About Eastar
Eastar builds beginner and student instruments across five families: brass, woodwind, percussion, strings, and keyboards, from trumpets and trombones to clarinets, recorders, violins, digital pianos, and kids' drum sets. The company's own account of its history describes a brand started to close a gap for affordable, well-made instruments for beginners, built around complete starter packages, cases, mouthpieces, and cleaning kits included, so a new player is not left hunting for the accessories a first instrument needs.
Eastar says every instrument goes through a quality-control inspection before it ships, and describes its manufacturing around durable materials and precise processes aimed at playability, tone, and durability. The percussion line applies the same complete-package approach, with kids' drum sets that ship with a throne and sticks sized for both children and adults.
Brand website: theeastar.com
What Eastar makes
Eastar's catalog runs wider than the gear we review. The lines we know best from our own testing are marked with a star:
Brass Instruments
Beginner trumpets, slide trombones, and pocket trumpets, sold as complete sets with case, mouthpiece, and cleaning kit
Woodwind Instruments
Student clarinets, alto saxophones, piccolos, and soprano recorders
Percussion
Kids' acoustic drum sets, snare drum sets, and bongo drums — featured on House of Octave
Keyboards
Foldable digital pianos and beginner keyboards
Strings
4/4 violin sets for students
Why we recognized Eastar
The House of Octave Top Brand recognition isn't paid for and can't be applied for. We award it to the brands whose gear consistently stands out in our player-tested category guides. Eastar earned it on the strength of the products below, judged the same way every product on this site is: assessed on build, tone, and playability, weighed against what players actually report over years of use, and ranked on merit.
Eastar gear we rated highly
Eastar 16-Inch 5-Piece Kids Drum Set (EDS-350)
This 16-inch five-piece kit uses cross-grained poplar shells with 6-lug heads, and the batter and resonant heads are different thicknesses, which gives more range when tuning each drum. The snare strainer is adjustable rather than fixed, so the wires can be set to taste. The throne is a double-plate design rated to 220 lb (100 kg), and the box includes a full-size pair of sticks alongside a smaller pair sized for a child's hands, so the kit keeps up as the player grows. Our own estimate, based on the 16-inch bass drum size, puts it in the roughly 6 to 12 age range, useful for a bigger or more boisterous child.
Read the The 11 Best Kids Drum Sets of 2026, From Toddler Kits to Teen Setups guide →What earned Eastar the recognition
- A full-range instrument maker spanning brass, woodwind, percussion, strings, and keyboards, built around complete beginner packages rather than a bare instrument.
- States that every instrument passes a quality-control inspection before it ships.
- The kids' drum set recognized here pairs cross-grained poplar shells with 6-lug heads set to different batter and resonant thicknesses, which gives more range when tuning each drum.
- Ships with an adjustable snare strainer and a double-plate throne rated to 220 lb (100 kg).
- Includes both adult-size and children's sticks in the box, so the set keeps up as a young drummer's hands grow.