Re: How can i get the red special tone in a budget?
I find myself in the same situation as Brian was, I can't afford a chibson or a squire, and here in México All the second hand guitars are beaten up and rusty, so and i am planning to make a red special.
I've been doing a lot of research about the red special and from what i learned the lipstick pickups are like the Burns Tri-sonic pickups: they both have a similar construction and seem to be quite big (judging by a video of someone opening one and comparing them to the restoration photos).
Can i get a similar Brian May tone using lipstick pickups, or should i use neodymium modified single coils? (Both cheap sets from Ebay)
A few months ago, I've fitted a short scale (24') Strat with a (regular sized) Tri-Sonic bridge PU and two lipsticks in mid / neck positions... plus a TBX tone control modified to give series and parallel wiring. This instrument plugged in a Rangemaster clone feeding a Vox AC gives a good emulation of the Red Special tone but is still not TOTALLY there. Reasons:
1-Even compared to other transducers with an
apparently similar architecture (lipsticks, "Gold Foil" variations and so on), Tri-Sonic's are truly special pickups, whose sound is due to their wide footprint
and to the incredible amount of "Eddy currents" generated by their metallic "shell".
Cancel one of these specs and the Tri-Sonic tone is gone. For example, I've here a pair of Srat sized "DiMarzio Brian May" with plastic covers: these things sound like subdued Strat pickups and not like regular sized TS's. The same thing can be said about "Burns mini-Tri-Sonics": they have the required metallic covers but their reduced Strat size results in a narrowed magnetic windows and a way lower inductance than needed... so they don't sound either like their big sized models.
2-Regarding the guitar, you already know that it's not only a short scale one but also a "special" instrument with a chambered body and a unique tremolo unit: these features
among others contribute to a unique tone that even mass marketed "Brian May Guitars" don't reproduce totally IMHO.
THAT BEING SAID:
1-A good part of the Red Special tone is due to its unique wiring, with single coils pickups in series and phase inverters. If you use a guitar with single coils able to give bridge + mid in phase / in series AND mid + neck out of phase / in series, you'll already have something very close to the two tones most often used by Brian May (NOTE: I do that with a Strat copy whose wiring allows to put in series splitted humbuckers and it works decently).
2- There's
relatively cheap products able to give you a good
approximation of what you want. See this:
https://www.guitarfetish.com/KP--Brighton-Rock-Vintage-Pickups--Kwikplug-Ready_p_22006.html... and that:
https://www.thomann.de/es/harley_benton_bm_75_trans_red.htm
3-I've already heard people characterizing a tone as "exactly the same" than Brian May's sound, although it hadn't been
at all produced with Brian May's rig: there's many ways to skin a cat and IME/IMHO, it's possible to mimic Queen in a convincing way with many guitars and amps, as soon as the required settings and playing are applied (I've already done that with a Variax in a Marshall and nobody in the audience told me that my tone was "off").
Good luck in your quest.
