A personal peccadillo, the Spectrum. One of my friends, a fine player, used to get some great stuff out of one of these when they were first around in the late 80’s, but I was too busy, snobbishly turning my nose up at anything but Tom Anderson.
Many years later, I was reflecting and wondered if I could find one of these. A few years further on, I have this set including a one-off sparkle/pearloid variant made for a trade show. As far as I can tell, it is the only complete set of rosewood-fingerboard Spectrums in the world. (I’m not quite insane enough to to start over and build another collection of maple fingerboards too. But having assembled this group, if and when I sell these, it will be as a piece to another serious collector or not at all.
They were offered in turquoise green, magenta pink, fluorescent orange, black, metallic dark blue and ‘desert sand’ – a pale beige finish with black hairline cracking. All colours were offered with both rosewood and maple fingerboards, and as you can see all of mine are rosewood, so I wouldn’t mind finding one or two with maple boards too. I’m also in the market for several original cases, preferably the shaped ones though rectangular ones would be ok too.
The three pickups are stacked Jackson single-coil humbuckers with good output and tightly-focused magnetic fields, so they’re fairly bright. The tone circuit has a switchable active option, giving volume boost and onboard sweepable tone boost rather like a wah pedal. Great for big hair solos.
The earliest of these have jackson-branded Floyd Rose trems (adjustable from behind), no back rout for bending up and no scalloping around the neck plate on the rear to give better access to high notes. The more common later models have a Jackson-licensed trem unit (adjustable from the top), trem routs for upward bends and scalloping around the neck plate to aid access to the upper frets. To my knowledge, this is the only way of dating them as the serial numbers on the neck plates are not sequential.
The Charvel Spectrum follows on from the rare Charvel Model 8, which looks identical except for the earlier US Charvel headstock logo (see second last and last pix, sadly neither one of mine), whereas Spectrums all have the ‘toothpaste’ logo. Jeff beck played a custom Jackson around the time of which acted as the prototype for the Model 8 and subsequently the Spectrum (the last pic shows him with it on the cover of a contemporary magazine. The video for ‘Ambitious’ featuring the prototype Model 8 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbpQf22c494).
Made in Japan they might be, buy these are great guitars, easy to play, lots of great sounds and naturally resonant. They look cool and come in lots of great colours.
I’ve just bought a cheap Chord stand for them on eBay, so I’ve added a pic of them in the stand to the gallery. Awesome…
I am looking for my first guitar ever which my dad gave to me when I was 14 (1991) It is the Charvel Spectrum Desert Crackle. A couple years later I lost it in a bet with my best friend that he couldn’t swim 3 laps in a pool without coming up for air. I guess he really wanted that fkg guitar b/c he did it (lesson learned) . Anyways, he was in love w/ this red-head at our school named Kristin. And so, on THIS particular Spectrum which I am now looking for in 2026, behind the backplate and underneath the springs is written the name “Kristin” . Would love to find this guitar again . I imagine it could possibly be somewhere on the East Coast in the USA probably b/n Virginia (where we lived) and Pennsylvania (where he moved the following year (for another girl).
Thanks for your post, nice story. Checked mine just in case it was thus marked but no. Good luck with your search.