Faced with unusual set-ups like these Staccato guitars, the crucial question remains: are these people merely trying to be different for the sake of it, or is there a method in their madness?

Pat Thomas is the designer of this particular madness – he's designed such things as drums (also called Staccato) and racing cars – but the principal scheme with his guitars is one of interchangeable necks slotting into an all-receiving body. There is also the technological bonus of magnesium alloy – the only wood around seems to be the ebony fingerboard – and a few coloured lights. Switching is minimal; the sound comes from the steadiness and inherent tone of the mag alloy and the specially wound Kent Armstrong pickups.

We had a body plus a six-string and a bass neck to fool with, and straight away found the slotting in and out a doddle: there's a little trigger at the back of the body to unlock the required neck via a spring-loaded catch (rather disturbingly described in the Staccato info sheet as "similar to those found on a good shotgun").

Near the catch is a 15-pin male connector that mates with a similar socket on the relevant neck. The body holds all the controls (two touch pads, a volume level indicator, three pickup toggle switches, a pickup selector and a Jack socket), while the "neck" has the pickups and wiring on-board. There are some batteries visible in the body, though it's not immediately obvious how you'd actually get at them.

The back of the "neck" leaves all the wiring and pickup mountings exposed when unconnected to a body, and this could be dodgy if you left it hanging around – which is presumably the idea, to have a single body and then chop and change around with necks as the will or the song dictates.

The switching is, as we've seen, minimal, and there are two main areas that you'd have to deal with in the method-or-madness stakes.

First is volume: two pads on the lower bout offer touch sensitive control of increase or decrease, and a 00 to 99 readout on the upper bout lets you know where you are. There's no end-stop at 99, the read-out keeps going round and round, so you can easily run over from full volume to minimal volume if you get too touchy, and the run-up and run-down is actually rather slow. In practice, a volume control is rarely used anyway. So give me a normal volume pot please, and a few quid off, however noiseless this sort of volume control may be.

Second is tone: there is none. Instead, three flickswitches on this early model control coil-taps and impedances: a choice of humbucking or single-coil, 6000 or 4000 ohms, with less bass and oomph at the lower figure. On future production models there'll be four switches, logically giving these options on either pickup.

Again, I'd take the conventional line and say I'd prefer the wider range offered by, say, active bass and treble tone pots, though the offered switches do give a reasonable if limited spread of possible tonalities – including a strange, hollowed-out, almost electro-acoustic racket if the flickswitches are all left in their middle "off" position and your amp's jangled up a few notches.

Tiny rollers in each string position take the place of an overall nut – helpful, this, particularly for the wang-laden six-string. Sticky nuts (ouch) normally mean pitch-robbing bar operation. Up at the rather ugly headstock are some (you guessed) unconventional tuners.

Taking pitch down with these, as when I tried to put the six-string into my favoured open-D, involved something of a problem in that the knurled tuning knob kept falling off. Going up in pitch was fine, and precisely that – these are fine-tuners.

Stringing-up requires the string to be laid in a slot at the headstock underneath another roller, and clamped into place with a tiny grub-screw – Pat is now working on an improved stringing device, apparently an additional horseshoe-shaped gadget with a key to pull the string into tune. While doubts are immediately aroused at the thought of the necessity for clamps and grub-screws and horseshoes when a string goes ptang on-stage at the Queen's Arms, Mr Thomas assures us that a complete re-stringing with the new system took him but 15 minutes, as opposed to a Strat's 20 minutes. But then he did design the thing.

The sound of the bass, especially, allayed a good deal of my criticisms, and was indeed so warm and friendly that I began to think you'd eventually get used to these oddities and the hole in your wallet. I gazed lovingly at the long-scale bass, apparently destined for Lemmy, flicked deftly and silently between single-coil slapping and humbucking raunch, noticed a little slackness in some of the binding work on the fingerboard, and generally speaking had a good time.

The flickswitches do give some potential for tone changes, and push the bass – yep, my favourite – into areas that only actives have taken me to. It's the sort of four-string that pushes the playing, both because the neck feels so easy, and because the sounds the instrument produces make you want to take chances and just play. Full marks on that front.

The bridge packs a similar design on both six-string and bass – another roller on each saddle, and a rather long travel between it and the anchoring point. A tiny Allen key controls action, and similar individual attention is there for intonation. The wang bar on the six-string looked and felt somehow crude, and yet worked nonetheless.

Despite all the ingenuity involved in making this such a different guitar system, the overriding impression left with me was the strong, characterful sound (the bass especially, remember?) and the fast and easy necks on both six and four. An aid to the playability of the thing if you should find yourself in the dark is the pretty lit-up position markers on the top edge of the neck: these come on, as does the volume indicator level, just as soon as you plug the jack into the socket on the front of the body.

The finish – all the way up the back of the neck and on the back, sides, and a little of the front of the body – looked good and gave absolutely no tactile clues to the guitar's metallic construction. It evidently chips badly, this particular finish, nicked as it is from BMWs and Mercs, and may benefit from the intended change to common cellulose, though happily retaining the lovely pearlish effect, made by the addition of ground-up fish scales.

A protrusion to attach your strap can be clipped to the back of the body, and I'm told that you can soak it in hot water and bend it to the shape you want. I didn't have it long enough to try that, but found the shape as supplied pushed the guitar away from me a bit more than I'd like. The balance was fine, though.

A positive conclusion is tricky. As responsive, playable instruments, these Staccatos have me hooked. As pieces of design with a single-minded and oddball approach to control and function, they have me worried. If Staccato are to make "production" instruments then they'll have to draw a line somewhere and say, "This is how it will be." If they're going to be a custom maker, then they can say, "What do you want?" But not, I would have thought, both at once.

Staccato modular system: £1400+