We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Homer Lavernia. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Homer below.

Homer, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

My wife came up with the name HomerMade because our drums are homemade by Homer. She also named our cats Bart and Lisa.

Homer, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

HomerMade Custom Drums creates one-of-a-kind snare drums and drum sets by hand. Musicians who seek our drums want to be their best on-stage and in the studio and they understand the quality of sound produced by custom drums. Drum-making is an art. We take art to the highest level and focus on sound and beauty. We offer our clients all types of woods like Cherry, Purpleheart, Douglas Fir, Maple, Birch, Walnut, Oak and many more. The particular tree the wood came from, the angle of the grain, thickness of the wood and size of the drum determine the sound and tone of the finished product. Some woods are harder to find than others, making our drums and the sounds they create unique. We go the extra mile to find the perfect wood combinations to create the type of sound a drummer or band desires.

One challenge we have had in the past was to replicate the bright, cracking sound of a 1920s brass snare but completely made of wood. We used a combination of Cherry and Douglas Fir woods to achieve this tone.

Our art coordinates the color and grain pattern of the wood with a perfect finish and hardware. We make inlaid designs and offer painted drums. My wife is an artist with an eye for design and a steady hand for detail work. She created our logo of a tree stump transforming into a drum– a symbol of the magic of our drums.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

We have used our 100 sq. ft. enclosed carport as our workshop since 2016. We had to set equipment on the driveway to make space to work, moving things in and out constantly. With only word-of-mouth advertising, our need for space expanded. Our home’s crawl space had potential to be excavated so my wife and I dug it out by hand using shovels, pickaxes and five-gallon buckets over the last six years. We finished the digging with a small Bobcat tractor when there was enough space for us to move it around. With the help of friends and family, we created new footers to support our house by pouring concrete walls around the inside perimeter and a concrete floor. Our brand new 600 sq. ft. workshop opened in August of this year and features an efficient woodshop and a drum lounge for bands to come by and sample all of our drums. Creating our new shop by hand and all its immense back-breaking labor has been one of the greatest challenges either of us have ever faced. Conquering this feat side by side has only made us stronger partners in our company as well as a couple. Now that the major construction is finished, we challenge ourselves by hiking Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

As a teenage drummer, I was interested in how drums were built so I dissected and customized my own drum kit. These customizations began as experiments. To change the drum aesthetically, I would add bright colors to the outside of the drums to make the kit look completely different. Other times I would change the tone of a drum by adding reinforcement rings or sealing the inside of the shell to make it more resonant. Local Miami drummers wanted me to do the same to their kits. I would help them by completely refinishing their sets, reshaping bearing edges and repairing cracks and dents on their drums.

I played in several bands over the years and toured around the country and while that was fun, I eventually realized that I enjoyed the creative side of working with drums more than playing in bands. I took a giant leap and moved to Colorado in 2014 to learn how to make ply shell drums from scratch from a master craftsman.

Today, the satisfaction I get from going to a concert with our drums in play is mind-blowing. We live in the mountains near Red Rocks Amphitheatre and our drums have been played in that great venue as well as on TV. My wife and I often get invited backstage to talk with the bands about their HomerMade custom drums or about potential builds. These are lifelong friendships formed for the love of custom sound.

Drums can be very therapeutic. My wife was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in her late 20s and started banging on the drums to let out some frustration. Since then, she has learned to manage her health and now we play drums together for pure enjoyment. Every visitor to our home is asked to join us in giving the drums a try.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.homermadedrums.com
• Instagram: homermade_custom_drums
• Facebook: HomerMade Custom Drums

Image Credits
Sandra Leatherman