26th March 2025:

Unfortunately I have put the Mayday 2 distortion pedal project on hold for the time being. This is because I am largely retired from the guitar business and am more than busy in the marine industry.

Although this new pedal design is 95% developed and I believe it would sound unique and great, unfortunately the project must be put on the ‘back burner’ for now due to lack of available time. Cheers, Greg Fryer

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12th December 2024:

It is possible that in early 2025 I may build prototypes for a new Mayday 2 distortion pedal. Earlier this year I thought this pedal would focus only on producing a superb Deacy Amp distortion sound. However after recent conversations I have changed my mind and believe that the new prototype would be best with both AC30 sound and Deacy Amp sound – with two footswitches similar to the original 2015 Mayday pedal.

If prototypes are made and I am happy with the sound then I will make videos of its sound played through the Vox MV50 amplifier,

In July 2024 I made videos playing through the Manuel Angelini Deacy Amp – and compared its lovely authentic sound to the pedal combination of the new Strelly Booster + 2015 Mayday distortion pedal played through the Vox MV50 amp.

This pedal combination gave a surprisingly close sound to the fabulous Deacy Amp! Since then I have been drawing up ideas for a new prototype Mayday 2 pedal which would incorporate elements of both Strelly Booster and 2015 Mayday plus several new ideas and sounds.

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My comments and videos from 23rd July 2024 are below:

Its been an interesting time over the last few days learning new things and experimenting with A/B sound comparisons between the beautiful sounding Manuel Angelini Deacy Amp replica vs the Vox MV50 AC amp and 3 of my pedals attempting to create convincing Deacy Amp sounds.

The 3 pedals I have used with the MV50 are Treble Booster Touring, Strelly Booster and 2015 Mayday distortion.

Using the new Strelly Booster has given me a lot of interesting variations to the basic Deacy Amp sound of the Mayday pedal with “D” mode (for Deacy Amp sound) footswitched in.

The Strelly has provided both thinner and fatter sounds from the 6 position ‘Range’ rotary switch control – and all of the sounds with more overdrive and sustain.

I hope you enjoy the videos. By the way, these videos and more are on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@gregfryer/videos

All the best, Greg Fryer

240723 #3 playing the Brian May solo from Queen song ‘Somebody To Love’:

240723 #7 playing the Brian May solo from his 1998 ‘Another World’ album ‘Why Don’t We Try Again’:

Photos below of the some settings I used on the videos from Tuesday 23rd July 2024. Though bear in mind that I was tweaking the controls of the Strelly Booster through the morning when doing these videos – to see what it would give me when combined with the Mayday and MV50.

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20th July 2024:

Saturday 20th July was when the ‘penny’ dropped for me – after my Japanese friend Daizo told me that many Red Special players in Japan use the little Vox MV50 amp (rather than the Vox AC30 Normal Channel) with their Red Special guitars and various pedals to get a good Brian May/Red Special sound at home.

I finally understood that for reasons of size, weight, volume level, cost of initial purchase, cost of replacing valves etc, a lot of people through the world are now using the MV50 AC amp to create good BM sounds at home. And yes I agree the MV50 does sound VERY good!

So on Saturday night I began to do some videos comparing the Manuel Angelini Deacy Amp replica vs the Vox MV50, trying to get a convinging Deacy Amp sound out of the MV50.  And I started experimenting with the tonal settings on the Strelly Booster,  Mayday pedal, and MV50  amp to see what I could get.

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19th July 2024:

Yesterday I tried a interesting experiment which now has me thinking about the direction of the new Mayday 2 distortion pedal.

During the afternoon I completed a Mayday 2015 version distortion pedal which had been put away half built for a couple of years. I not had one of these pedals in my workshop for a while. An hour earlier I had completed the #002 Strelly Booster, a new pedal designed for Strats® and Teles®.

I decided to try the Strelly and Mayday 2015 together using the Kz RS Jnr Hybrid guitar into the Normal Channel of my Vox AC30. To my surprise this worked very well.

This pedal/amp combination was then compared to Manuel Angelini’s Deacy Amp replica, which in my opinion is the closest replica to Brian May’s own legendary original Deacy Amp that I have ever heard or played.

The results of the afternoon’s playing have me now thinking that the new Mayday 2 distortion pedal should perhaps be an upgraded version of the 2015 Mayday to appeal to Red Special players who use the AC30 Normal Channel. But with more output level and distortion added like some people had asked me about several years ago……

Prior to yesterday I had been designing the Mayday 2 pedal to work with a broad range of amps such as Fender Marshall PRS etc – but these amps are tonally miles away from the AC30 Normal Channel, and such a pedal would not sound very good into the AC30 Normal Channel. Food for thought……

Here are the videos I made – all 3 are overlapping to some extent in that I talk about similar things and play similar things in them. However for me the 3 videos are an excellent reference to hear the Deacy Amp and Vox AC30 with the GoPro camera directly in front of both amps.

This camera position gives probably the most accurate sound of the amps of any of my recent videos. The sound that you hear in these videos is extremely close to what I heard being in the same room playing the guitar.

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16th July 2024:

Today I made 3 videos showing the latest development version 1e of the Deacy Amp distortion pedal, the Mayday 2. There is still much tweaking and experimenting to be done with this new prototype pedal, however it is beginning to sound very promising.

The Mayday 2 pedal is being developed to reproduce as closely as is possible in a guitar distortion pedal, the sound of Brian May’s legendary Deacy Amp – this version of Mayday 2 designed for amps such as Fender, Marshall, PRS, Roland, Vox AC30 Brilliant Channel etc – ie not for the the Vox AC30 Normal Channel which is tonally completely different to those amps mentioned before.

In the videos below I am using the KzJnr Hybrid Red Special guitar (25″ scale length) plugged into a Fryer Treble Booster Touring pedal,  plugged into the Mayday 2 distortion pedal prototype, then into the Brilliant Channel of the Vox AC30 amp.

The Deacy Amp replica is the Supersonic made by Manuel Angelini in France. In my opinion this amp is the closest sounding replica to Brian May’s own original Deacy Amp that I have ever heard.

Bearing in mind that I was the first person to open up, photograph and catalogue Brian’s own original Deacy Amp in 1998, and spent much time during 1998 at Brian May’s Allerton Hill studio playing recording and studying in fine detail the original Deacy Amp – then spent many years experimenting making replicas of the amp – few people would doubt that my opinion on the subject lacks credibility or substance.

Anyway enough for the preamble – the videos below show the beginnings of recent experiments developing a Deacy Amp distortion pedal ‘Mayday 2’ – which hopefully may turn out to be the successor to my 2015 original Mayday distortion pedal.

Videos are in reverse chronological order ie today’s videos are first and the original  video made on 4th July 2024 in last spot. Hopefully as Shaun Klinger begins to work his magic on the circuit that I have developed to this stage, that we will be able to post videos showing the latest versions of the pedal.

I hope you enjoy the videos. Hooroo, Greg

Version 1e: the first 3 videos done today all show essentially the same thing, just some slightly different settings and dialogue:

Version 1d:

Version 1c:

Version 1b:

Version 1a:

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