Baum Carve Vega Review: Premium Baum Character at a Ridiculous £669

There are affordable guitars, and then there are guitars that make you check the price twice because something clearly isn’t adding up. The Baum Carve Vega sits firmly in the latter camp.

At £669 at the time of review, this is part of Baum’s most affordable range yet, sold through the company’s direct-to-customer model with pre-orders and instalment payments available. On paper, that means a few concessions have inevitably been made. In practice, though, most of them are the sort of things you’ll stop caring about approximately thirty seconds after plugging the guitar in.

For the unfamiliar, the Carve is Baum’s slightly offset take on an SG-style guitar, filtered through the company’s very distinctive mid-century European design language. It has a mahogany body, a roasted maple neck, a 25.5-inch scale length and a bolt-on construction, which gives it an interesting mix of traditional “G-style” and “F-style” DNA rather than feeling like a straight copy of either. The Scepter-derived headstock, distinctive inlays and standard strap locks round things out nicely.

More importantly, it plays brilliantly.

The roasted maple neck is slim, fast and rounded into a C profile that manages to avoid either extreme. It’s not one of those paper-thin shred necks that feels like you’re gripping a ruler, but there’s also nowhere near enough bulk to slow you down. If you’re a thumb-over player, there’s enough shape to grab onto; if you prefer fast lines and big bends, it’s equally happy doing that.

The 22 medium-jumbo frets are particularly well judged. In fact, the reviewer prefers them to the slightly smaller frets on his own Baum Backwing, which is hardly faint praise given how highly he rates that guitar. They’re substantial enough to make bends and faster playing feel effortless without being so enormous that players coming from more traditional fretwire will immediately recoil.

Then there’s the balance.

SG-style guitars and neck dive go together often enough that you almost start accepting it as part of the deal. Personally, that’s one of those things that can completely kill a guitar for me. The Carve, thankfully, has none of it. It balances properly on either leg, behaves itself on a strap and doesn’t spend the entire time attempting to headbutt the floor. The mahogany body gives it enough weight to feel substantial, but it’s still relatively light and very comfortable.

This is also where some of Baum’s cost-saving decisions start to make a lot of sense. The company’s more expensive roller bridge has been replaced by a straightforward Tune-o-matic-style bridge and stop tailpiece, while the tuners are conventional Baum-branded 18:1 units rather than anything especially fancy. Do I miss the expensive hardware here? Not really.

The tuners are smooth and accurate, the bridge intonates properly, and because there’s no vibrato system involved, the additional tuning stability offered by the pricier roller bridge simply isn’t doing much for you anyway. It’s cost-cutting, certainly, but it’s intelligent cost-cutting.

Things get considerably more entertaining when you get to the P90s.

The Gold Sound pickups measured around 7.3k and 9.1k and are surprisingly muscular. They hit the front of an amp hard, with plenty of attack and a properly rowdy rock & roll character, but they’re not just one-trick noise machines. Clean them up and there’s still plenty of brightness, definition and balance on offer. Bridge, both pickups together and neck positions give you a useful spread of tones without making things unnecessarily complicated.

The comparison with the reviewer’s more expensive Backwing is perhaps the most telling part. That guitar is fitted with mini humbuckers rather than P90s, so this isn’t exactly controlled laboratory testing, but the Carve still holds its own remarkably well in both sound and playability. At no point does it feel like the cheap one being politely allowed to sit at the grown-ups’ table.

Even the setup arrived basically perfect straight out of the box, with no compulsion to start fiddling with bridge heights or anything else before getting on with playing it. And really, that sums the Carve up.

It looks cool, plays fast, balances properly, has a pair of P90s with enough grunt to make an amp work for its living, and the reviewer reckons he could happily take it to basically any gig apart from perhaps a metal one.

At £669, Baum has cut out some expensive hardware without cutting out the bits that actually make you want to play the guitar.

That’s not just good value.

That’s slightly silly.

Find out more about the Baum Backwing at BaumGuitars.com