary, the element of the sound it alters depends on the song mode you’re using. For example, for We Will Rock You it affects the degree of phasing, but for Keep Yourself Alive it changes the emulated tape flanging effect.
So what do these effects sound like? Well, I was using a Gibson Les Paul through a Crate amp and, despite this, I have to say, the guitar did sound surprisingly May-ish. The midrange and top-end really cut through with plenty of bright, angular gain. You can see where they’re going with the acoustic-sounding effect on the Crazy Little Thing Called Love setting, although dedicated acoustic simulator pedals may do a better job if simple ‘acoustic’ is the sound you want. The best setting on this pedal by a long way, however, is...
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