Since it seems that Much of the early Tama history isn't well known I thought I'd make a quick post describing Tama drums in the '70s into the '80s.
The first line of drums under the Tama name were Swingstars. Followed by Imperialstars,Royalstars,Superstars, and Fibrestar. Until the mid '80s these were the lines. Now here is where the fun begins. When Tama introduced the Imperialstars they were the flagship high end. In '74 the Swingstar & Royalstar lines were being made using '60s hardware ( rail mounts,off set lugs, single center lugs ) I can only assume there was still some demand for kits such as that. But in '75 the Royalstars featured modern hardware - yet had the exact same shells as the Imperialstars. Now in '77 the Swingstar drums had the same shells as both Imperialstar & Royalstar and even had the same lugs as the Royalstar. The only difference was the name. They were the exact same drums. This was true until the mid '80s when they stopped making Imperialstars,Royalstars,Superstars in favor of Artstars, Granstars, etc... That is when the Swingstar became the bottom line of Tama drums. I am including a few photos from catalogs to show this. Also a link to look through Tama catalogs from the '60s until today. You'll also notice the descriptions of the drums are basically the same. This makes things very confusing as until the Superstars all their lines were more or less the same with slight feature differences. Here is the link to all the catalogs -
