The Red Special is the electric guitar designed and built by Queen's guitarist Brian May and his father, Harold, when Brian was a teenager in the early 1960s. The Red Special is sometimes referred to as the Fireplace or the Old Lady by May and by others. The name Red Special came from the reddish-brown colour the guitar attained after being stained and painted with numerous layers of Rustins Plastic Coating. The name Fireplace is a reference to the fact that the wood used to make the neck came from a fireplace mantel.

A guitar that would define May's signature style, it was intentionally designed to feed back after he saw Jeff Beck playing live and making different sounds just by moving the guitar in front of the amplifier. He wanted an instrument that would be alive and interact with him and the air around him. May has used the Red Special almost exclusively, including on Queen albums and in live performances, throughout the band's entire career.

In celebration of the instrument's 50th anniversary, a book about its construction and history, Brian May’s Red Special: The Story of the Home-Made Guitar that Rocked Queen and the World, was written by Brian May with Simon Bradley.

Unlike the main instruments of most musicians, the Red Special was built by its player, May, along with his father. The inspiration struck when May realized he could not afford a Fender, Gibson or Höfner guitar. They began to work on the guitar in August 1963, with the project being finished in October 1964. The neck was constructed from wood from a "hundred-year-old-ish" fireplace mantel that a friend of the family was about to throw away. The neck was hand-shaped into the desired form, a job that was made more difficult by the age and quality of the wood. May revealed there are worm holes in the neck of the guitar that he filled in with matchsticks.

The neck was finished with a 24-fret oak fingerboard. Each of the position inlays was hand shaped from a mother-of-pearl button. May decided to position them in a personal way: two dots at the 7th and 19th fret and three at the 12th and 24th.

The body was made from blockboard (strips of softwood sandwiched between two plywood skins) with oak inserts in the top and bottom layers sourced from an old table. It was covered with mahogany marquetry veneer on the top, bottom and side to give it the appearance of a solid-body guitar. It was originally intended that the guitar would have f-holes but this was never done.

White plastic shelf edging was then applied to the top and bottom edges to protect them from damage. The guitar features three single-coil pick-ups and a custom-made aluminium bridge. May purchased a set of Burns Tri-Sonic pick-ups and covered the coils of two with Araldite epoxy to reduce microphonics. The middle pickup remained uncoated and this is understood to have been modified in the early 1980s when DiMarzio examined the Red Special when designing pickups for the first Guild replica. The magnet was turned over to change its polarity and the wires on the solder posts swapped (to mimic a reverse wound coil) which made his favoured pickup combination of bridge and middle in phase humbucking. He originally wound his own pick-ups, as he had for his first guitar, but he did not like the resulting sound because of the polarity of these pick-ups: alternating North-South instead of all North.

The tremolo system is made from an old hardened-steel knife-edge shaped into a V and two motorbike valve springs to counter the 79 pounds-force (350 N) of string tension. The tension of the springs can be adjusted by screwing the bolts, which run through the middle of the springs, in or out via two small access holes next to the rear strap button. To reduce friction, the bridge was completed with rollers to allow the strings to return perfectly in tune after using the tremolo arm (the arm itself was from a bicycle saddlebag holder with a plastic knitting needle tip). For the same reason, at the other end of the neck the strings pass over a zero fret and through a bakelite string guide.