It started many years ago when Jackson were offering a Ghost Flames finish on their US line and you could get green, blue, black and my favourite, RED!!!
It looked like this:
Then I saw THIS guitar and was intrigued by and fell in love with it's different style of Red Ghost Flames. I did some research and found they called this Advanced Red Ghost Flames.
This was in the early, early 2000's, and so it was that when I saw Megadeth play in Sydney on August 4 2001 I had this Jackson in the boot. I used the trip to pick it up after buying it shortly before.
When I was talking to the guy he said it had flames, but they were hard to see and now I know what he meant! It's an '87 Soloist, so made in Ontario and it has Invisible Ghost Flames inscribed in the trem cavity, along with NAMM, so I think this guitar was at NAMM in '87. Either way, someone decided to make some totally custom flames for it. Look closely, they're there!!!
Along the way I acquired this Charvel, not because it was red per se, but because it was very Strat like and had a Strat headstock, a rarity in the Charvel world, but something they were doing in the early 90's for markets outside the USA, which got a nasty, beak like, headstock on the same guitar.
It's still stock and needs better pickups and a setup, I haven't really used it or done anything with it. I tracked down a nice case for it and that makes me happy enough.
By now I had also had my custom Charvel strat from hell made locally by someone who has become a great friend. What colour did I choose? Red of course, but with a black burst. Tiger striped flame maple cap over a one piece mahogany body. My main player since it was finished until recently when my bands switched to Eflat tuning, so I bought new guitars to setup for that as all my others are in standard.
A matching Jackson Star is being built with the same wood combo for the body, but with a set-neck configuration and without the blackburst. One day I may have the blackburst on the strat removed as I really liked it when it was just red tiger striped but I continued with the blackburst as I had decided on it already. Here's what it looked like:
By now my hankering for a custom creation with a graphic was getting pretty intense and using a guitar generator available on the JCF at the time I made this up:
That was my concept for my ultimate ghost flame guitar. It eventually became this:
At some point I will probably get a neck pickup installed on this. One day.........
Now, after getting many oohs and ahhs about this beast at the JCF I was contacted by someone who worked for Jackson and I supplied some pics as I thought he just really liked it.
Later on Jackson announced a special, limited run guitar that looked like this:
You could have bowled me over with an Ibanez!!!!
This was basically my guitar with black hardware. It was an Import model made in Japan. I could not believe it.
Funny thing was though that when they all arrived after actually being built they looked like this:
I laughed and laughed. They had more of an invisible flame paint job, NOTHING like the picture at all!!!!
