(This article is copyrighted 1998 by Sheri Hurt, and may not be reprinted, reposted, or used in any manner without prior permission from the author.)

Back from the convention, and have a number of things to post after I catch up, but I haven't seen anything about this in the convention reports yet, so I'll start with this. Greg Fryer is the guitar maker from Sydney Australia who is working with Brian on repairing his guitar and who has made three replicas for Brian and will be writing a book on the Red Special with Brian sometime in the future (hopefully published before 2000, he said with a chuckle!).

He gave a talk and demonstration at the convention, and I took notes so that I could share when I came back. My video camera wasn't working, so I'll have to wait for Wolfgang to send me a copy of the bits he recorded to have any of it on tape.

First of all, Greg has worked on repairs and replicas of many well-known guitarist's guitars, and he's the one who approached Brian back in 1996 about making Brian a replica guitar. He said that Brian and Pete Malandrone (Brian's guitar technician who brought the Red Special to the convention last year) had heard of him, so that is what initially got his foot in the door.

To start first with the replicas, Greg has made three of them for Brian. Brian has said that he likes them much more than the Guild replicas which had a number of differences from the original, including the thickness of the neck, the sound of the pickups and the woods were different in areas. I believe he said there were also other proportional differences, but that may have just been the neck of the guitar. Brian wasn't terribly enamored of using the Guild copies.

Greg began quite a while ago making measurements, taking photographs, etc, and actually had disassembled it to a much lesser extent with Pete M. back in 1996 to get some things measured and documented accurately. He needed to figure out exactly what it was like to make the best possible replicas. So, the design of the original Red Special is now documented in AutoCad.

Most of the replicas are handmade rather than using commercially produced parts. About the only things that are mass produced that he used are the white dots for the fret markers, the white binding and the tuning heads. He detailed the process that Brian had used (more on this below) with his mother's pearl buttons to make the dots on the Red Special and said once again how complex that Brian and his dad's process for making the guitar had been and how he was amazed at the detail of the things he did. The white binding was originally made from shelfing plastic, which Greg said was a very long and laborious task.

The volume and tone knobs that Brian has on the original are knobs that Brian fashioned on a lathe at his university. Greg found a metal worker from Sydney (who normally works on Porches) who could reproduce those. The white switches were the thing that caused quite a bit of trouble since no one makes white switches anymore. So, they cannibalized the switches for one from a Guild replica and got the rest out of Brian's cabinets of stuff that he has.

They started with special Burns pickups, and then rewound and potted them to improve the microphonics.

When Greg was making the guitars, he referred to them as Guitar 1, Guitar 2, and Guitar 3, but Brian didn't like the idea of referring to them as numbers and decided that they needed names. Greg thought a bit and jokingly suggested "Paul, John, George, and Ringo" which Brian quite liked. So, the first two guitars became Paul and John while the last became George, but Brian later changed it to "George Burns" because of the Burns pickups. :-) "Paul" was the featured guest at the demonstration. Paul and John look just like Brian's guitar, and can be told apart from each other mostly by the grain of the wood. George Burns, however, is different. Greg used different woods, something that might be more commercially available in this guitar - New Guinea Rosewood (This one I was writing quickly on, an Scott and I disagree on whether this is actually quite correct for the first wood) and Brazilian Rosewood. A standard finger board was used, and at the suggestion of Pete Malandrone and Julie Glover the fifth fret will have one of Brian's cruciform stars that he first used on his Back to the Light Album. Greg believes that this is the guitar that will appear on the cover of the upcoming June 3rd issue of "Guitarist Magazine"

While sound testing the guitars, they did have to make a few minor changes from Greg's original design. They made the v-shaped groves steeper on the bridge rollers for the thin strings, and they adjusted the height of the pickups. One of the few changes that they made from Brian's original design is that the new guitars have captive rollers on the bridge. With the Red Special, every time Brian broke a string, the rollers would pop out, and Greg said that more than once several roadies would be scrambling around the stage looking under all the wires and things trying to find it. Another change was that the internal wiring of the guitar is now shielded with copper tape to reduce the electronic noise (not to be confused directly with audible noise, I might add).

Brian has been *very* pleased with these replicas and has told Greg that he thinks that they're the closest to his original. In fact, he used them to finish up four songs for Another World (Greg didn't say which 4). Brian told him that several times he'd been quite startled while he was playing a guitar solo and looked down and realized "That's not my guitar!" When the replicas were done, Greg and Pete blindfolded Brian and handed him the different guitars - including the Red Special - to see if Brian could accurately tell which one of the four guitars he was playing. To Greg's satisfaction, Brian frequently couldn't tell which guitar it was.

The next project, then, was to clean and repair the Red Special. Brian and Greg have been working together on taking apart and cleaning the Red Special since January, and Greg said that it should be complete and put back together in the next two weeks. (Probably one now since that was nearly a week ago!) The video message that Brian did for the convention where he showed the disassembled Red Special (which brought an audible gasp from the audience, some of whom hadn't received the latest OIQFC mag yet) was done one week before the convention.

