Great Sound, Great Look

by Martin Patmos

Misses
no protective pad on bass drum hoop

The Spaun Drum Company recently introduced a line of 100% birch drums to complement their 100% maple line. Featuring the same well-thought-out design as their maple cousins, these hand-crafted birch drums look beautiful, sound fantastic, and are a joy to play.

It’s All About The Shell...

Before the drums were even out of the boxes, I noticed how little they weighed. Once I had them unpacked, I could see that their light weight stemmed from their shell construction and the elimination of unnecessary hardware. Spaun’s 8-ply shells are just under 1/4" thick (5.5 mm) and have no reinforcement rings. The result is a shell that’s thin and light yet strong and resonant.

A notable feature on Spaun drumshells is the double 45° bearing edge. This design ensures that the flat of a drumhead makes contact with the shell avoiding the edge and resulting in good drumhead contact all around. Spaun deliberately keeps their drum hardware to a minimum. Small, attractive lugs and unobtrusive badges, combined with RIMS mounts, keep the shell free of anything that might impede the sound characteristics of the drums. The resulting look is very clean, and it really shows off the finish. Whether finished in the natural wood grain of the Blonde Satin stain on the test kit we received, or the American Flag motif of the kit featured on the Spaun Web site, these kits will turn heads.

...And It’s All About The Sound

The Spaun kit came outfitted with Evans heads. The drums sounded great right from the start, with a distinct attack and great tone.

What first caught my attention was the depth of the toms. They had more bottom than I expected, creating a full tom sound with fantastic projection. The decay was just right, letting me hear the note, yet avoiding unwanted boominess. The toms responded very nicely at different dynamics as well, playing evenly from Bonham loud down to some quiet smacks with brushes.

When I tightened the heads up a bit I discovered that the acoustic characteristics of the toms remained consistent through an impressive tuning range. From a comfortable, fat low, I was able to achieve a crisp, high tom sound without having anything sound choked.

The bass drum matched the sound of the toms very nicely, allowing it to function as the lowest note in the kit as well as providing a great counterpart to the snare drum. With Evans EQ3 heads and an Evans EQ pad providing a little muffling, the sound was solid, deep, and resonant. From lightly feathering the drum, to dropping bombs, to laying down a groove, the bass drum always produced a nice, satisfying “whump.”

The only thing I wished for on the bass drum was a small pad of some sort on the wood hoop for mounting my pedal. I’m not a fan of clamps biting directly into the wood, which after a while results in a pretty shoddy-looking hoop. That’s something to avoid with nice drums like these.

Snap, Crackle, Pop

The 5" snare we reviewed was crisp and sensitive and I loved it. The shell is made like those of the other drums, so there was a nice, deep tone with the snares off and a great foundation for them when they were on. Spaun snare drums are outfitted with the Nickel Drumworks Piston Drive snare strainer, which allows an effortless, quiet throw of the snares, both on and off.

The drum had a clean, crisp attack, with a solid, warm tone, plenty of projection, and no stray ringing. And it had great sensitivity to ghost notes and chatter. As with the toms, there was also a nice range of tuning possibilities.

I was also sent a 61/2" snare to try. Its performance matched that of its 5" sibling, other than the expected lower pitch and deeper tone produced by the deeper shell. These are beautiful snare drums.

Lend ‘Em An Ear

There’s a lot to like about Spaun’s birch drums. With their clean look and great sound, they could easily fit into a wide variety of playing situations. In particular, I suspect they would record very nicely. But what I appreciated more than anything was the consistent timbre across the kit. Taking the drumset as a whole, no drum sounded out of place or demanded any special tweaking to get it into the chorus. Instead, everything worked together as one complete instrument. Perhaps this is due to the uniformity of the shells used throughout the kit, or maybe it has something to do with the attention to detail that comes from hand-crafting. Selecting hardware to get the most out of the drums doesn’t hurt either. Whatever the case, based on my time with the birch kit, it’s obvious to me that Spaun really cares about how their drums sound.

Although the prices may put a full kit out of reach for some, these drums have a lot to offer. A variety of sizes and depths are available, and a good selection of finishes, including custom jobs, make getting that “dream kit” all the more likely. So if you’re looking for a kit that looks and sounds beautiful, you may want to lend Spaun an ear.

Copyright 2002 by Modern Drummer Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.