Telecaster B-Bender Explained: How the Parsons/White StringBender Works

A B-Bender lets a guitarist raise the B string by a whole tone without touching it. The player tilts the guitar neck down against the strap, a lever inside or behind the body pulls on the string, and the note slides up in the way a pedal steel does. The device was built for the Telecaster in the late 1960s by Gene Parsons and Clarence White, and in our view it is still mostly a Telecaster story. This guide explains the mechanism, where it came from, how Fender and others have built it since, and what it asks of the player.

Quick Facts

How a B-Bender Works

The original patent describes the principle plainly. A rocker lever sits on the back of the guitar. One arm of it reaches the strap, and the other drives a second lever that is tied to the lower end of one string. The lever arm linked to the rocker is longer than the arm on the string side, so the string end moves less than the strap end. A spring holds the system against a stop, so with no force applied the string sits at its tuned pitch.

When the player pushes the neck down, the strap pulls on the rocker lever against the spring. The string tightens and its pitch rises. The patent says the lever ratios can give anything from roughly a half-tone to more than a tone and a half, and that the bend can happen before or after the string is plucked. A removable cover protects the mechanism, with only the strap-connected arm outside the guitar.

In practice the designs from Parsons are set up for a whole tone on the B string. Vintage Guitar’s 2004 profile of the device describes a small adjuster that sets the pitch the string reaches at the top of the bend. Premier Guitar’s 2008 survey describes the same job being done by a screw on the bass-side bout, adjustable with a pick. The two descriptions do not match in every detail, which is a reminder that the hardware changed between versions.

The important consequence is that the picking hand and fretting hand are free. A bend that would otherwise need a finger pushing the string sideways across the fret becomes a movement of the whole guitar.

Why the B String

Parsons and White tried more ambitious ideas first. According to Vintage Guitar, Parsons built an early multi-string version using parts from a Fender 800 pedal steel, and Guitar Player’s 2022 piece says White rejected an early pedal-operated version. The version that stuck raised only the B string. Vintage Guitar reports White’s reasoning: the B string lent itself to more combinations with notes he bent by hand on the G string. Guitar Player places the starting point in a 1967 session with Vern and Rex Gosdin, when White wanted a bend at higher positions and said he needed a third hand. A second Vintage Guitar article describes the same joke, with Parsons offering to push the strings behind the nut.

A whole-tone rise from B lands on C#. Held against a fretted or open string beside it, that gives the double-stop movements that pedal steel players use all the time. Premier Guitar’s 2008 survey calls B the most popular bender string, with G gaining ground. Players who want a second string under the strap can have both, and Parsons has also built E-benders, according to Vintage Guitar.

A Short History

The 1967 to 1970 Parsons/White device

White was a bluegrass flatpicking prodigy who moved into electric session work and then the Byrds. Parsons was a drummer and a machinist, and he had already modified banjos with Scruggs tuners. Vintage Guitar says White wanted something self-contained that did not change his hand position, and that the shoulder strap became the trigger because pushing the neck down pulled up on the strap button.

The first model went on the back of White’s 1954 Telecaster. Guitar Player describes a mechanism built from pedal steel parts, attached to the rear of the guitar and covered with a wooden frame and a Masonite board, which made the body noticeably deeper. Later versions fit into routings cut in the body instead. Sources differ on the guitar itself: Vintage Guitar calls it a 1954 Telecaster or Esquire-based instrument, and Guitar Player gives 1954, while Wikipedia gives 1956. We would treat 1954 as the better supported date, since two magazine sources agree on it. Our Clarence White profile covers the guitar and the rest of his rig.

The patent was filed on 30 October 1968 and lists Parsons and White, with one-third interest assigned to Ed Tickner, the Byrds’ manager. Google Patents gives the grant date as 19 May 1970, while the Wikipedia article gives 7 October 1970, so we use the patent database date.

Leo Fender and the CBS years

Vintage Guitar says Parsons and White showed the design to Leo Fender in 1968, when Fender was working as a consultant after CBS bought the company. Fender and George Fullerton liked it, and Fender built a prototype that could be mass-produced. Development stalled during the staff turnover of the CBS period. That is the version of events given in the magazine; we did not find a second source for the details of the meeting.

