Brent Mason has enjoyed a long career as one of the best session musicians in the business – playing guitar on numerous records by major artists including Shania Twain, George Strait, Alan Jackson and Neil Diamond.
And one guitar in particular has defined that career – his beloved ’67 Fender Telecaster.
Painted with primer grey automotive paint and hot-rodded to his taste, the guitar has been slung over his shoulder since the ’80s.
When he acquired the Tele, Mason couldn’t afford more than one guitar.
And so – as he recalls to MusicRadar – he turned that Tele into a jack of all trades.
“If I had the money, I would have just gone and bought three new guitars,” he says. “I would have loved to have done that, but I probably never would have come up with the Tele setup if I’d done that.”
He explains how the guitar came into his possession while he was gigging in Nashville with local hero Don Kelley.
“When I first got it, it was unaltered – a standard ’67 Tele.
“Don Kelley and I played in a band together that headed up the Stagecoach Lounge Band for years.
“We visited a shop in East Nashville, which is no longer there, and there we saw two guitars hanging on the wall. I bought a white one, and Don bought a mustard-coloured one, which ended up being mine – the one that’s famous now!
“It was originally mustard-coloured, but someone put a coat of primer car paint on it, and I guess they were going to refinish it, but instead decided to trade it in for something else.
“And it had standard pickups. Well, who knows what pickups they had in it because it was a secondhand guitar.
“But I bought the white one, and Don bought the mustard one with the primer grey paint over it.
"We played a gig that night, and I said to Don, ‘Can I see that primer-covered one – the grey one?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, here.’
“I gave him my white one that I bought, and I said, ‘I kind of like this grey one better. Dang… I wish I’d have bought this one.’
“Don goes, ‘Good, we’ll just trade.’
“You know, Don would trade them every month anyway! He didn’t have a guitar for longer than a month before he traded it for something else, so that’s how I got it.
“Don claims that he bought a bass that day or something, and I bought the grey Tele, but no, that’s not right at all. He must have been drinking or something!”
Mason explains how he went about modifying the Tele.
“I played at that club, The Stagecoach, and I was broke, busted and poor,” he says. “I’d say, ‘I’d love to have a Strat, a Tele, and an ES-335.’ But I just couldn’t afford it, so I’d have to trade one for the other.
“So I said to [Nashville luthier] Joe Glaser, ‘Can I put a middle pickup in this guitar, and can you give me some ideas for wiring?’
“And we came up with this idea where I could just add an extra volume pot in there, in the middle between the EQ and the volume, which was another volume to bleed into the middle pickup.”
Sometimes the work itself inspires a mod, and that was the case with Mason’s Tele. Booked to work with Emory Gordy Jr and his wife, Patty Loveless, Mason was asked for some B-Bender licks. Of course, he did not actually have one but he duly obliged anyway – a good session pro gets the job done. All that bending, however, killed his fingers. It was time to reach out to Glaser and have the real thing installed.
Mason’s three-pickup configuration – and its wiring – is the big talking point. It covers all the tones he needs and then some.
“I had Seymour Duncan pickups, but I’ve switched them out a couple of times to vintage stacks, mini-humbuckers, and Gibson Baby Humbuckers,” he says Mason.
People would tell me, ‘That guitar freakin’ kicks, man! I love that thing. It’s insane how good that thing sounds
“But Joe put them in there with that extra volume knob, and the pull knob to split the coil on the middle pickup, which, as it turns out, I didn’t use that much.
“So when the guitar came back to me, I thought, ‘Well, now I have a Strat, a Les Paul, and a regular Tele all in one.’”
“And at that point, people would tell me, ‘That guitar freakin’ kicks, man! I love that thing. It’s insane how good that thing sounds.’”
That was not the end of the modding. The wiring was later updated so that the push-pull function on the tone control toggled the middle pickup on and off, a feature Fender recreated in 2020 when it added Mason's modded Tele to its Stories Collection and released a Custom Shop replica of the Tele, masterbuilt by Kyle McMillin.
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