
The riffs, the fills, the tones. What's not to love?
Intermediate
Beginner
- Understand how to craft melodic licks in the style of Brent Mason, Pete Anderson, and others.
- Create flowing open-string licks.
- Learn how to combine blues with bluegrass.
Mainstream country music in the '90s was a guitar-lover's dream. Nearly every tune on the radio was full of tasty fills and ripping—but short—solos. The most prominent session player during this time was Brent Mason, whose car primer gray Tele became as iconic as the parts he crafted.
In this lesson, we will take inspiration from a few of the classic licks from the era and twist them around to make new ideas to add to your arsenal. We will cover double-stop licks, open-string lines, bending licks, and chromatic lines. Phrasing and timing is important and I will breakdown the key components to why they work and what chord to use them over. We will be using hybrid picking with all of examples.
Since we are working specifically in the '90s country vein, I picked four tunes with lots of guitar work and rather long solo sections.Vince Gill - Liza Jane
It's always great to learn exactly what the player did on the recording. Signature licks are what define the song and are important, especially if you're playing the tune live. But what happens if the tune is extended, or you are the only lead player that has to cover more territory and time? Some of these tunes have a long ending that vamp and fade out on the recording. What do you do then? You can always improvise a solo. These examples are a great launching pad for attacking those vamps.
Ex. 1 is a great way to kick off the beginning of the solo to "Liza Jane." It starts with an A7 arpeggio (A–C#–E–G) before chromatically approaching our comfortable blues box pattern. This lick ends in a very "Vince Gill" way with the unison bends and landing on a double-stop. Strive for the silky smoothness of Vince's phrasing.
Ex. 1
Ex. 2 covers the C and D chords in the solo section. Using bluegrass ideas over both chords gives you a cool open-position lick for the C chord. Make sure to bend down on the D# note. Over the D chord we do an oblique bend ending the phrase on the b7, a very hip Vince-ism.
Ex. 2
Alan Jackson - Chattahoochee (Official Music Video)
The intro to "Chattahoochee" is an all-time crowd pleaser, so make sure you get that under your fingers. Brent Mason's licks on this song are iconic and, in some ways, have become cliches—but in a good way. Ex. 3 is over the C chord and is a great way to work down the neck using double-stops.
Ex. 3
There's a very cool II-V progression on the back half that fits perfectly with Ex. 4. Notice how I keep all the notes ringing through the first measure before adding a "dead" note and an element of chicken pickin'. Don't forget to really pluck that Bb on the 3rd string before resolving to the G.
Ex. 4
Dwight Yoakam - Fast As You (Video)
Pete Anderson was another twang king that made waves in the '90s. During this time, he was the one behind nearly all the snappy riffs on Dwight Yoakam's albums. Ex. 5 has a B-Bender sound to it and should be given special attention. Notice how the second G on the 2nd string is only bent up a half-step. This is a simple and effective way to jam on the I chord in "Fast As You."
Ex. 5
Next up we use a few open strings for a bluesy lick (Ex. 6). I can totally hear a bit of SRV in this one. Plus, the cool rake at the end is a signature Pete Anderson move.
Ex. 6
Joe Diffie - Pickup Man (Official Music Video)
Ex. 7 uses a motif from the intro lick of Joe Diffie's "Pickup Man" and twists it around a bit. It's a nice way to reference the lick while using an open-string concept. Generally speaking, this riff uses G Mixolydian (G–A–B–C–D–E–F) along with a b3 (Bb). What a great way to combine blues with bluegrass.
Ex. 7
Naturally, we can move this open-string idea to a different part of the neck. In Ex. 8, I keep the same tonality, but move it up to 10th position. This frees me up to reach for this idea in another place on the neck, which is invaluable when improvising.
Ex. 8
The '90s provided us with so much great playing and ideas on how to approach country guitar. The high-energy playing combined so many great elements and techniques into unforgettable songs. My hope is that these examples will inspire you to dig deeper into the tunes and the players that define this style.
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Andy’s axe!
The Police guitarist’s go-to guitar is the source of a few mysteries, so let’s crack the code.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. In this column, we’ll take a closer look at the wiring of Andy Summers’ famous Telecaster, as well as some of the many mysteries of this guitar that remain unsolved today.
Best known as the guitarist from the Police, Summers was born and raised in England. He picked up the guitar at a young age, and moved to London when he was 19, aspiring to become a professional musician. Eventually, he played with some legendary bandleaders, including Eric Burdon and Jimi Hendrix. Summers studied classical guitar and composition in Los Angeles at California State University, Northridge, graduating in 1972. After moving back to London, he played with Joan Armatrading, Jon Lord, Mike Oldfield, and many more before meeting Gordon Sumner (aka Sting) and Stewart Copeland and joining the Police in 1977. The rest, as they say, is history.
The guitar Summers is most associated with—and which you can hear on a lot of the band’s hit records—is a well-worn and heavily modified sunburst Fender Telecaster. Let’s dive into what makes it so unique.
