As the yen climbed sharply in 19, from 238 per dollar to 168, the price of the Spectrum FX climbed as well. The comet that killed this tone tyrannosaur was financial. The equivalent modern guitar would be an Ibanez S5470 Prestige, which costs $1999. It’s such a brilliant tool for the purpose, and it sold for a reasonable price: $499 in 1985, which would be $1050 today. It can perform Vai-style bends without difficulty but it can also imitate Page’s Les Paul. There’s a lot of magnet under the strings, which isn’t great for sustain, but the solid maple body and neck go some way to bring that back. It can accurately re-create almost any electric guitar tone you’d want for a cover band, it would be invaluable. It doesn’t have a sharp edge on it anywhere. There’s something almost too perfect and evolved about the Spectrum FX. In 1986, however, Matsumoku added the “heel-less” construction that had proven popular in the Electra X935 “Endorser”, only with an even deeper cut. Louis Music decided to use the “Westone”, rather than the “Electra” name, for their US-market guitars, the X199 simply became the Spectrum FX. The first-generation FX was basically an Electra X199 a sleek, set-neck super-Strat with eighteen different pickup combinations, a deep-bend-optimized tremolo, and the highest grade of workmanship Matsumoku could bring to the table. Louis to get it, but that’s a small price to pay for an example like this. That’s a photo of the Spectrum FX my man ultra sonic picked up for me in St.
Then the meteor hit.Īmong the spiky and multi-featured Cretaceous Matsumokus of 1986, the final-production Westone Spectrum FX, demoed above by my friend “Proendorser Mike”, is the Tyrannosaurus Rex.
The earliest “Uncle Mat” guitars were Les Paul copies the final ones arrived in a bewildering variety of colors, shapes, capabilities, and tonal possibilities. In a way, it was a lot like the age of the dinosaurs in the relatively short period between 19, the guitars became vastly more specialized, complex, and expensive. I’ve been writing and talking about the Matsumoku Electras/Westones/Arias/Skylarks and the Golden Era of Japanese guitar-building quite a bit lately.
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