In March 2007 I visited Brian May at his London Allerton Hill studio. I spent a week in London and during this time I visited Brian on three days and also visited Nigel Knight on two days of my trip.

I brought various new effect pedals to show Brian, and also showed him two of the latest Deacy Amp replicas which Nigel Knight and I had been developing. There were also a handful of treble boosters from other makers that I bought along to give Brian a listen to.

With Brian and Pete Malandrone, I discussed the idea of a ‘mid priced’ Brian May Red Special guitar to be manufactured in Japan by Kazutaka Ijuin of Kz Guitar Works.

In 2001 Kazutaka had visited me at my workshop in Sydney, and I was impressed by his thorough attitude and his quality workmanship.

For my 2007 visit to Allerton Hill, Kazutaka arranged for Mark Reynolds to deliver to Brian’s studio a ‘Kz Junior’ Red Special guitar, so that we could discuss my idea with a good example of what Kazutaka had been producing.

In 2007 there were only 2 Red Special guitars available in the Brian May Guitars range: the affordably priced Korean made Red Special, and the highly priced handmade Andrew Guyton Red Special. There was no Red Special guitar which occupied the middle ground – good quality yet still factory made to keep the price reasonable.

Fortunately Brian liked the idea of the mid priced Red Special guitar, and after playing the Kz Jnr guitar liked it a lot and saw the potential of us improving that guitar even further. He enthusiastically backed the idea.

We scheduled a meeting at Allerton Hill with several of the other potential business partners in the project. The people who attended the meeting were: Brian May, myself, Pete Malandrone, Adrian Turner (of Adeson Pickups UK who I had been working with since 2004 to develop an authentic Brian May version of the Burns Trisonic pickups), Barry Gibson (of Burns London who supplied the mass produced Korean Burns Trisonic pickups for the Korean made Brian May guitars), Barry Moorhouse (who was then heading up Brian May Guitars in London and with former business partner Barry Gibson had kicked off the Burns Brian May Red Special guitars around 2002).

As you may imagine, there were a couple of people at the meeting who didn’t particularly like each other, and there were some thorny issues to iron out. Nevertheless after healthy discussion we eventually struck agreement, and the mid priced ‘Brian May Super’ was to go ahead!

On my final day at Allerton Hill Brian and I spent several hours in his guitar room demo-ing different things for the upcoming BM Super guitar – including trying different brands of tone capacitors on a switch which was dangling out of my guitar John to determine the manufactured brand that Brian liked the sound of best for the guitar’s tone capacitor.

On this last day at Allerton Hill after the guitar things with Brian were completed I spent several hours doing a modification to my AC30 ‘Bob’ which was one of the amps that I built for Brian in 2005. Since 2005 I had developed a few new improvements for the custom AC30 design and modified ‘Bob’ to this new spec.

More info and photos soon