You're listening to the PianoPod, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry
about how they're bringing the piano into the 21st century.
Welcome back to the PianoPod for our season finale.
I am Eric Hunter.
I'm Yukimi Song.
And I'm Clara Zhang.
Today our guest is Ben Lottie, a classical pianist and head of piano at ToneBase.com.
Ben is a graduate of the Juilliard School and the Shepard School of Music at Rice University.
He debuted with the Austin Symphony at age 17 and was a prize winner in the Yamaha Young
Performing Artist and Kingsville International Piano Competitions, among others.
He has performed at concert halls around the world, including Carnegie Hall's Wild Recital
Hall and Alice Tully Hall.
Prior to joining ToneBase, he taught at Bard College and worked as an assistant to the
well-known radio host and lecturer David Dubal.
Ben, thank you for being with us today.
Eric, it's my pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Clara, Yukimi, thank you so much for having me.
Welcome.
All right.
So we are really excited to talk about ToneBase, which has been making waves this past year.
For anybody who doesn't know, can you explain to us what is ToneBase?
What do you guys do?
Well, the mission of ToneBase is to democratize music education, which is a loaded phrase.
So let me unpack that a bit.
Essentially, actually, this resonates a lot with what I heard you guys talk about in your
introductory episode, which is this phenomenon of piano teachers and practicing pianists
feeling the sense of isolation from one another in their craft.
It's not like doing sports where you're on teams and it's very communal and there's
crowds all the time.
There is an often talked about separation between the solitude of the soloist and honestly
the teaching craft too and the audience and the sort of end results.
So that alienation, I think, is just one thing that we're trying to push back against with
ToneBase in our own way and in a new medium using new technologies.
So democratize might just mean create more accessible and affordable opportunities for
piano lovers, amateurs, piano teachers spread out wherever they might be to be able to enjoy
some of the top artists, top performers, top professors from conservatories and concert
halls around the world with the kind of intimacy that we might only get if we get to attend
a conservatory and even then not so much.
I mean, even then it's like, okay, I went to a Murray Pariah master class and I sat
in the 18th row and maybe I got to shake his hand after, but with ToneBase there's a sense
of, well, we don't have Pariah yet, fingers crossed, but there's a sense of being able
to actually be right there in the room with them.
So it's really helping to deliver a very specialized art form and craft to the masses, if you will.
So can you tell us a little bit about your offerings?
It sounds like you have lessons, master classes, how does it work?
Sure.
I could show you a little bit if you like.
Yes, if you would like to show us that.
If my screen sharing chops are good.
So I just landed on the ToneBase dashboard.
I'm already logged in, so I'm a subscriber, but because I work for ToneBase, I don't have
to pay.
And there we see Seymour Bernstein teaching me Férolise, as he says appropriately, correctly.
And why is that there?
Because it happened to be the last thing I watched.
So when you land on the page, you get a variety of offerings and videos.
And if you come to browse, you'll see that we have different categories.
There's lessons, progress tracks, courses, and then you can sort by composers and artists.
So just to maybe take you through a little bit, if I wanted to watch a repertoire lesson,
for example, on, I don't know, name a composer, Clara.
Chopin.
Oh, I think we have some Chopin.
So I'm going to go to Romantic Repertoire here.
And I don't know, there's some, I like to look at the list.
There's our Chopin offerings.
And oh, look, there's Garak Olson teaching the first ballade.
So I can now watch one of the great Chopin interpreters of the last half century and
the only American ever to win the Warsaw International Competition Prize.
Can you hear that?
Are you hearing that?
Or is it just me?
Not yet.
I think you didn't share your sound, maybe.
That's fine.
So you see Garak there, an hour and a half lesson on one of the most famous, cherished
pieces.
And this is just one of hundreds of videos we have.
So that's just a little taste.
But you see right there, I'm right next to Garak, who, you know, I just, when I directed
Garak, I just pressed his on button and he just poured out this, you know, long form
structured lesson about this piece that he's known intimately ever since he heard Rubenstein
play it in Carnegie Hall like 50 years ago or whenever.
So this is not something you can get everywhere or really anywhere.
YouTube doesn't have it.
Masterclass.com doesn't have it.
