Play like Brian May

Brian May's guitar sings. With Queen he built solos like melodies, layered guitars into rich harmonies and bent notes the way a vocalist reaches for them, as you can hear in "Bohemian Rhapsody" or "Killer Queen". This chapter teaches you the Brian May style in four lessons, mostly in D major.

You start with melodic harmony lines: a melody on the B string and a harmony a diatonic third above on the high e, played alone and then together as double-stops. Trills and legato give you smooth, shimmering trills and three-note-per-string runs with few pick strokes. Vocal-like bends teach whole-step and half-step bends that arrive on the beat and release slowly, always to a note in the scale. Finally, arpeggio melodies show how to build a line from the chord tones of a G, Em, C, D progression, so the harmony stays clear even without a band.

Every exercise plays as tab in your browser with a click and a tempo ladder, and each lesson ends with a checkpoint. The tone tips approximate May's often-described treble booster into an AC30-style amp with a warm, mid-heavy overdrive.