The model that started Baum
The Leaper Tone is the guitar Baum was founded on. Designed and built by Morten Bau in 2015 alongside the Conquer, it set the direction for everything that followed. Every technical decision that now defines Baum was first developed and proven on this model, from the 36mm mahogany body construction and the roasted maple neck philosophy to the in-house pickup development and the friction-optimised hardware. The Leaper Tone is not the entry point to the Baum catalogue. It is the foundation.
A semi-hollow electric guitar with a vintage P90 voicing and Bigsby vibrato, the Leaper Tone occupies the territory that traditional ES-style semi-hollows have defined for over half a century. What sets it apart is the specificity. Where most semi-hollows are designed to cover broad tonal ground, the Leaper Tone is built around one tonal direction and committed to it fully.
Goldsound® Rewind ‘52 P90s on a semi-hollow body
The standard Leaper Tone variant uses Goldsound® Rewind '52 P90 pickups. P90 electric guitars sit between single coil clarity and humbucker warmth, and on a semi-hollow body that middle territory expands further. The chambered construction adds air and resonance to what the P90s are doing, producing a tone that is crisp and articulate at low volumes and meaty and aggressive when pushed.
That responsiveness from clean to roar is what makes the Leaper Tone a rock 'n' roll guitar in the practical sense, not just the marketing sense. The same instrument handles fingerpicked blues, jangly chord work, country picking, garage rock rhythm and high-gain lead playing without changing character. Players who want a semi-hollow without committing to P90 territory can choose the mini humbucker variant, which shifts the tonal profile toward more output and a slightly smoother high-end response while keeping the same body construction underneath.
Bigsby B70 with friction-optimised hardware
The Bigsby B70 is the larger of the two Bigsby models commonly fitted to semi-hollows, with a longer travel range and a heavier feel than the B50. On the Leaper Tone it produces controlled pitch bending suited to the vintage character of the instrument. Wide, expressive vibrato on sustained chords. Subtle pitch waver on held notes. The kind of vibrato that defines classic rock 'n' roll and rockabilly playing.
The Levitator™ roller bridge is what makes the Bigsby actually work. Standard Bigsby installations on vintage semi-hollows have a long history of tuning instability caused by string friction at the saddle. The Levitator™ eliminates that friction with rolling contact, so strings move freely during vibrato use and return to pitch accurately afterward. Baum Precision Tuners at 21:1 gear ratio handle the fine adjustments that semi-hollow guitars need across temperature and humidity changes throughout a long set.
Why the construction matters here
Semi-hollow guitars depend more on their construction than solid bodies do. Air movement inside the body, neck stability against shifting room conditions, the interaction between top wood and back wood, all of which contributes to the final tone in ways that are harder to mask with electronics.
The Leaper Tone weighs around 3.4 kg (7.5 lbs), light for a semi-hollow body guitar of this format. The 25.5" scale matches Fender-style spacing rather than the shorter Gibson scale most ES-style guitars use, which gives the strings more tension and adds clarity to the P90s' high end. The dark roasted maple neck is dimensionally stable across temperature and humidity changes, which matters more on a semi-hollow than on a solid body because the chambered construction is more sensitive to environmental shifts.
These are not specifications chosen to fill a spec sheet. They are decisions made in 2015, tested in real-world use, and refined across a decade of production.
Where the Leaper Tone fits
The Leaper Tone is the traditional semi-hollow with P90 voicing in the Baum lineup. For a semi-hollow with an offset body shape, single coil pickups and Bigsby B50 vibrato, the Conquer 59 covers that territory and bridges the offset and semi-hollow universes. Both models sit within the broader Baum electric guitar lineup.
45 days and ten years of refinement
The Leaper Tone has been in production longer than any other Baum model, and every example shipping today is the result of ten years of small refinements. Each guitar is set up by hand in Aarhus before leaving Denmark. Baum doesn't sell through retailers, so the 45-day home trial is how players get to spend real time with the instrument that started Baum, in their own space, before deciding whether to keep it.
