Simon Bradley
Music Journalist,
Co-Author of “Brian May’s Red Special: The Story of the Home-made Guitar that Rocked Queen and the World”

The thing is, it’s this level of dedication that genuinely pioneering innovation usually requires and, if you get it right and the timings happen to be in your favour, you can conquer the world; just look at where the drive to beat new paths of invention demonstrated by Clarence Leonadis Fender or Lester Polsfuss in the 1940’s, far better known as Leo Fender and Les Paul respectively, has taken us.

In my career as a journalist and writer I’ve been fortunate to have sat and chatted with innovators from MI whose achievements are certainly worthy of similar levels of adulation as those of Leo and Les; Seymour Duncan, Jim Marshall, Paul Reed Smith, Grover Jackson, and Mesa/Boogie’s Randall Smith to name but five, and each could certainly be filed under the heading of ‘inventor’ (or ‘mad scientist’ if you’re feeling a little unkind).

And how big and influential are the companies that each built on the foundations of their innovations? Well, that’s kinda the point.

Musicians, too, have sometimes found necessity to be an especially nurturing mother of invention. Jimmy Page tells a story that, in his pre-Led Zeppelin guise as a studio kingpin, he joined forces with someone who – ahem – “… worked in a top secret department of the Admiralty…” to come up with the first distortion pedal, derivatives of which reside on the ‘boards of surely every modern player.

A few years later and across the pond, a young Dutch-Indonesian immigrant named Edward Van Halen was fiddling with the inner workings of his amplifiers to streamline and supercharge their performance, a procedure that certainly isn’t recommended! He also built the instrument with which he would reinvent the world’s fundamental approach to the electric guitar, the unmistakable Frankenstein, put together from prefabricated parts sourced from Wayne Charvel’s store in Azuza, California in 1975.

A decade earlier, no such luxuries were available to a student of astrophysics residing in Feltham, Middlesex, who’d also found himself without an instrument to allow him to express the feelings that were unstoppably welling up inside him. That young man, Brian May, went on to meticulously design and build his own electric guitar virtually from scratch and the legendary Red Special is still going strong today, having leant its unique tones to some of rock’s most revered music.

There’s a wonderful book available that minutely details its construction, so there’s no need for us to go any further into that story here.

Amongst the very few parts of the guitar that May and his father were ultimately unable to make themselves were the pickups, the initial designs and embryonic attempts rendered unusable by magnetic polarity issues that the guitarist concedes he still doesn’t quite understand.

I truly feel that, if he had had access to modern manufacturing techniques and today’s pool of knowledge, his drive would have allowed him to come up with something very similar to the Yonderbosk Sovereign and the fact that we Queen fans, as well as everyone else of course, can spec-up and purchase such things is a genuine revelation.

I encourage you to go through the Yonderbosk site and discover for yourself just what’s available; the attention to detail will surely amaze you as it did me.

I have a set of custom-etched Yonderbosk Tri-Sonic style pickups fitted to my own Belben RS-inspired guitar, and I revel in the knowledge that they’re as close to those fitted to the original Red Special as it’s practically possible to get.

Yes, other pickup manufacturers are available, but none in my experience offer the exquisite attention to detail and dedication to perfection that is offered by Yonderbosk.

Oh, and do they sound good? Haha! YES!

A toneful, expressive, diverse, rock ‘n rollin’, stadium-fillin’, fan-thrillin’, ear-caressin’, Mercury-missin’, May-lovin’ world of yes.

As Yonderbosk’s Matt Netherwood says, “If I’m doing it, it’s got to be done as closely as I can.”, and it’s the combination of that devotion, combined with his skill, tenacity and knowledge, that is difficult to find these days.

Yonderbosk Creations. Go get some.

Simon Bradley 2024

---