“I have none of that high-speed technical skill of a Steve Vai or a Joe Satriani. What I have is a connection between the mind and the fingers”: How Brian May plays off instinct – and how he and Freddie Mercury battled over a Queen classic
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Brian May was voted the greatest guitarist of all time in a 2023 readers’ poll by Total Guitar magazine – but the Queen legend has conceded that Steve Vai and Joe Satriani are more technically accomplished players.
Speaking to MOJO magazine in 2017, May discussed his instinctive approach to playing guitar.
“I think a huge amount of a guitarist’s sound is in the fingers and in the body and in the mind as well in the way it’s played,” he commented. “You own a guitar, play it, and it becomes a part of you more and more as time goes on.
“I’ve picked up other people’s guitars and they go, ‘Oh, it seems to be in your fingers, it’s not actually in the guitar.’ I guess it’s a mixture.
“The sound that people mainly know me for is a guitar that sustains, and something happens to you when you hold a guitar like that in your hands.
“I always used to wonder about that when I was very first starting off. I remember people used to sing and play at the same time, the same notes, and I thought: I wonder how that happens? And it happens through doing it for a lifetime.
May admitted: “I have none of that high-speed, high technical skill of a Steve Vai or a Joe Satriani.”
But he added: “What I have is a connection between the mind and the fingers, which just serves me in a particular way. I find that I can connect what’s in my head through the fingers to what’s coming out, and it’s quite a smooth connection.
“You get to the point where you can almost turn off any kind of thinking process and you just allow what’s in your head to go through your fingers.”
In the same interview, May also recalled how he and singer Freddie Mercury fought each other during the mixing of the classic Queen anthem We Are The Champions – but in an unexpected way.
He told MOJO: “I remember it very clearly – mixing We Are The Champions with Freddie.
“On that song, the last couple of choruses have guitar going through them. Now, we were very wary of that, because we liked order in our music. But the guitar in that case was kind of competing with Freddie’s vocal.
“In those days it was all manual mixing and we both had our fingers in that mix. And strangely enough, Freddie had his hand on my guitar and I had my hand on his vocals.
“And he’s pushing up the guitar more and more and I’m going, ‘Freddie, are you not overdoing it?’
“And he says, ‘No, the guitar is fighting with the vocal here and that’s the way it should be.’”
May also said in that interview how he valued physical product in the age of streaming.
“I do like to see bits of creative work,” he said. “I want to hold it in my hand. It’s still a good feeling.
“That’s why I like the physical CD or the vinyl. To hold the CD in my hand is a great feeling, because the rest of it is a bit nebulous.”
And he spoke of the value of art over commerce.
“The fulfilment isn’t in watching its chart performance or sales,” he insisted. “The fulfilment is in knowing that it’s done to the best of your ability – it’s fulfilled a dream, and it’s become what you dreamed it could be.
“It’s the creation of those things, and you know that no one else has done it, and nobody else could have done it quite in the way you’ve done it.”