"I'm not really a purist - the standard Telecaster thing is not really my thing. A lot of guys who play Telecasters, their sound is very bright and twangy, which just isn't really for me. So people associate me with it, but I don't have the cowboy hat to go with it! (ultimate- guitar.com - Guitar.com)
"My Telecaster was more of a hybrid, because somebody had replaced the neck pickup and put a Gibson humbucker in there, but had also messed around with adding a drive switch into it, powered by a 9V battery – this was a period when people took their guitars and did all that sort of stuff to them!
"That guitar just had an incredible tone, and then it had what was effectively an in-built fuzzbox, which you could then switch on for solos.
"It had something that was almost indefinable – what makes a guitar great? We could be here all day trying to analyze and quantify it, but that one had something magical – that's why I kept going with it for so long!
"The Telecaster is a wonderful instrument, but in the history of the marvelous creations of Leo Fender... it was his first attempt!
"Of course, it was an amazing breakthrough, but the Stratocaster was the elegant, refined version of that – and it really is the greatest solid-body electric guitar ever made. There have been a million different variations on it of course, but really Leo got it right in 1954."
When they did the Telecaster, they came to me with a request to make it, and I said, 'Yeah, okay, great!' This whole idea about signature guitars hadn't really occurred to me back then.
"Usually I have that Telecaster hidden away, but I brought it with me to the studio for them and they took the whole thing apart! It was just... shocking to me!
"So they took it to pieces and measured it and photographed it and micro-metered it and tried to log every possible variance that they could find. When I got the first replica, man, I couldn't tell the difference – quite incredible... and scary, almost!"
