 For me, building instruments is the best way to be able to shape music. I work hard for eight hours every day at work and then I come home and I come down to the basement and I build. My day job, I work for a food safety company and sell food safety training to health departments across the nation. I love what I do but I don't think that's necessarily how I would define myself. What I do on the side is more of who I am. I always had this desire to create something. Working with my hands has always been a part of my life. My first job was working for my grandpa. He taught me how to use tools and work the saws. My grandfather did a really good job at passing on the passion of woodwork to me. Every since I was a kid, I always felt like our house was like a musical. My dad would be singing while he's cooking and my mom would just pull out a guitar and start playing. So I had building and music and eventually they kind of came together. This opportunity to build banjos for other people and for myself, it's just a very personal and kind of emotional thing for me. Being a banjo builder, the market isn't huge. I'm still in the early stages of getting the company going but I hope I would be able to have my niche and be provided for my family. Since my son was born, that makes me more serious about what I do to provide for him. I want to make sure that no matter what he'll have a roof over his head, he'll have food on his plate and that's my number one responsibility. The good thing about the business is that there's not a lot of people making them in the way that I make them. There's probably around five of us in the world building the way that I do. Every tree is different so depending on how the tree grew, they'll end up being a different sounding banjo just because of the nature of the wood. Another aspect is the drumhead. You have synthetic skins and then you have goat or cow skin. The most fun part about building is being able to take these natural materials that are all around us and piecing them together in a way that produces a sound that I love. This banjo, I built it with my wife's father in Slovakia. I built it out of wood that was actually from a tree in my wife's yard where she grew up. I'm never going to sell this. Tom is a great example. Knowing what you want and really committing to it, it might seem impossible to build the banjos out of our basement. Even when things get hard, he has that passion and he can still do it. Because I'm not building full time, it takes me months to finish one banjo. My goal is to get to the point where I'm building four banjos a month and selling four banjos a month. I want to get to the point where I'm kind of known as the banjo maker. I want my customers to order one. When they finally get it and play it, they say, this is the last banjo I'll ever own. This is the banjo that I want to play for life. Being acoustic, you have the ability to play anywhere. Being able to take a banjo up to the mountains with my family, it just makes me so happy. When my son is playing with the banjo, I feel like he feels this connection with me. I want him to know that you can have passions and you can follow them and that you can be successful in doing those things. My goal in life is to make sure that I pass that idea along to my son. If you like what you saw, please click the subscribe button and leave a comment below. Thanks for watching!