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The Deacy Amp is an amplifier created by and named after Queen bassist John Deacon and used by guitarist Brian May. For the British rock band of the same name, see Amplifier (band). ...
Queen are an English rock band formed in 1970 in London by guitarist Brian May, singer Freddie Mercury and drummer Roger Taylor, with bassist John Deacon joining the following year. ...
Deon Rexroat of Anberlin. ...
For the motorcyclist, see John Deacon (motorcyclist). ...
For the UK magazine, see Guitarist (magazine). ...
For the Australian film composer, see Brian May (composer). ...
It was created in the early 1970s using a piecemeal amplifier found in a skip by Deacon and a treble booster pedal, constructed by May. Also used was an amplifier circuit board stationed into a Hi-Fi speaker cabinet, powered by a 9-volt battery. The amp was used along with May's Red Special guitar and his treble booster. John literally found the circuit board as he was walking down the street one day in London - this occurred in early/mid 1971 at a time when he was first playing in "Queen" with Freddie Mercury, Roger Taylor and Brian May. Being a keen electronics experimenter (and was then studying for an Electronics Degree), John's attention was drawn to the wires that were dangling over the side of a builder's skip - the large skip was sitting on the side of the road filled with rubbish which was about to be taken away to the tip. The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, also called The Seventies. ...
Rubbish skip on skip-carrier lorry The word skip is used for various large open-topped containers, including the load-carrying container part of a dumper. ...
Popularized by legendary guitarists such as Brian May of Queen and Eric Clapton, treble booster pedals have been used to overdrive tube amplifiers, such as VOX AC30s, in order to create a cleanly-driven type of distortion. ...
High Fidelity is also the title of a book by Nick Hornby and a film directed by Stephen Frears, based upon Hornbys book. ...
A loudspeaker enclosure is a cabinet designed for mounting loudspeaker drive units. ...
9-Volt redirects here. ...
This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...
These wires were attached to a circuit board and John's curiosity led him to examine the board to see if he could salvage it and put it to some use. He initially thought that the circuit board might have come from a battery operated cassette player or radio, and after inspecting it decided it would do the job as a small practice amplifier for guitar (John played guitar as well as bass).
John coupled the newly found circuit board with a spare bookshelf speaker box that he had lying around - the circuit board was fixed inside the speaker box with two screws and the finished product featured only the most spartan of controls:
On the back panel of the speaker box was fitted a single jack socket to plug the guitar lead into - the amp's power was turned on by simply connecting the two battery clip leads (which came out from the back panel) to a large PP9 battery - and through most of its history the Deacy Amp has had no volume or tone controls whatsoever although John remembers that initially he rigged up a volume control which hung loose outside the speaker box - soon after he fixed the volume internally on full, having found that this sounded best - there were definitely no deluxe frills with this model!
With a standard guitar plugged in, John said the amp possessed a warm and pleasant (and partly distorted) sound but lacked brilliance or much definition - however a new way of using this little amplifier was about to be found that would change its sound and make it an invaluable part of Queen's recording armoury...
By some chance John brought his practice amplifier along to band rehearsal one day and showed it to Brian - immediately he said, Brian was interested in the amp's possibilities - and especially so when he heard how it behaved once he plugged in his innovative home made Red Special guitar and Treble Booster pedal.
These two changed the amp's sound dramatically, overdriving both the input and output stages and producing a richly distorted but defined and sustained sound which resembled such things as violins, cellos and even vocals. John commented that the rich saturated compressed type of distortion produced by the combination of Red Special guitar, Treble Booster and Deacy Amp was very unusual and different to the more typical harder sounding "sawtooth waveform" distortion common at the time in many guitar effects and amps.
He mentioned that the recording engineers that the band were working with particularly liked the way the amp behaved in the recording studio. Here the amp would produce a constant response, whereas the engineers found it more difficult to capture on tape the exciting and dynamic sound of Brian's Vox AC30 amps.
John's small amplifier became known as the "Deacy Amp", and featured regularly on Queen albums where Brian used it for his creative, highly original "Guitar Orchestration" multi-tracked pieces. These were painstakingly built up line by line (and even note by note on some of the more complex pieces such as "Good Company" from Night at the Opera). Although the Deacy Amp is a deceptively simple looking piece of equipment, the wide number of creative uses that Brian has managed to find for this little piece of rock history is nothing short of remarkable.
On occasions Brian's Vox AC30 was combined on tape with the Deacy Amp but usually on Queen records it was just the Deacy Amp alone used for the multi-tracked guitar orchestrations. Brian has described the way that the Deacy Amp's sounds sit and blend together when recorded as being "symphonic" compared to other amps used for this purpose, whereas when the AC30 was tried its combined sounds didn't have the same character and effect.
The tracks "Procession" and "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke" from the album "Queen II" (released in March 1974) saw the first recorded examples on a Queen album of the Deacy Amp.
Perhaps the best known example of the amp's use is "God Save The Queen" from 1975's "A Night At The Opera", whilst possibly the most unusual use was for all of the jazz band sounds on the song "Good Company" (trombones, clarinets and all!), from "A Night At The Opera".
The Legendary Deacy Amp continues to this day in good health and continues to occupy an important place in Brian May's recording studio.
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