There's no real way to experience that level of like very thorough, detail, high quality
insights and inspiration into this music that we love and also have resources, a score available
and tools to take notes and in addition that we've created, you know, with space for annotation.
So that's just one sampling.
There's other kinds of offerings.
There's progress tracks, which help you progress from maybe beginner to intermediate levels
in various musicianship categories and technique.
There's interview features that I've just had the absolute honor and privilege to do
with some of the great legends of piano and I hope to do more of those.
I just did one recently actually and we have got a big release in a month with Emmanuel
Axe and so that's a big deal.
And just, we can talk about him if you want later.
Got to meet him and work with him and he's just the most special person in the world.
So anyway, my job is I'm really lucky and but most importantly, tone based, I think
is important thing and you can get a taste of it there.
And I really recommend it highly to music lovers, pianists, piano teachers, just watching
these great artists teach and speak their craft is invaluable.
It's very educational for our level of pianists too, but also seems like you're reaching out
to beginner intermediate levels.
So and it's not only educational, but also quite entertaining because I so particular
one that I remember was John Kimura Parker.
He was actually doing his lecture from his home studio, I think.
It's actually that's his studio at Rice at the show.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
But he makes it very homey.
He's got a couch in there.
He's got all of his Star Trek memorabilia all over the walls.
So it feels like it's his home office.
Yes.
And it feels like he's really giving you a lecture right next to you.
Right.
That intimacy that you're creating and he shares his personal anecdotes with the piece,
connection to the piece.
So it's very actually quite entertaining.
And I saw not only his lectures, but also Fred Tsu, who was our guest of the show a
couple months ago.
And then yes, and he's incredible.
So I saw a lot of incredible unique things on tone base, very distinctive about from,
let's say YouTube, because before Tom base, I used to go to YouTube and look for more
materials to learn from, from these old, all these big names like a listers, right.
But now with Tom base, I think it's more like very well organized.
But also I feel like I used to go to summer camp and then, you know, after I graduate
from masters in Europe or something, and then I have to pick which summer camp I want to
go to because there is the famous teacher on this summer camp, but there's another
teacher I want to study with on.
But now with this tone base, I feel like I just get to choose from the home screen with
the click of a button.
That's one of the goals.
I hope if we keep growing and expanding and I'm able to attract as many of these great
artists as I can, that it really will feel like, you know, not that people will choose
tone base over summer festivals.
If anything, it should help facilitate people to want to go to more and more festivals because
they'll be able to meet these artists on tone base first.
But yeah, it should be basically a little microcosm of our whole piano world or piano
universe.
You know, that's a little ambitious.
We have a huge repertoire.
We're never going to teach all those pieces.
We have there's, you know, a thousand great concert pianists, at least, you know, touring
the world right now.
We'll enroll only ever going to get, you know, a portion of them.
But at the same time, yeah, that's that's you came.
That's one of the ideas is that this is a way to experience that in-person festival
conservatory concert hall experience.
But sort of, you know, with a click of a mouse.
In my opinion, I also feel like you're protecting all the artists because YouTube is basically
it's free unless they get sponsors or something.
But you know, classical music is usually a niche base.
So I feel like with the millions of postings on YouTube per day, I guess our content, the
content that I want to watch is pretty much buried.
So you are tone basis actually helping all these artists of their content and copyright.
I feel like I think so.
And I mean, YouTube is just it's everything.
It's it's too much, which is great.
I mean, you could get lost in it.
We all do.
And it will always be a resource.
I mean, I think it'll be be with us forever until until the apocalypse, perhaps.
But before then, YouTube, of course, still has its limitations.
And it sort of requires these other premium platforms to complement it so that maybe you
notice a tone based video on YouTube or you see an artist you like and then you Google
them and you say, I want to find more and I want to find the highest quality.
Where can I get that?
And that's where something like tone base or master class or Netflix or any of these
premium subscription video content platforms, whether it's entertainment or education, come
in handy for a relatively modest price compared to a lot of things we pay for.
You can get this just sort of extensive access to something that YouTube can't achieve on
its own.
And that way we can be a business.
We can pay our artists fairly and also be able to promote them in a way that is like
you said, you give me is probably lost a little bit with the sort of YouTube effect of everybody's
stuff being diluted and sort of lost in the mix.
