Brian May Guitars Red Special vs Kay K-20T
The Brian May Guitars Red Special and the Kay K-20T are both electric guitars. The Brian May Guitars Red Special leans bright.
cited
Blended from circuit-archetype lineage, dynamic feel, tone-signal overlap and tone-vector distance — the tone vector itself is derived from editorial description text, not a measured acoustic signal, so this reflects how similarly the catalog copy describes the two, not a lab measurement. Shown only within a gear class, and only where there's enough evidence to be meaningful.51% — moderately similar
Brian May Guitars Red Special
Brian May Guitars · electric guitar
cited
Citation/mention fame — how often this gear is cited across artist rigs and gear discussion.The Red Special is the guitar Brian May built by hand with his father Harold, an engineer, starting around 1963 using largely salvaged and homemade materials, including a mahogany fireplace mantel for the body core and motorcycle valve springs in the custom tremolo system May designed himself. Brian May Guitars, formed through a partnership between May and Barry Moorhouse of House Music beginning in 2001, is now the only company officially licensed to produce recreations of this famously idiosyncratic double-cutaway design, having taken over from Burns and Guild, both of which built licensed versions in earlier decades. This entry represents either the guitar concept itself or an officially licensed BMG-produced example rather than May's own irreplaceable original, which remains his personal instrument.
This Kay K-20T, though catalogued generically as an SG-style guitar, is Tom Morello's first-ever electric, a cherry-red, plywood-body SG copy with a Bigsby-style tremolo and two blade pickups that he bought for fifty dollars at Rigoni Music in Libertyville, Illinois. Made in Japan and sold cheaply in the United States, it sat untouched in a closet for four years after two guitar lessons he disliked, before becoming the guitar behind his first band, The Electric Sheep, and his earliest live shows and recordings. He later upgraded to a Gibson Explorer in the early 1980s, but decades afterward retrieved the Kay from his mother's house in Illinois, had his guitar tech set it up properly, and used it on his 2018 album The Atlas Underground, despite it never having held tuning particularly well.
cited
Genres this gear is documented as being used in.- Electronic
- Blues
- Country
- Rock
- bright