Tama 2026 | New finishes and limited drums

Tama’s August announcement had two headline acts — the Erskine and Nilles signature snares and the finished Spartan hardware line — and then a long tail of everything else.

That tail is worth your time. There are three new finishes on a flagship kit, a mystery colourway on another, and four separate limited runs including one drum that is entirely black and one that costs more than most people’s whole kit.

Here is the lot, in plain English.

Starclassic Walnut/Birch: three new sparkles

Vintage Champagne Sparkle, Garnet Red Sparkle and Smoked Silver Sparkle.

Same shells as before — only the wrap changes — but those shells are worth a paragraph because the hybrid is the interesting bit.

Toms and floor toms are 6mm and six plies: four plies of European birch on the outside, two of American black walnut inside, with the interior lacquered. The bass drum steps up to 8mm, five birch plies with two walnut inside.

The logic is straightforward. Birch is bright and forward with a natural high-frequency lift, which is why it has been a studio wood for decades. Walnut is warm, dark and low-mid heavy. Put walnut on the inside and birch on the outside and you get the attack facing the microphone with the warmth underneath it.

Hardware is the proper stuff: die-cast hoops, the Star-Cast mounting system, Quick-Lock tom brackets and a double tom arm in the box. The matching snare is sold separately, as ever.

A 4-piece — 22x16 kick, 10x8 and 12x9 toms, 16x14 floor — is listed at $2,199.99 in Vintage Champagne Sparkle. The other two colours are the same drums.

This is also the second finish drop for this line this year. Molten Platinum Burst arrived in December, and these three follow it, which puts the Walnut/Birch on six-plus finishes across 2026. Tama is clearly treating this line as the one that gets refreshed.

Superstar Classic: Indigo Bintangor Burst

A new finish on the Superstar Classic, and one worth flagging carefully.

Tama’s name for it is Indigo Bintangor Burst. There is already a long-running “Dark Indigo Burst” on this line, and they are not the same thing — the new name calls out bintangor, which is a tonewood, not a colour.

What we cannot tell you honestly is the shell. Superstar Classic has historically appeared with both all-maple shells and bintangor plies depending on the sub-line, and we could not find a direct Tama spec page confirming which one this finish sits on. So: new finish, confirmed. Shell material, unconfirmed. We would rather say that than guess and be wrong.

For scale, the existing 7-piece Superstar Classic in Dark Indigo Burst runs around $1,399.99, so this sits well below the Starclassic lines.

Starclassic Performer “Blacked Out Black”

Limited edition, and exactly what it says.

The kit is a 5-piece — 22x16 kick with no tom-holder base, 10x8 and 12x9 toms, 14x12 and 16x14 floor toms, with two MC69 single tom attachments. Shells are birch with maple inner plies in flat black, and the interiors are painted black too.

Then every piece of metal on the drum — lugs, hoops, fittings, the tom attachments — is finished in matte black.

The heads finish the joke properly: clear on the toms so you can see the black interiors, and a black Fiberskyn-style head on the bass drum. There is a matching snare available too, the MBSS65MB — 14x6.5, birch/maple, matte black die-cast hoops on ten lugs, Super Sensitive wires, with a black chrome head option.

Blacked-out kits are not new. Done badly they look like a kit somebody rattle-canned in a garage. Done properly, with matte finishes rather than gloss and the interiors painted so the shells do not flash pale wood at every drum cam angle, they are genuinely striking. This looks like the second kind.

It was originally announced on its own in mid-July and folded into the August roundup, so if it looks familiar, that is why.

S.L.P. G-Maple 14x7 in Mappa Burl

The S.L.P. range does this well, and this is a good one.

Model LGM147M-TMP: a thick 11mm shell, twelve plies of maple core with a single outer ply of mappa burl veneer, in a finish called Twilight Mappa Burl. Tube lugs, ten-hole die-cast hoops, Linear-Drive strainer, 20-strand hi-carbon wires and an Evans G1 Coated batter.

The thick shell is the sound story, not the veneer. An 11mm, twelve-ply maple shell is stiff and does not want to flex, so it gives you volume, brightness and a hard ceiling before it chokes — a cutting drum rather than a warm one. If you want a sensitive, breathy 14” snare, this is not it, and it is not trying to be.

The burl is there because burl looks extraordinary and no two pieces are alike.

STAR Reserve Bubinga/Walnut

The expensive one. Around $1,399.99.

It is a 14x6.5 with a six-ply bubinga and walnut hybrid shell, one outer ply of claro walnut, a 5.5mm maple Sound Focus Ring and Tama’s STAR bearing edge. Sound Arc hoops at 2.3mm on ten lugs, newly developed STAR tube lugs with their own lug nuts for fine tuning, Super Sensitive wires and a coated Ambassador on top. The finish is Gloss Claro Walnut — a black see-through lacquer over the walnut, so the grain still reads through it.

Bubinga is dense and heavy and gives you low end and cut in a way few woods manage together. Walnut warms the mids. The focus ring tightens the attack. Everything about the recipe is aimed at a drum that projects hard without turning brittle.

It is the third drum in the STAR Reserve series, and it sits alongside the G-Mahogany from December’s announcement.

POWERPAD limited colours

At the other end of the price list entirely: the POWERPAD Designer Collection stick bags get three limited colours — red (TSB12RD), blue (TSB12BL) and green (TSB12GR).

Nylon with brown suede trim, room for about six pairs, zip top, elastic strap to hook over a floor tom, pockets inside. Tama is selling these as a style item as much as a bag, which is fair enough — a stick bag is one of the few pieces of gear anyone actually sees you carry.

There is a matching limited-colour snare bag named in the same announcement, but it was not separately spec’d on the pages we checked. Assume the same colourway logic and check the dimensions with a dealer.

Quick explainer: what are S.L.P. and STAR Reserve?

Two names that turn up constantly in Tama announcements and confuse anyone who has not followed the brand closely. Neither is a one-off.

S.L.P. stands for Sound Lab Project. It is Tama’s experimental snare series, and the whole idea is one strong concept per drum rather than a matching family — a bronze shell here, a burl veneer there, an unusual depth somewhere else. Prices are mid-range and the range rotates constantly. It is where Tama tries things.

STAR Reserve is the same instinct at the top of the catalogue. Small runs of hybrid shells using exotic wood combinations, built to STAR-line standards and priced accordingly. The Bubinga/Walnut above is Vol. 3.

So when either name appears, read it as “limited run, unusual shell, will not be here forever” rather than a permanent product line.

Where can I buy one?

The right shop depends on where you are: Guitar Center in the Americas, Gear4music in the UK, or Thomann for Europe and the rest of the world.

Every price here is a US street price. Tama had not published UK or European list pricing for these on the pages we checked, and no ship dates were given for anything — dealer listings exist, so treat it all as available now and confirm locally.

Limited runs are also exactly the drums that show up used a year later at sensible money, so the Reverb price guide is worth a look before you pay list on any of them.

Final thoughts

A finish announcement is not usually news. Four limited runs in one drop is, and it tells you what Tama is doing at the moment: keeping the flagship lines visually fresh while using S.L.P. and STAR Reserve as a rolling showcase for shells you cannot get any other way.

The pick of them, for our money, is the S.L.P. Mappa Burl — a genuinely different drum at a price a working drummer might actually reach. The Blacked Out Performer is the one that will get photographed most.

If you are new to the brand, start with the Starclassic Performer for what the mid-flagship kits are about, or the Imperialstar for where most Tama players begin. And whatever you buy, run it through our free drum tuner before deciding what it sounds like.