A Gittler. Not a guitar. No neck. Six pickups. Thirty-one frets. Something fishy going on here.

Steinbergers? Nah, mate, they're too big and old-fashioned for me. I mean, look at the body on them; might as well get a bleedin' Gretsch.

No, this is the one. Frets? Yes, it's got those. Strings? Yes. And that's about it.

In fact, the only thing that the Gittler consists of is frets, at first glance. Thirty-one of them, mounted on a stainless-steel spine. At one end is a nut, where the strings tie on, and at the other six knurled knobs. No sign of a conventional pickup at all, and as for a bridge there's merely a bar in the same shiny stainless steel.

And the overall effect is, quite frankly, astonishing. You might hate it, on the fairly sensible grounds that it looks more like a haddock's leftovers than a guitar. On the other hand, its futuristic, minimalist lines might attract you, like it did the New York Museum of Modern Art, who exhibited it, or Andy Summers, who used it in the Police's Synchronicity video.

Of course, to make things a little more practical — and this is definitely a playable instrument, not a wallhanging — there are a few concessions to 'normal' guitar building. Unlike the first version of the Gittler guitar which was nothing but the basics, this improved model has a plastic body-like thing running along the back of the central rod and holding an arm which the strap attaches to so it balances reasonably well.

It does, too — it's very light indeed, as you'd expect, and has that Steinberger characteristic of feeling like it moves with you rather than on its own. It hangs very nicely and without the illusion you sometimes get on headless instruments that it's two frets too long. It's so weird to look at you tend to evaluate it as a different instrument rather than, say, a Status which you can easily mistake for a normal bass with the same problem as Anne Boleyn.

The pickups are invisible to all intents and purposes; in fact they're hidden in the tubes that run from the 31st fret to the bridge and tuners. How many pickups? Six, to be precise. That's one for each string, going through its built-in active preamp and exiting by either a mono output jack or a special socket you can use to get the sound of each string separately.

If you think about it, the possibilities of this are awesome. With each string running through a different channel on a mixing desk and equalised differently, the sound opens up dramatically. And when you slap a separate echo, reverb or chorus programme on each string, adjust the gain to suit the line being played and pan the guitar across the stereo image, you're talking huge. Guitar as philharmonic orchestra, no less.

This is something the professional studio person could use to interesting effect, though onstage the advantages of having six outputs could be outweighed by the crushed vertebrae you'd sustain from lugging six amps about. Mind you, a mixer might be handy, though most people have enough problems setting up one set of controls, let alone six. Maybe a job for Akai's new programmable mixer? Or maybe you could lug an SSL desk and complete studio monitor system to the Pig and Dingbat, Carshalton.

To play, the Gittler is, err... interesting. Delicate is one word I might use, although 'Bastard' might do for the more hefty-fingered. Like a sitar or indeed Richie Blackmore's Strat, the lack of wood between the frets makes a deep and satisfying finger vibrato easy, and going out of tune, particularly on dodgy chords, easier still. You do get used to playing more lightly quite quickly, though, and using the classical hand position with your thumb on the back of the neck (no, not your neck, this isn't yoga) is by far the best way to get accuracy and speed.

Soundwise, it's a clean, precise-sounding guitar, very much as you would imagine from its looks. Chorus and reverb plus a touch of treble give an American rhythm sound most San Francisco fretmelters would envy, and that clean, AOR distortion comes easily with a touch of compression and a good amp or Heavy Metal pedal. Boss's Dimension C might do wonders, too.

So if you want to be the first kid on your block to get comments like Oy, your guitar's fallen off its frets' or what the hell's that?', try Andy's on Denmark Street, London (Contact Details) who are the agents in this country at the moment. Any comments about World War II, however, will be looked at very askance...

Gittler guiter: £650