“I just remember thinking, ‘I can’t play this thing’”: Why Steve Vai struggled to play Brian May’s iconicRed Special

Steve Vai has recalled the time he played Brian May’s legendary Red Special electric guitar at just 20 years old – but admitted he struggled to get a tune out of it.

In a new interview with Q1043 New York, Vai looked back on his early years as an aspiring artist who’d just moved to Los Angeles to make it big as a guitar player. While there, he crossed paths with one of his heroes.

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“He actually invited me to a Queen rehearsal,” Vai continues. “I was just this unknown kid, and there I was. And then there it was, the Red Special. I said, ‘Is that it?’ And he goes, ‘That’s it. You wanna play it?’”

May has been loyal to the electric guitar he built with his father throughout his entire career. So loyal, in fact, that last year’s Gibson SJ-200 was his first-ever signature guitar, after a series of Red Special releases via Brian May Guitars.

As such, it was made to his liking – no one else’s. Vai figured that out pretty quickly. Some of the specs were just too far removed from his own personal setup – particularly the neck.

“I just remember thinking, ‘I can’t play this thing.’ The neck is like a bat,” he goes on. “It’s got like, what, gauge 0.8 strings? But it was a miracle to actually have the guitar under my fingers, and he allowed that.”

Indeed, when showing off his custom-built Vai-ified Red Special guitar earlier this year, Vai said the neck was “the size of a small tree,” and him trying to play it was like “a giraffe on roller skates.”

May signed with Gibson in a surprise move in 2024, and while there’s been speculation that a Gibson-made Red Special is in the works, there’s sadly no sign of movement there yet.

Elsewhere, May says he gave the Red Special one mod after taking inspiration from Jimi Hendrix, but he quickly regretted it.

A freelance writer with a penchant for music that gets weird, Phil is a regular contributor to Prog, Guitar World, and Total Guitar magazines and is especially keen on shining a light on unknown artists. Outside of the journalism realm, you can find him writing angular riffs in progressive metal band, Prognosis, in which he slings an 8-string Strandberg Boden Original, churning that low string through a variety of tunings. He’s also a published author and is currently penning his debut novel which chucks fantasy, mythology and humanity into a great big melting pot.