7 April

Another example of Brian May’s genius. Not the solo itself, which is beautiful, but how May managed to design a guitar and rig which achieved the impossible. Instead of the usual opposites of a ‘clean’ sound and ‘overdriven’ sound, May found a way to create a continuum from one to the other, at every point along the way. And with infinite sustain, a guitarist’s Holy Grail. Notice how the solo starts with a clean sound, and then with a small nudge of the volume knob the guitar suddenly is in that infinite sustain space. And finished with a power chord where you can hear how much more harmonically rich the sound is than standard guitars, which tend to sound buzzy and electricky at that overdriven stage, with almost no link back to the acoustic qualities of the instrument. You can hear every note in the chord, again often seen as impossible for overdriven guitar. It irritates me a little when people call all of this ‘the Brian May sound’, as if it’s just some idiosyncratic sound. Makes as much sense as saying everybody who plays a Telecaster or Stratocaster is looking for the ‘Leo Fender sound’.