Greg said that as they worked on the guitar, the list of what was done kept growing. The white binding on the guitar had increasing amounts of tape holding it on, so that was glued in general . The tuning knobs had been replaced many times over the years, and there were actually extra holes in the area, so they replaced the tuning knobs (using locking tuners) and filled in the holes, etc. Brian had asked about replacing the frets, but although they showed wear, Greg didn't feel that they needed replaced, and he also said that it would have been a *tremendous* undertaking to replace the frets for a number of reasons, including the way Brian has the black section painted on the neck.

Greg and Pete Malandrone walked in one morning and Brian had taken the neck out of the guitar body himself, much to their shock since Greg hadn't been particularly planning on taking it apart that far. :-) During the whole process, Brian "rolled up his sleeves and pitched in", so the cleaning sounds as though it was very much a joint effort. On the neck, there was one red wooden dot that had been supplied by one of the roadies to replace one of the original mother-of-pearl button dots that had been lost in the early 80's. Greg said he had photos of Brian carefully gouging out the red dot and the adhesive used to hold it in after he'd brought out his (Brian's) stereo-microscope. Brian made Greg fashion a new mother of pearl dot using the original methods and tools that Brian and his dad had used. The button was glued on to a wooden dowel of the exact diameter needed to fill the hole. The wooden dowel was put in an egg-beater style manual drill, and the mother of pearl was hand filed down to the diameter of the dowel in what Greg described as a very slow and painful process. ;-)

In the process of taking the guitar apart and cleaning the guitar, Brian remembered many of the original processes used in the construction by him and his dad and found many of the original jigs.

Greg and Brian took out the electronics and such to clean them, and there were "bucket loads of little six-pence filings" behind everything! When the electronics are replaced, the copper tape will also be used as shielding on the wires as was done in the replicas. Some of the veneer on both the front and back of the body was replaced where it was worn, and the whole neck and body were re coated with the original coating that had been used - Rustics Plastic Coating. Greg mentioned at this point that though he'd worked on and built many guitars in his career, he had to learn everything from scratch for this guitar since nothing was done using things that are standards. When they refinished the guitar, he said that it regained its original color and luster, so it's appearance may be a little different than it has been most recently, but more closely resembles it's original appearance.

The one hole that had been covered with the orange tape for ages where there had previously been a built in distortion pedal will be replaced with Brian's cruciform star. (I thought that was perhaps a little surprising, but definitely a very neat thing to do!)

During the discussion, Greg demonstrated the different kinds of sounds that can be made using the guitars with their unique pick-up arrangement, as well as the tremendous difference in sound produced by using a sixpence coin rather than a pick. He says he can't hold on to the sixpence well at all, and can't see how Brian does! He told us that there are 13 "very usable sounds" that the guitar can produce, and he played us passages using the different pickup and phase combinations, showing us the tremolo effect, etc... The three top switches turn the individual pickups on and off and the three bottom switches change the phase. A few brief notes that I had on that type of thing:

About 60% of the time Brian uses the Bridge and Middle pickups combined and in phase. (Scott says he told us that this was similar to a humbucking pickup on other guitars.)

For sharp sounds, he uses the middle and neck pickups out of phase - these were used frequently in BoRhap and Somebody to Love. (It's the out of phase relationship that really contributes to the sharp sound)

The closer to the neck the pickups are, the more mellow the sound is, and he said that all three pickups in phase also produced a mellow sound.

The pickup near the bridge is one of the closest pickups, if not the closest, to the bridge of any guitar.

KYA used the bridge and neck pickups out of phase.

Greg repeatedly talked about what an amazing design Brian's guitar is, and how tremendous the task of building the original was for Brian and his dad. He spoke of how some of the features have become standard in current guitars, and of how some things are still better than some regarded as very good in the industry. One example he gave was that Brian's guitar stays in tune with the tremolo much better than Fender's tremolo, in part due to the very shallow angle (4 or 5 degree) on the head and the almost straight path the strings take through the head to the tuners.

It's possible, though not definite, that his replicas may be on sale some time in the future. Most likely they would be ones similar to the "George Burns" guitar. He said that if they do sell them, though, it's likely that they will be mostly handmade and would cost considerably more than the Guild's (he may have spoken of them as being more valuable rather than direct cost...). He said that it would be a very limited number if they do that. They are also looking into doing a Deaky Amp replica, which may be available for purchase, as well as a redesigned one of Brian's treble booster in which they cut the electronic hum in half.

Greg left plenty of time at the end of his talk for people to ask questions that he might not have already covered, as well as time for people to take photos of the guitar and photos of or with him.

The presentation was really a fascinating addition to the convention and something I'm glad I didn't miss! Like Brian, Greg seems to be a very humble person, though confident in his skills as guitar maker. He was a little shy about his own guitar playing skills when he demonstrated techniques and pick-up settings with some of Brian's guitar solos and other bits, but really his playing was quite good. Greg was very gracious and friendly about answering questions, and his personality and sense of humor made it easy to imagine how well he and Brian must work together. I'm really looking forward to their book!
(Copyright 1998, Sheri Hurt)


Return to Sheri's main page