Steve Vai was simply 20 years outdated when he met one among his largest heroes, Brian May, on the legendary Rainbow Bar & Grill in Los Angeles, a metropolis he had solely lately moved to. But when the younger guitarist was given the possibility to play May’s Red Special electric guitar, he found he was utterly out of his depth.
Vai had earned his massive break simply two years earlier as Frank Zappa’s transcriptionist — a frightening position that required him to meticulously notate Zappa’s complicated compositions. He excelled at it. After mastering the job, Vai was quickly employed as Zappa’s lead guitarist and relocated from New York to Los Angeles as his profession started accelerating at a dizzying tempo.
Not lengthy after arriving in California, he bumped into his idol. May, he recollects, proved to be the quintessential English gentleman. But the Queen guitarist’s famously idiosyncratic instrument was one the younger shredder merely couldn’t tame.
“Just a year before that, I was in my teenage bedroom with Queen posters and Led Zeppelin all over the walls,” Vai stated in dialog with Q104.3. “I walk into the Rainbow, and there’s Brian May standing at the bar. And I just thought, How is this possible?”
It’s additionally a narrative he shared with followers on Instagram earlier this 12 months whereas exhibiting off a brand new custom-built tribute to the Red Special. Vai recalled how “time slowed down” when he was invited to a Queen rehearsal at Zoetrope Studios.
Even with Freddie Mercury within the room, his consideration instantly fastened on May’s guitar — the instrument May famously constructed with his father from reclaimed wooden and family supplies.
“Is that it?” Vai remembered asking.
But when he lastly picked it up, the expertise wasn’t what he anticipated.
“I just remember thinking, ‘I can’t play this thing — the neck is like a baseball bat,’” he stated. “It’s got, like, gauge .008 strings. It was a miracle to actually have the guitar under my fingers, and he allowed that.”
“After idolizing that guitar my whole youth, holding it was seismic,” Vai added on Instagram. “I thought, ‘This is it — I’m finally going to sound like Brian May.’ But much to my chagrin, I didn’t. I sounded like me. And between the gauge .008 strings, ultra-low action, and a neck the size of a small tree, I played it like a baby giraffe on roller skates.”
According to longtime Meat Loaf guitarist Paul Crook (through Ultimate Guitar), May as soon as joked that the Red Special’s famously chunky neck partly took place as a result of he merely grew uninterested in sanding it down. In actuality, its dimensions had been modeled on the neck of an outdated Egmond acoustic guitar he liked as a teen.
Speaking at a fan event in late 2024, May defined, “I needed the fingerboard to really feel the identical means that it did. So I measured all of it up and normal it out of the 100-year-old hearth. I just about matched the profile. And then, in fact, I put the fingerboard on and the frets on. What I forgot was that the fingerboard had thickness as nicely. So that was a little bit of an elementary mistake.
“At first I thought, ‘Oh, I’m not sure if I can handle this,’” he added. “But what I found was I really liked it — it seemed to sit in my hand better.”
It was an identical story for Tony Iommi, who was lately gifted a left-handed Red Special. The neck on the one-of-a-kind mannequin was crafted to match his trusty JayDee Old Boy SG. The instrument was constructed by esteemed luthier John Diggins as a tribute to Iommi’s iconic SG, the guitar he turned to whereas recording Black Sabbath’s groundbreaking debut album.
Elsewhere, May has mentioned clashing with Mercury over whether or not one among Queen’s largest hits ought to embrace a guitar solo, arguing that their artistic friction was key to the band’s success. Vai, in the meantime, has been reflecting on the radical guitar-mod concepts he absorbed from Zappa — ideas that finally helped form his signature Ibanez JEM.