So here's a way that we can say, no, no, no, in this place, there's something special happening
and we can promote that and then take it back to social media and Google and and even YouTube
and say, hey, guys, it's like let's we want to share this with with the world, too.
And we want to invite you to to come in and experience it.
So Ben, I wanted to ask you, you guys have this incredible roster of artists right now.
I mean, so you showed us there's an hour and a half long lesson with Garak Olson on Chopin.
For most people, the only way to get close to him would be to go to one of his concerts
if he happened to come to your city that you live in.
And then you've got other huge names like Leon Fleischer, Gary Grafman, Seymour Bernstein.
How did you guys get started?
Let me start with the piano platform because the the actual the pilot platform, if you
will, was is for classical guitar.
And that was actually right two years before piano.
And I was hired once the company raised enough funding to expand to help launch the piano
platform.
And it came on in the spring of twenty nineteen and the first four to six months of my job
was almost exclusively trying to recruit artists.
So for every Garak Olson I got, there were 20 equal artists who didn't respond or said
no.
Now, I always treat the door as being open still.
And actually, some of those artists, including Maniacs, I was able to return to.
He never said no.
But what he said was, why me, I'm so he's so modest.
You know, I don't know what I could offer you that would be useful.
And then we weren't able to put something together.
But two years later, when I was able to show him what we did with Garak, what we did with
Leon Fleischer and others, I mean, I was able to I was just more experienced and was able
to get somebody of his caliber.
So it was not easy.
I mean, it's a lot of emailing and just grunt work of trying to you know, these people get
asked for stuff all the time.
You know, they that's why they have agents, you know, and we try to kind of avoid managers
to some degree, because we're not going to put up the kinds of, you know, fees that Carnegie
Hall and we're not going to pay them $50,000.
Of course, we don't have that.
So it can't be that kind of engagement from our side.
It's still I think, a very fair price that we're paying, you know, depending on the artist.
But it's something more that's I think they have to want to do it.
You know, it can't be the kind of thing where their publicist or their manager says do this,
because it's going to be good for your public image or something.
And so with somebody like Garak, I was introduced to him through Nicholas Rosado, who's actually
the artistic director at 92nd Street Y wonderful organist.
And he knew Garak from organizing concerts there with him.
And he set me up with him by email.
Garak happened to be in New York City when I was spring or the summer of 2019.
We met at the Nice Metin on 79th and Columbus, I think.
And he was staying at the hotel above there.
And we just talked about piano and pianists for like an hour and a half.
And I was just that I could have like died and you know, quit my job that night, and
I would have been happy.
But that was just the beginning of a wonderful collaboration with him that extends to this
day.
I still am in touch with him.
I called him before the Maniacs, you know, session just to be like, tell me about Manny,
because you've known each other since you were 15.
And so I'm just so privileged and blessed to be able to have somebody with that caliber
of a pianist and that magnitude of an intellect to offer his time and services for us and
be able to share the extraordinary lessons and interviews that he did with us.
So he was a big help at first, but I also, you know, I went to Juilliard, I have connections,
I was able to get some professors.
I know a lot of successful young pianists and I just did a lot of cold emailing too.
At some point I was like, all right, let's just find every major music school and conservatory
starting in the United States, but I'm branching out to other countries as well.
And just going to start sending basically the same version of the same email to everyone
and that's how I got people like Simone Dinerstein and Rebecca Pennies and some others.
So that worked too.
And getting off the ground was the hardest.
And now that we've launched and established ourselves and people have heard of us, it's
getting easier, but there's other challenges too, because now we have lots of different
priorities, lots of initiatives.
And so recruiting artists is just one of them at this stage, but I'm back at it.
And Martha Argrich, if you're listening right now, no, but anyway, so yeah, that's just
that's been a core part of the job and it's not easy at all.
There's no magic to it.
It's just hard work.
Right, right.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I mean, as a new podcast, we can certainly sympathize, but it does get easier once you
have an established body of work to show off.
And I have to say your production values are incredible.
I just want to mention that a little bit for anybody who hasn't seen any of ToneBase's
videos yet.
They have a lot of samples on YouTube, great stuff.
Like I'm just the camera angles are so informative.
You get the over the hands shot of one of these pianists playing as well as the side
angle and just top audio quality, video quality.
Really good stuff.
Plus the score.
Yes, the score.
