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Guitar Songs, Tabs & Lessons

Queen

38 guitar songs · Tabs, Lessons & Tone Guide Rock

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Bohemian Rhapsody - Guitar Tab Guitar Tab

Bohemian Rhapsody - Guitar Tab

YouTube Stats: 2.7M · 47K

Mr. Tabs Guitar Tab
You Don't Fool Me - Guitar Tab Guitar Tab

You Don't Fool Me - Guitar Tab

YouTube Stats: 1.2K · 89

StephLeGratteux Guitar Tab
Love of My Life - Guitar Lesson Guitar Lesson

Love of My Life - Guitar Lesson

YouTube Stats: 1.6M · 19K

GuitarLessons365SongLessons Guitar Lesson
Bohemian Rhapsody - Guitar Cover Guitar Cover

Bohemian Rhapsody - Guitar Cover

YouTube Stats: 5.6M · 128K

Kfir Ochaion Guitar Cover

Band Overview

History and Guitar Legacy

Queen formed in London in 1970 with Brian May establishing himself as one of rock's most distinctive and influential guitarists. May built his own guitar from scratch and pioneered multi-layered guitar orchestrations with a tone recognizable within two notes. His innovative approach to guitar arrangement and composition has made Queen's catalog essential study for understanding rock guitar's possibilities and creative potential.

Playing Style and Techniques

Brian May's technique blends rock, classical, and vocal phrasing into a unique voice. He uses a sixpence coin instead of a standard pick, creating a rounder, more textured attack. His wide, singing vibrato and precise, expressive bends are signature elements. May excels at stacking harmonized guitar lines to create orchestral textures, layering multiple tracks that function as both composition and improvisation on songs like Bohemian Rhapsody.

Why Guitarists Study Queen

Queen's catalog demonstrates exceptional versatility: crunchy riffs, delicate fingerpicked arpeggios, operatic harmony arrangements, blazing pentatonic runs, and melodic solos. Learning Brian May's style sharpens your phrasing, ear for harmony, and ability to make a guitar sing. The band offers a masterclass in genre exploration, blending rock, opera, and metal influences into cohesive compositions that showcase guitar's expressive range.

Difficulty and Learning Path

Queen songs span wide difficulty ranges. Intermediate players can tackle Another One Bites the Dust and I Want to Break Free. Advanced players face challenges in Bohemian Rhapsody's solo and Tie Your Mother Down's riffing, requiring accurate bending, fast legato, and confident vibrato. Stone Cold Crazy demands proto-Thrash Metal techniques: tight aggressive downpicking and palm muting at speed. This variety ensures continuous challenge across all skill levels.

What Makes Queen Essential for Guitar Players

  • Brian May uses a sixpence coin as a pick, which produces a brighter, more textured attack than a standard plectrum. Try using a coin or a thick, rigid pick to approximate his tone, you'll notice it adds a distinctive snap and harmonic overtone to each note.
  • Multi-layered guitar harmonies are a Queen signature. Songs like 'Killer Queen' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody' feature multiple guitar tracks harmonized in thirds and sixths. Learning these parts individually will develop your understanding of harmony and voice leading on the fretboard.
  • May's vibrato is one of the most expressive in rock, wide, controlled, and almost vocal in quality. He typically uses finger vibrato rather than wrist vibrato, bending the string parallel to the fret. Practicing this slow, deliberate vibrato on sustained bends will level up your soloing dramatically.
  • 'Stone Cold Crazy' is one of the earliest examples of speed metal riffing, requiring tight palm-muted downpicking at a relentless tempo. It's an excellent workout for building right-hand stamina and precision, similar to what you'd need for early Metallica.
  • Brian May frequently employs a technique where he toggles his pickup selector and uses his volume/tone controls mid-performance to shift between rhythm crunch, lead sustain, and cleaner tones, all without pedals. Learning to use your guitar's controls actively during a song is a skill Queen's catalog practically demands.

Did You Know?

Brian May and his father built the 'Red Special' guitar from scratch in the early 1960s using wood from an old fireplace mantelpiece, motorcycle valve springs for the tremolo, and hand-wound pickups. It remains his primary instrument to this day, over 50 years of professional use on one homemade guitar.

The famous guitar solo in 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was recorded through a wall of Vox AC30 amplifiers, with May layering multiple takes to create a choir-like effect. The solo itself uses the pentatonic scale almost exclusively but sounds orchestral because of the arrangement.

Queen's 'We Will Rock You' features no guitar until the solo section, the stomp-stomp-clap was recorded with the entire band stamping on wooden boards. When May's guitar finally enters, it's one of the most dramatic gear-shift moments in rock.

'Tie Your Mother Down' was written by Brian May while studying for his astrophysics PhD. The main riff is in open D tuning and features a grinding, aggressive tone that's one of the heaviest sounds in Queen's catalog.

Brian May almost never uses effects pedals. His entire signal chain is essentially guitar into a treble booster into Vox AC30 amps. The Dallas Rangemaster-style treble booster is critical, it pushes the amp into natural overdrive while keeping the top end cutting and articulate.

The 'guitar orchestras' on tracks like 'Brighton Rock' were created by May recording up to a dozen guitar parts, each harmonized like an orchestral section. He mapped out these arrangements on paper before recording, treating the guitar like a compositional instrument rather than just a riff machine.

