No Picks or Fingertips: The Unorthodox Tool Brian May Uses To Shred on the Guitar

If you are a guitar player, then you know you generally have three options for a playing tool: a guitar pick, fingerpicks, or just your fingers. Now, those are the most traditional methods, but every once in a while, some guitar players utilize some more non-traditional methods. Non-traditional methods, including sliced up credit cards, carved wood chips, or really anything that mimics the general form and function of a guitar pick. Nevertheless, one individual who doesn’t use a traditional method to play guitar is Queen‘s virtuoso lead guitarist, Brian May.

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Very rarely do we hear of professional guitar players not using something other than a pick to play guitar. Furthermore, very rarely do we hear of rock ‘n’ roll electric guitar players merely using their fingers to play. Well, for a very particular reason, Brian May doesn’t use either of those things. Rather, he uses a coin, specifically a United Kingdom sixpence coin.

Why Brian May Traded in a Pick for a Coin

Crafting a relationship with any instrument is an intricate practice. Guitars, in particular, are not a one-size-fits-all instrument. Instead, preferences have to be discovered and tactics have to be developed, and as stated previously, the most notable preference in May’s guitar playing is the tool he uses to play it.

In an interview with Radio X, May stated, “I found when I was learning that I was using soft picks to begin with, and I gradually liked them harder and harder because I liked to feel what was happening at the string in my fingers. Eventually, I thought, ‘well, I don’t want it to bend at all, I want it to be completely rigid.”

Through that discovery, May decided to try out a sixpence coin. Recalling how the discovery happened, May divulged, “I just picked up a sixpence and it worked for me, it just fit in my hand nicely. It also has a bonus because if you turn it sideways, at an angle to the strings, you get those serrated edges [which provide] a sort of articulated sound … sort of like having consonants in your speech.”

So, per Brian May’s comments, it seems a sixpence coin has been the middleman between his fingers and the guitar strings for quite some time. A middleman we’ve heard on all of Queen’s greatest hits, and the middleman we’ve heard on iconic solos such as “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Killer Queen”, “Tie Your Mother Down,” and “I Want It All”.

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