Exactly.
Yeah, that is very helpful.
And all of that is part of a workflow with great people and great teammates behind the
scenes and great contractors that I work with around the states.
We're not in a position yet that we can fly a production crew anywhere in the world.
So we have really wonderful collaborators who are videographer and audio crews in different
parts of the country who we trust and rely on and have just done really great work for
us.
But especially my teammates, I wouldn't be able to do any of this without them.
The scores that you see, the editing that takes place.
I have my hand in a lot of this or most of it.
But ever since the beginning, where I actually did try to do absolutely everything along
with the head of production, Sean Mulholland, we've been able to expand, add more people
to the team, bring more people on.
It's really a wonderful group of dedicated musicians and web developers essentially.
So that brought me to my question, Ben.
I think sometimes when you keep on thinking about something that this thing would just
show up.
So in the beginning of pandemic, when we first started our podcast, and I remember I keep
on noticing Tone Bass online and online and I registered for this lunch club and all of
a sudden I was connected with Abbie, I think, on your team.
And then we were like, oh, wow, Tone Bass.
And so I told these two guys, I was like, oh my God, this is amazing.
So he told me a little bit about the behind the scenes.
But I want to know what is your role as the head of piano?
Obviously you connect all the artists, but how does it work with the programmers and
the technology?
I think it's very innovative because as musicians sometimes we are so used to just hiding the
practice room and practice, but what you guys are doing are so cool.
Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, Abbie is a genius.
I think he's like 24, which means he's one of the founders of Tone Bass.
So just to give a little bit of a profile of these three, because really this traces
back to them and what they started, although a lot has developed since then.
Abbie was the third founder to be added to the sort of triumvirate that began all of
this.
But the sort of two original musicians who spawned the idea were Igor Lichman and Chris
Garwood.
And they are classical guitarists who met at Yale during their masters studying with
Ben Verdery.
And they met in a class taught by a woman named Astrid Baumgarner.
I don't know if you've heard of her, but she teaches the music and business class at Yale.
She's a philanthropist, amateur pianist herself, lives in New York City.
I happened to have given her a lesson once because she still takes lessons.
Her primary teacher is Peter Dugan, who's now the host of From the Top, wonderful pianist,
just played with Joshua Bell in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Peter's one of my best friends from way back.
And so when Igor and Chris and Abbie were looking for a pianist to sort of build the
platform, they reached out to Astrid, among others, and said, hey, who do you know?
And Astrid said, well, I know Peter Dugan.
But Peter Dugan's so awesome and busy, like, you know, he's not going to have time to do
this kind of intense job.
It's a full-time job.
It's what I do all the time.
But I, knowing Peter, was looking for a job.
I had my doctorate and I was like, let's put this to work.
Let's apply for the tenure track positions.
Let's do the whole thing.
And so it was just good timing.
It was right in the middle of that season when I was waiting to hear back from the Boston
University had a job open, University of Maryland, Baltimore County had a job.
And I'm just like, can I get an assistant professor position somewhere?
And then I get this email and Peter forwards it from Astrid.
And I read the tone-based job description for head of piano.
It just sounded like a joke.
I was like, there's no such job that exists.
That's impossible.
I also happened to be somebody who always loved media and film.
And like every high school project I had in class, I would, I wouldn't make a poster.
I would go edit something on iMovie and just have a fun time.
And I even applied to USC for undergrad because I wanted to do music and film stuff.
So I always was like, will I ever be able to do something in video media again?
Because it's one of my passions, like dating back to childhood.
So I'm just reading this job description.
It's like, yeah, you need to have at least a master's in piano performance.
You need to be well connected in the piano world.
You need to know the piano repertoire.
You need to have like writing skills and media.
And I'm just like, these are the five things that I dedicated my life to.
And so I just, I couldn't believe it because I had no idea what was going to be the next
chapter in my life.
I wasn't particularly looking forward to it.
So I just consider myself extremely lucky that that happened and that I knew people
like Peter.
And this is why you make friends at summer camps and stay friends with everybody and
are nice to people, by the way, it helps your life out.
But just that connection really helped.
And so Igor and Chris and Abhi, they met at the school and just very briefly, Igor and
Chris first started a kind of Facebook, I guess, page that was called maybe practice
portal or something.