The story goes that before returning to the U.K. from Los Angeles, Summers bought this Telecaster from one of his guitar students for $200 (approximately $1,420 today). It was already highly modified, and Summers instantly fell in love with it. Modifications included a brass nut and brass bridge plate with six individual brass saddles. The bridge pickup was installed directly into the body and there is a humbucker in the neck position, plus it had a phase switch on the bridge pickup and an additional third pot and switch controlling its active boost circuitry. The only mod Summers did on the guitar after receiving it was installing replacement Schaller tuners.
Summers has stated that the guitar is from 1961, although, because of the double binding on the body, it’s quite possibly a sunburst Telecaster Custom from 1963. The serial number on the neck heel indicates 1961, suggesting Fender may have used pre-produced necks from an earlier batch for the first run of Telecaster Customs in 1963. Or maybe it was a custom order from someone who wanted double binding in 1961? Dennis Galuszka from the Fender Custom Shop was the lucky guy who had the pleasure of taking the original instrument apart to closely study it while collecting info for the Tribute series. In September 2024, he told Guitar World: “If I had to guess, it looks like the neck came off a ’50s Tele because it actually had a little white blonde paint—like they used on ’50s Teles—left on the butt. But the neck pocket had no date written or stamped on it, which was weird. And the body has been routed out so much under the pickguard that all traces of a date are long gone.” There are no records at the Fender factory that can shed any more light on this, so it will remain a mystery—but not the only one.
Putting a neck humbucker on a Telecaster was nothing too special at this time; same goes for the phase switch. But while brass hardware had become a popular mod to many guitars by the mid-to-late ’70s, it wasn’t something that was common on Telecasters (or on Fenders in general), making the brass nut and bridge plate unusual.
Another mystery is the active booster circuitry inside this guitar. When the Fender Custom Shop released the Masterbuilt Andy Summers Tribute Telecaster in the mid 2000s, it was equipped with the mid-boost circuit from the Eric Clapton Strat. This circuit first debuted in 1983 in the Fender Elite Stratocaster, 10 years after Summers received this Telecaster. So the circuit used in Summers’ Telecaster must have been a different one. Keeping the timeline in mind, it’s likely that it was one of the many treble-boost circuits from this era—maybe something like the Dallas Rangemaster, EHX LPB-1, or something similar with a single-pot boost control. Or maybe it came from a cannibalized stompbox or was a home-brewed device ... again, this will remain a mystery. My personal guess is that the original circuit in the guitar stopped working after 1983, and one of the guitar techs had to replace it. Maybe Summers was not interested in those details, and as long as there was a boost available, he didn’t care what was going on under the hood.
Belt-buckle rash? A bit.
Photo courtesy of Ten-Guitars (https://ten-guitars.de)
Another mystery is the identity of the student who he purchased the guitar from. Summers has never shared their name, and we don’t know who modded it. Interestingly, in all those years, no one ever spoke up to earn the credits for this modding work. This alone fuels speculation as to who really did all these mods.
Now, let’s take a look what features this guitar has:
• 2-piece alder body, white double binding, 3-tone sunburst finish
• Quarter-sawn maple neck, C profile, 21 vintage frets, 7 1/4" fretboard radius, brass nut
• Scale length 25 1/2", width at nut 1.650"
• Brass bridge plate with six individual brass saddles
• Schaller M6 tuning machines
• Two butterfly string trees
• Rectangular jack plate held by only two of four screws
• 3-ply mint green pickguard with ’59 PAF humbucker in the neck position and ’60s Telecaster single-coil pickup directly mounted into the body
• Standard Telecaster 3-way pickup selector switch with modern wiring: bridge/bridge + neck in parallel/neck
• 250k master audio volume, 250k master audio tone controls
• Mini-toggle phase switch for the bridge pickup on the control plate
• Extensive routing on the back housing the active boost circuitry, 9V battery, and the additional third pot for controlling the amount of boost, all covered with a homemade backplate out of 3-ply black pickguard material
In the next installment of this column, we will break it down piece by piece, talk about the wiring, and how you can build your own Andy Summers tribute Telecaster, so stay tuned.
Until then ... keep on modding!
Tsakalis AudioWorks Phonkify X and Mothership Tube Overdrive + Preamp Demos | NAMM 2025
The latest iteration of Tsakalis' expansive envelope filter is a pure funk machine. All the classic '70s-era sounds are packed in there, but with three separate filters, you can get so much more out of it. Both the octave and filter are switchable, and with effect order switching you can really push the limits of out-of-this-world wah sounds. It will be available in March for $229.
EHX always brings some fresh goodies to NAMM and this year they showed us a trio of tone twisters. The most impressive unit had to be the POG3 that builds off their stupendous previous iterations and put lightning-fast tracking and perfect polyphony over four octaves with smoother tone and performance than ever before. It has six voices including DRY, -2, -1, +5th, +1, & +2, you can mix each with individual sliders and create enveloping stereo effects with dedicated pan knobs and selectable LEFT/RIGHT/DIRECT outputs. The effects section has been expanded to offer envelope control and adjustable Q for the new multi-mode FILTER, enhanced DETUNE section with SPREAD, and individual DRY effect selection, plus the famous ATTACK slider for subtle or dramatic swell effects. It also includes expression effects like Freeze, Glissando, Volume, Filter, X-Fade, and Warp.