On 'Another One Bites the Dust,' the iconic bass line gets all the attention, but Brian May's choppy, funk-influenced rhythm guitar part is a great study in muted strumming technique and rhythmic precision, very different from his usual style.

Essential Albums for Guitarists

A Night at the Opera album cover
A Night at the Opera 1975

This is the album with 'Bohemian Rhapsody' and 'Love of My Life,' showcasing Brian May's full range from delicate arpeggiated classical passages to blazing rock solos. The guitar orchestrations here are some of the most ambitious in rock history. Essential for learning phrasing, multi-voice harmony, and dynamic control.

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News of the World album cover
News of the World 1977

Home to 'We Will Rock You' and the underrated shred of 'It's Late,' this album features some of May's most aggressive and technically demanding playing. The guitar work ranges from arena-rock power chords to intricate solo sections full of fast legato runs and precise bending. Great for intermediate-to-advanced players looking to push their technique.

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Sheer Heart Attack album cover
Sheer Heart Attack 1974

Features 'Killer Queen' and 'Stone Cold Crazy', two completely different guitar challenges. 'Killer Queen' teaches you sophisticated chord voicings and tasteful layered arrangement, while 'Stone Cold Crazy' is a palm-muting speed workout that basically invented thrash riffing. 'Brighton Rock' also contains one of the greatest live guitar solo showcases of the 1970s.

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The Game album cover
The Game 1980

Contains 'Another One Bites the Dust' and some of May's most refined rhythm guitar work. The album leans into tighter, more disciplined playing with funk and pop influences. It's excellent for working on your rhythm precision, clean tone control, and learning how to serve a song without overplaying.

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The Miracle album cover
The Miracle 1989

'I Want It All' features one of Queen's most powerful riffs and an arena-sized solo that's a benchmark for melodic rock lead playing. The album also contains sophisticated chord progressions and layered guitar textures that show May adapting his style to late-'80s production while keeping his signature tone intact.

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Tone & Gear

Guitar

The 'Red Special', a one-of-a-kind guitar Brian May built with his father Harold in the 1960s from a 19th-century fireplace mantelpiece (the neck) and oak (the body). It has a 24-fret mahogany neck, a flat-radius ebony fingerboard, and a custom tremolo system using motorcycle valve springs for a smooth, subtle vibrato. The guitar features three Burns Tri-Sonic single-coil pickups, each with individual on/off and phase-reversal switches, giving May access to a huge range of tonal combinations, including out-of-phase sounds that create that distinctive nasal, vocal quality heard throughout Queen's catalog. Official Brian May Guitars replicas are available and get very close to the original.

Amp

Vox AC30 amplifiers, Brian May has used walls of AC30s throughout his career, typically running them at full volume for natural tube breakup and compression. The AC30's Top Boost channel provides that chimey, harmonically rich overdrive that's central to the Queen sound. In the studio, May would often mic multiple AC30s to capture a fuller, more three-dimensional tone. The key is the amp is driven hard from the front end by a treble booster, not from pedal-based distortion.

Pickups

Three Burns Tri-Sonic single-coil pickups, wound to approximately 6-7k ohms, lower output than humbuckers, which keeps dynamics responsive and articulate. The critical feature is the phase-switching system: each pickup has its own on/off toggle and a phase-reversal switch, allowing combinations like bridge + middle out-of-phase for that thin, reedy 'Killer Queen' tone, or all three in phase for a fuller, fatter sound. The Tri-Sonics have a prominent midrange character that cuts through a mix without sounding harsh.

Effects & Chain

Brian May's rig is famously minimal. The most critical component is a Dallas Rangemaster-style treble booster (he's used various versions including the Greg Fryer-built 'Deacy Booster' and modern Pete Cornish units) placed before the AC30s. This boosts upper frequencies and slams the amp's front end into rich, singing overdrive. Beyond that, he occasionally uses a simple delay (Echoplex-style tape echo or digital delay for live work) and the Deacy Amp, a tiny homemade amplifier built by John Deacon from salvaged electronics, which was used as a recording tool to create the layered 'guitar orchestra' sound on studio albums. No wah, no modulation, no fuzz pedals, May's tone comes from fingers, coin, treble booster, and cranked AC30s.

Recommended Gear

Vox AC30
Amp

Vox AC30

Brian May stacks Vox AC30s cranked to full volume, letting natural tube breakup and the Top Boost channel create the chimey, harmonically rich overdrive that defines Queen's sound. Driven hard by a treble booster rather than pedal distortion, these amps deliver the compressed, singing tone central to May's signature style.

Boss DD-3 Digital Delay
Pedal

Boss DD-3 Digital Delay

May uses digital delay as a live equivalent to the tape echo (Echoplex) he favored in the studio, adding subtle spatial depth to his solos without cluttering his famously minimal effects chain. The DD-3 provides clean, repeating echoes that complement his vocal-like tone without compromising the directness of his treble booster-driven AC30 sound.

How to Practice Queen on GuitarZone

Every Queen song page on GuitarZone includes a built-in Practice Toolbar. No app to download, no account needed. Open any song, then use the toolbar to slow the video to 0.5× speed, set an A/B loop around the exact riff you're working on, and jump between song sections instantly.

The toolbar appears automatically on every guitar tab, lesson, and cover page. Pick a song below, hit play, and start practicing at your own pace.

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