The Nashville session great’s signature Stories Collection Tele, with a Glaser Bender and three Seymour Duncans, now comes in gloss black for a limited run.
Brent Mason’s primer-grey ‘67 Telecaster is all over five decades of Nashville records, and Fender has now released his Stories Collection signature model in gloss black as a limited edition.
Mason’s session career covers well over 1,000 albums, with parts for Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Blake Shelton and Shania Twain among many others. Along the way he’s picked up a Grammy, 12 Academy of Country Music Guitarist of the Year awards and two CMA Musician of the Year awards, as well as a place in the Musicians Hall of Fame.
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The guitar behind most of that work turned up in a Nashville guitar shop in the early ’80s. A previous owner had already stripped the ‘67 Tele’s factory finish and coated it in grey auto primer, and Mason took the modifications further. He fitted new pickups, extra controls and a bender, turning it into one guitar that could handle whatever a session threw at him.
Fender’s Stories Collection version follows his changes closely. There’s a Seymour Duncan mini-humbucker in the neck, a Hot Stack in the middle and a Vintage Stack at the bridge, with the middle pickup getting its own volume knob and a push/pull on the tone control to bring it in or out. The Glaser Bender raises the B string when the guitar’s neck is pushed down against the strap, which gives Mason his pedal steel-style bends. Locking tuners and Dunlop locking strap buttons keep everything stable, and the late-’60s C neck is shaped to match his own guitar.
The standard model comes in a satin Primer Gray that mirrors the original. This limited run swaps that for gloss black and ships with a deluxe hardshell case, and it’s available now through Fender Music Australia.
The release lines up with Fender’s celebrations for 75 years of the Telecaster. Mason is one of the players featured in The Fender Telecaster: The One That Started It All, the 75-minute anniversary documentary now on Fender’s YouTube channel. His segment covers the Tele’s place in Nashville’s studio history and the sound he built his career on.
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