I don't know the exact history, but the idea there was just let's have great guitarists
film their practice sessions, just like open.
So you have a window in this kind of a, and then they sort of, that was their project
for Astrid's class.
And then that summer, I believe they got involved with the Yale management school who sort of
mentored them a bit.
And that's when they realized, OK, we need a kind of more intentional business model
here and we need to find a programmer.
We need to find a whiz kid.
Right.
That's when they found Abhi, who was an undergrad at the time, you know, a few years younger
than Chris and Igor.
And I mean, he was he could have gone and made instant high salaries, you know, being
a developer for Amazon or wherever.
And he wanted to do something that was his and that.
Yeah, he seemed very passionate to the world.
Yeah, and so just he played piano as a kid, but he leads the product team.
The product team has expanded now.
So we have developers, some of the musicians themselves spread out around the country now
because everything's remote and they're working on the back end all the time just to support
the platform, to encode everything and to just make sure it's a smooth experience for
our users.
And that's that's a really intense job.
And I feel for them because I get to be on podcasts talking to you and talking about
how I interviewed a man who acts or whatever and had coffee with Garrett Olson.
And none of this would even be seen if it weren't for the invisible people behind the
scenes led by Abhi, who are just working constantly to make sure that it's an awesome platform.
So anyway, that's a long winded answer to, I guess, the behind the scenes question, but
happy to dive in more if you're curious about specifics about how these things actually
end up looking the way they look.
Right, right.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, you keep me going.
I'm more interested in about the technical part.
So you have a team of people who does all the cameras and setting up audios and yeah.
So can you just tell us?
So we now do this more and more in-house because finally we were like, hey, let's invest in
our own studio in LA.
And it actually happens to be in Hollywood, although that's just incidental.
It's not like we're in one of these famous studios.
We're not Paramount Pictures.
It just happens to be on Gower Street, a block from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, because we
found a kind of nice space there that we can convert into a recording studio.
So yes, I'm a Hollywood producer.
That's what that means.
But it's not that fancy.
It's just very useful and practical for us.
And so finally in-house, we're able to, with the leadership of Sean Mulholland and other
wonderful editors and videographers on our team, like Phil is somebody I work with all
the time.
These guys are just like, some of them are musicians.
Some of them are coming from the media or the videography world.
And Phil Engel is just an incredible, like he was making music videos.
He was making videos for like Billboard and stuff before this.
And so we brought him in and he's able to share his talents with us.
And Sean was a classical guitarist, but he's always had a sort of tech interest and very
skilled with just being able to set up microphones and just, he's an audiophile and he just gets
this stuff.
And so they've helped design this set.
They helped run our in-house productions.
Now we use Blackmagic cameras, 4K.
And it's not just 4K, by the way.
It's about lighting, it's about a color, it's about recording in a certain kind of flat
color profile.
That's so that when you edit later, you can color correct.
All of that happens.
That's why it looks so good.
So it's not just about, like I saw some ad the other day for a new camera that's 8K and
it says just like film.
If you film at 8K and you have bad lighting and the color profile is off for whatever
reason, it's not going to look good.
It's actually going to look really weird because now it's like 8K and you're seeing very vividly
an image that's very distorted.
So it's an art and a science at the same time to actually make media look this good.
And we're, I'd say we're at, we're second tier to the first tier of HBO and Masterclass.com
and Netflix shows and Amazon shows that you guys watch.
We use some of the same gear.
We have entry level professional equipment.
But what they're doing, it requires much bigger budgets, obviously.
So I'm very proud of what we have made.
I think it looks fantastic, especially for piano lessons.
That's not usually something that you get a cinematic experience for.
So I'm really happy with where we're at, but it's something that I am meticulous about
too.
Like I want things to look as professional as possible and have production values be
as high as possible.
I mean, it's a dream come true for all the artists and pianists, even as a viewer.
It's a really dream come true.
Yeah.
I mean, I think a lot of pianists are used to seeing bums like us in our homes on YouTube.
So I mean, don't sell yourself short.
I think the quality is incredible.
Thank you.
I mean, I, yeah, I mean, I'm used to just iPhone videos too.
Like I didn't, I'm just lucky that I get to work with people who have access to this equipment.
And I should mention Point of Order Productions, led by Christopher and Mary Smith.
