The Guyton RS Transporter: Brian May's Space Travel Guitar

In this final video for 2024, we take a closer look at a special and unique Brian May Red Special guitar variant: the Guyton RS Transporter, a travel sized headless electric guitar with all the features of Brian May's original Red Special.

The guitar was designed by Martin Pitcher in 2014 because he travelled by air a lot and wanted a Red Special type guitar that could be easily transported in cabin baggage. Andrew Guyton produced a limited edition run of twenty five starting in 2016 and most had unique finishes and hardware customisation. I'll show you some of these a bit later in this video.

Brian May uses his Transporter as a pre-concert warm-up guitar and it replaced the scalloped fretboard Guyton Red Special. Most of the media credits in this video are to Andrew Guyton, Martin Pitcher and Luke Holwerda and are used with permission. Additional images and video footage by Jamie Rail and James Kerrigan.

Construction
The body is of chambered mahogany construction with an oak block embedded into the rear of the body onto which the neck and bridge are mounted. The pickups are mounted onto pine 'rails' to mimic the original guitar's pine blockboard construction. The neck is made of quarter sawn mahogany and crucially has the same thick profile of the original guitar. The fretboard is made of oak and is finished in black lacquer with 24 frets and a 24 inch scale.

Hardware
The pickups are Brian May specification Burns Tri-Sonics, hand made by Adrian Turner of Adeson. The electrical harness was designed and built by Nigel Knight of Knight Audio Technologies and features a built in KAT treble booster that is switched in and out via the red button. The JCustom XS tremolo bridge is fitted with modified rollers, tremolo arm and spring to achieve a similar feel to Brian's original design. The bridge can be locked into a hard tail by moving a lever at the rear. Each Guyton RS Transporter is supplied in a Hoffee custom carbon fibre hard case which fits in the standard overhead lockers of passenger aircraft.

00:01 - Introductory montage to part of the TYMD studio stem.
01:49 - dsgb YouTube video thumbnails.
02:09 - Body construction.
02:35 - Adeson Brian May specification Burns Tri-Sonic pickups.
02:46 - Custom PCB and wiring harness by Knight Audio Technologies (KAT).
02:58 - JCustom XS floating tremolo bridge modified by Andrew Guyton.
03:14 - Custom Hoffee carbon fibre case.
03:28 - Standard colours - Union Red and Old English White.
04:19 - Rear ownership graphics.
04:30 - My guitar: No. 9 of 25, 0817154.
05:12 - Customised Transporters.
07:22 - Transporters under construction.
07:35 - More customised Transporters.
08:35 - Outro.

Please check out my other YouTube videos and visit my website, dsgb.net for information on Brian May's guitars and musical equipment and all my Brian May related guitar and amplifier projects. Build guitars, modify guitars, collect guitars, play guitars, Doug Short Guitar Blog.

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