South Bend drum shop doesn’t miss a beat
Posted: Thursday, September 4, 2014 6:00 am
By JEFF HARRELL South Bend Tribune

“The biggest thing about the drums — a lot is custom ordered,” [shop owner Michael William] Janovic says. “We’ll build whatever anybody wants.”

But it’s the custom-made drums and hardware, not to mention the friendly social atmosphere that invites musicians, students and anybody else to hang out amid the ambiance of locally-made instruments on display.

“We’re now a drum manufacturer, we just started that,” he says….

Janovic, a South Bend native who began playing drums at 7 but spent 25 years as a local television producer, also worked in a machine shop “to learn how to make my own hardware; that was the primary goal.”

But the biggest dimension South Bend Drum Company offers, “a lot of the reason I opened up the store,” Janovic says, “is, I had nowhere to sell my drums.

“Now I’m back into production,” he says, “so I’m basically working as fast as I can make them.”

He picks up his red sparkle snare drum and taps it around the rim lightly to fine-tune it.

“I don’t know,” Janovic says about its price. “It’s not like I’ve got a name yet, so I really can’t demand. Probably $400.”

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