Spectral-spatial excitation pulses are an efficient means of achieving water- or fat-only imaging and can be used in conjunction with a variety of pulse sequences. However, the approach lacks reliability since its performance is dependent on the homogeneity of the static magnetic field. Sensitivity to static magnetic field variation can be reduced by designing pulses with wider frequency stop bands, but these require longer pulse durations. In the proposed method, spectral-spatial pulses are optimized on a subject-dependent basis to take into account measured subject-specific static magnetic field variation. Extra control of the radiofrequency (RF) field from multichannel transmission is used to achieve this without increasing the length of the pulses. The method characterizes RF pulses using relatively few parameters and has been applied to abdominal imaging at 3 T with an eight-channel system. In a comparison of standard and subject-specific pulses on five healthy volunteers, the latter improved fat suppression in all subjects, with a reduction in RF power of 13% +/- 6%. A forward model suggests that the mean flip angle in fat was reduced from 0.72 degrees +/- 0.55 degrees to 0.12 degrees +/- 0.04 degrees for a 20 degrees excitation; uniformity of water excitation also improved, with the standard deviation divided by mean reduced from 0.26 +/- 0.05 to 0.16 +/- 0.05.