I’ll be honest, prior to getting an email from Mike about doing this review, I’d never heard of Sia Drums. That meant I had to do some reading.

Sia drums are made by Sia Seysan in Sydney, Australia. The review drum was made from staves of Jarrah (a very hard Australian wood). It had ten double-ended tube lugs, a Trick GS007 strainer, small butt plate, Puresound wires and Evans heads.

For those who aren’t familiar with stave drums, the shells are basically glued together from solid vertical blocks of wood – like a barrel – to form the basic cylinder.

My initial thought after spending time with this drum was that I found it to feel comfortable. That might be a strange word to use, but it’s the best one I can think of. It felt familiar taking it out of the box and again when playing it. It also ticked all of the boxes I would wanted marked in looking for a snare drum – great looks, great sound, plays really well, great hardware, and good value for money.

Ok, so these points can be subjective. However, in looking at any snare drum, it’s these sort of things that I take into account most of the time.

So, looks…

I’ve always liked wood finished drums. Whilst the finish of any drum can be, like I mentioned, subjective, I think we can all agree this drum looks good by anyone’s standards. The natural grain of the wood is very clear and apparent, as is the rich colour. And I liked the badge too.

Sound.

I’ve tried to give a basic idea of how the drum sounds at a high, medium and low tuning with a minimal amount of EQ and no damping. In terms of playing the drum, while I didn’t gig it, I did play it extensively in my studio and it seemed plenty loud and full sounding to me.

How does it play?

I found the drum to have lots of sensitivity and the ability to go from soft to loud without it feeling like it might have lost anything or was pushing too hard. This was one of the things that made the drum feel comfortable; it felt like a snare drum I might already own, set up just the way I would like it.

Hardware.

All of this seemed to be of a good standard and I had no issues with it. I’ve said in previous reviews that I dislike lower end snare strainers on drums that aren’t entry level, but this drum came with the great Trick strainer, which will always get points with me. Same thing with the Puresound wires.

Pricing.

I don’t normally mention pricing because obviously not everyone is in the UK and so it’s normally irrelevant. However, in this case I’ll make an exception and tell you that this drum is £699. That makes it not cheap but in terms of overall marketplace, not that expensive either. In my opinion, this drum is spot on in that respect and you get what you pay for.

Overall, as I’ve said, I found this drum to be very comfortable. It’s well made, looks good, is of a good quality and is flexible in terms of sound, so it gets a thumbs up from me.

More at www.facebook.com/Siadrum and for the UK twitter.com/siadrums

David Bateman