To be honest, the electric guitar has become distinctly middle aged. In the fifties and sixties it was a test bench with six strings. Everyone toyed with new shapes, daft colours, strange gimmicks and outrageous ideas – 75 per cent crashed like a lead sparrow, but at least the guitar had speed.

In the seventies, Japanese big business took over. Eastern manufacturers were responsible for bringing prices down and sending construction and finishing standards soaring upwards. But they committed one hideous crime. They played safe.

This year, a large number of people seem intent on changing the guitar radically. There are the Steinbergers and Rolands with plastic bodies and synth electronics, there are the inspired researchers such as Bond with their stepped necks and touch electronics. But there's another cause for hope, and that's the return of the test pilot – and in this case that's Maxim.

Marriot McLellan, a small British company, patented facets of this instrument more than three years ago. It should be in production by the end of 1984, it won't be cheap and there's still a lot of work to be done before it's perfect. But it's a start.

The Maxim is a headless six string with an oblong and stubby uncontoured body which will eventually be made from a plastic, foamed based material called Darvic. The prototype is jury rigged from laminates and weighs a ton.

The bolt-on Japanese neck is not that unusual. But the tuning mechanism is a doozie.

Each string passes over a saddle with an individual rolling wheel in the place of the normal supporting ridge. It then dives through a hole beneath the bridge plate and wraps around another much larger wheel, almost 1½in in diameter. Six of these are mounted on a cylinder between a fork in the guitar body. The strings have now performed a complete 180 degree turn and are heading back towards the neck but inside a compartment at the rear of the body. It's here that they meet the machine heads – perfectly ordinary heads, in fact, but instead of tuning pegs on the ends of their shafts, there are black control knobs, and these are mounted on the upper edge of the body.

A rubber panel slides away to reveal this compartment (similar ridged rubber strips are glued to the bottom of the body - and the tip of the neck to protect against bumps). Stringing up involves passing the strings through a retainer an inch above the aluminium nut, then round the bridge and wheels to the machines.

The rest of the controls sit inside a 'trench' at the bottom of the body. Three plastic switches (yellow, red and blue) swap the guitar from active to passive eq, connect either or both of the pickups, and choose between humbucking or single coil operation. Next is a four band graphic marked high, high mid, low mid and low, and finally a stacked volume control – the outer ring sets the level of the active sound (PP3 powered), the inner one is for the passive option. They're not mixable, it's one or the other.

Now we start coming to the areas where the Maxim needs tidying up. The active is sensible... really just a strong tone booster and not one for daft excesses. But it's noisy, the sliders have no centre notch so you can't tell where you are, it's very difficult to judge their position from up top, and anyway, they're mounted backwards.

Perhaps the doctors were right about me, but I reckon it makes sense to move the sliders away from you in order to boost the level (as if you were looking down on a graphic eq effects pedal). Maxim have it the other way round.

The tone of the guitar, particularly on the bass strings, is generally dry – nothing seems to happen in the lower frequencies, no excitement.

The Maxim is low on harmonics but the graphic can give it a jangly top end, like ice cubes down your spine. It works especially well with a chorus unit for a bright, 12 string effect. But apart from a remarkably lengthy sustain, thanks to the mighty body, it's not going to set too many ears on fire.

But elsewhere the smart ideas continue – a built in headphone amp connected to a mini-jack socket on the top of the body, lockable strap buttons with a quick release mechanism and an amp.

It's being marketed as the Maxim Guitar System – hand luggage for the travelling axeman. In the bottom of the flight case is a compact, removable, 10W practice amp, with a single jack input, plus a Euro socket for the mains supply and a 12DC input if you want to run it from a car battery. Can't help thinking a battery powered version would have made more sense.

The active guitar signal overdrives it too soon but the sound is adequate for practice if not stylish enough for performance.

The major drawback to this prototype was its weight – about half that of Saturn by the office scales. Can't see anyone lasting a full gig with this round their neck, and since there's no headstock and therefore no restraining mass for your left hand, the imbalance is exaggerated still further. But that should be cured in the Darvic production models.

Looking back, this seems to have been a review of one company's imagination rather than their product – not much good to the guitarist with a few spare fivers in his pocket. Still, at least I can recommend the former, even if the latter isn't quite ready.