Parsons then licensed the design to Dave Evans, who built a Telecaster with a “sandwich” body and altered the Bender. Vintage Guitar says Albert Lee used an Evans version on some of his best-known solos. Wikipedia places Evans’s own production between 1969 and 1973. Parsons went on to make and install the device himself under the StringBender name; Vintage Guitar describes his Caspar, California shop producing the Classic design, with the design finalised in the mid-1970s, while Wikipedia dates his own production to 1973.

The Fender B-Bender Telecaster

Fender came back to the idea decades later. By the 2004 Vintage Guitar profile, the Fender Custom Shop had built a Clarence White model Telecaster with the Classic StringBender, reportedly about 200 of them, virtually by hand. The magazine says the factory then mass-produced the American Nashville B-Bender Telecaster in the mid-1990s, using a redesigned mechanism that Parsons developed with Meridian Green. Wikipedia gives 1996 as the start of Nashville B-Bender production; we have not confirmed that year from a maker’s page.

The redesign matters for the how-it-works question. Vintage Guitar and Premier Guitar both say the Parsons/Green design mounts the moving parts on a back plate, which makes assembly far easier than fitting the original Parsons/White unit into a hand-routed body. Premier Guitar adds that the Custom Shop’s limited-edition White model was costly to make consistently, which led to the Parsons/Green design.

Premier Guitar’s 2008 article states that Fender was no longer producing a Bender Telecaster at that time. Fender’s own site was unreachable for us when we checked on 16 October 2026, so we cannot tell you whether any Fender model currently carries a B-Bender. Check the maker’s catalogue before you plan around one.

Marty Stuart and “Clarence”

The prototype guitar survives. Guitar Player’s 2022 article names Marty Stuart as the owner of White’s original modified 1954 Telecaster. Vintage Guitar’s 2004 profile says Stuart bought it from White’s widow, Suzy, and that he has made changes of his own: he moved one of the Scruggs tuners from the fifth string to the sixth, and added a pedal that lowers a string by a half step (Vintage Guitar says the first string; Premier Guitar’s 2025 rig rundown describes a bender on the low E, so the sources differ). In our view that makes it a working instrument and not a museum piece. Our Clarence White guide says the guitar is still in Stuart’s hands and remains fully functional.

Compare the Main Bender Designs

What It Asks of the Player

A bender is not a vibrato arm. Vintage Guitar makes that distinction directly: a Bigsby-style vibrato moves every string together, while a StringBender lets one string rise while the rest stay put, or several move together. If you want the other approach, our Bigsby vibrato guide covers how those arms work and which guitars use them.

Technique is mostly about the strap. Premier Guitar’s survey says to let the strap carry the guitar so you do not apply neck pressure by accident, because an unintended bend throws open D and A chords out of tune. Tuning is a choice too. According to the same survey, some players tune a few cents sharp to leave room for the bend, while others tune the bender string a whole step up, which the article says makes the bend simpler to learn. Neither is a rule.

The B string also needs a bridge that lets the string reach the bender cleanly. Hipshot sells what it calls Bender Ready bridges for this purpose.

It also helps to separate the device from manual multi-string bending. Amos Garrett, whose playing is covered in our Amos Garrett guide, is quoted there as saying that the only person he heard doing that kind of bending before he started was using a mechanical B-bender, and that was Clarence White. Garrett’s own approach is the fretting-hand version.

Who Uses One

Guitar Player’s 2022 article names Albert Lee, Jimmy Page, Bernie Leadon and Marty Stuart among users. Our Albert Lee guide says both his Telecasters and his Music Man guitars have carried B-benders, and our Fender Brent Mason Telecaster article calls the B-bender “one of the best-kept secrets of the country session world.” For a modern Telecaster player who leans on the device, our Brad Paisley guide covers his use of it.

If you are still deciding whether a Telecaster is the right base guitar for any of this, our solid-body comparison sets the Tele beside its rivals.

Where the Idea Came From

The Parsons/White story is not the only account. Premier Guitar’s 2010 history by Wallace Marx Jr. traces a line back to a South Dakota-raised player named Sherwin Linton, who watched Carl Perkins reach behind the nut of his Gibson Byrdland to bend the B string in 1960 and later made benders from baby-crib rods. According to that article, Linton later showed a modified Jazzmaster he called a “Plever” to Clarence White in early 1965. The writer says the Perkins-to-Linton-to-White chain is hard to prove and rests largely on Linton’s own recollections from a phone interview. We have kept it as a lead and not as established history.

Frequently Asked Questions