I have a very old, cheap Hairfred [sic] which makes that buzzy sound that's on "Jealousy" and "White Queen". I've never seen another one like it. I made it sound like a sitar by taking off the original bridge and putting a hardwood bridge on. I chiseled away at it until it was flat and stuck little piece of fretwire material underneath. The strings just very gently lay on the fretwire, and it makes that sitar-like sound.
The sitar sound on White Queen is actually just my old buzzy acoustic guitar. I always keep the strings and bridge loose enough to stay buzzy - so it's easy for me to play it more or less the same way I play the electric highly amplified guitar. They both sing if you get it right.
White Queen - back in time again - I wrote this at College, where I led a relatively sheltered life, even though the University on the whole was a pretty rampant pace! I had been reading The White Goddess by Robert Graves, which explored the role of the idealised Virgin/Mother/Queen/ figure in art through history, and the name for our group, decided just around that time, fitted in with this perfectly - which was one of the reasons I was convinced to go with the name. The personal side is bound up with a girl (of course!) whom I saw every day at College, and was to me the ultimate goddess. It's incredible in retrospect, but because I held her in such awe, in three years I never had the courage to speak to tell her, or even speak to her. The song found its way on to tape much later, on our second album.
I don't think many people have figured out that I do this “pre-bending” thing ... and I'm not aware of anyone doing it ... with the possible exception of Jeff Beck ... but he tends to achieve the same kind of thing but mainly with the whammy bar ... his Where Were You? must be the most incredibly piece of electric guitar recorded, ever. But as for me ... well, I also have to tell you I don't always get it right. It depends on a lot of things. As with any playing, but especially string bending, if you can't hear clearly what you are doing, you are sunk. So good monitoring is a vital requirement. We are fortunate in having a superb Monitor engineer, but of course there are still times when the acoustics of a hall or arena conspire to blur things, enough to make judgement of bends difficult. Secondly, it depends on knowing your instrument very well ... mine has been with me so long, that it is almost a part of me. I always use the same strings, and the guitar always gives me what I ask of it. So the “memory”, of how far a given bend will need to go to produce a bent note of a certain pitch, is at least partly in the muscles of the fingers. Its [sic] also, I think, updated by the few bends which you have just played, with “bio-feedback” allowing you to correct the pitch as you go along. But in the end, I think it has to be quite largely instinct. On a good day, everything is sweet and it's impossible to go wrong. On a bad day when you're not hearing stuff well, I find you can come off feeling that almost nothing was quite right!!! SO, like most things, you prepare, you plan, you think, you do everything to give yourself the best chance, but in the end, it's “In the Lap of the Gods” - and it helps to realise this .... “admitting powerlessness” is a powerful technique at the very least, and can become a whole way of life. I subscribe to that belief - and try to act on it when I can. By the way, thinking about it, my “pre-bends” go back a long way .... there are some (mutitracked!) on The Night Comes Down on the first Queen album ... and White Queen on Queen II ... and they are an essential part of the solo in Killer Queen. But Last Horizon has the hardest ones to pull off live!!