They've done all, most of our Northeast stuff.
And guess what?
Most pianists live in either New York or Boston or Baltimore or Philly.
So I've been, you know, between those cities with them, they traveled to the Berkshires
to work with Manny with me.
They have awesome Canon C500s and really state of the art lights.
And Christopher Smith just got a Canon R5, which has a stabilizer.
So he was able to like do all kinds of motion shots with Manny that aren't without a gimbal.
So like, it's actually still stabilized enough to really feel like you're there.
I don't know if you've seen the fly on the wall video productions that are made in London,
but you know, Boris Giltberg and Claire Hoangse have been on them, but you get this feeling
that you're like right next to the pianist playing.
So we're going to have actually some of that with Manny Axe, which is going to be...
I could go watch lots of videos of Axe playing right now on YouTube.
But what I can't do is feel like I'm this close to it and that it's even better than
real life, the picture quality.
So that's, that matters.
You know, it's not directly part of the educational experience, but it certainly enhances it.
It's certainly part of it.
Of course, because you kind of have to have the entertainment quality to it.
I also want to shout out to those students that are watching.
We have all these young students that eventually turn into teenagers and go to college and
they don't know what to do with music if they don't major in music.
These are great examples.
These days we're all like, they're all high tech, growing up from a few years old.
If they can come up with ideas like this, or I think tone bass is a great inspiration
for a younger generation, right, to just brainstorm.
We don't have to be.
And also just, I have to tell you a little secret.
I was watching you with Samuel Bernstein last night, again, probably for the fifth time,
and I dropped a little cocktail tear.
I studied with him when I was...
So I moved here from China to Kansas when I was 17.
And then at one point my teacher was like, if you want to go to New York, go study with
Seymour.
And so I remember writing this email to Seymour in the library or something.
And he was like, sure, come.
And so I dragged my suitcase, come to New York City from Topeka, Kansas.
And he was just so nice.
It was just so nice to me.
Isn't he amazing?
He was just...
The hand, like you guys were talking about the hand.
And then he was like, Clara, Clara, Clara Schumann also touched this hand.
I was just like, oh my God.
Well, a lot of stories.
Yeah, there's a reason why he was able to impress somebody like Ethan Hawke at a dinner
party so much that Ethan Hawke had to drop everything he was going to do for a year in
order to make a film about this guy.
He's intoxicating, he's hypnotizing.
He'll be all of your friends and he won't want to be all of your teachers.
He's just completely selfless and giving when it comes to his knowledge of piano.
And he's one of the few serious...
I mean, he's actually weirdly not mainstream in the sense that you're not going to see
him...
I mean, he has this incredible biography where he quit performing at 50.
He wasn't exactly trying to rub shoulders with all of the giants of piano and the professors.
In fact, he wrote books very critical of a lot of piano professors.
There's one called, I think, Angels and Monsters.
And there's a whole lot of monsters in the world in the history of piano teaching, which
is a whole topic we could discuss.
But Seymour is not a monster.
He believes in all of his students and he believes in their potential.
And he has, I think, the right philosophy, which is that the job of the teacher is not
to push technique and musicality into a student, but to draw it out of them and to reveal for
them, help them reveal what they already know, which goes back to ancient philosophy.
This is an idea of education that I believe in too, even if I don't always practice it
so successfully.
We're often in positions where we feel like we have to teach it into the student.
It's more so wonderful.
And I hope in that session with me, you kind of see it happening to me.
Oh, for sure.
It's a magic trick.
It's like he doesn't do anything at all.
He doesn't say, that's the moon.
He really does have magic.
He helps you look at the moon and discover it for yourself.
It's just he's wonderful.
And he's able to make teaching technique an expressive musical thing, which, of course,
is all of our challenge as a teacher.
How do you make technique into something that's not just athletic training, but at one and
the same time, a human expressive act?
And I think that mission is so important because, of course, we're always so divided between
this false dichotomy of technique and musicianship or musicality, right?
As if you're supposed to work on your technique first and then sprinkle the musical sauce
on afterward rather than baking them in together.
And he always bakes them in together.
His recipe is always both.
Well, I think he's also just incredibly kind, right?
I remember just all these things.
Did you study with him before you interviewed him?
No, that's what's crazy.
I met him like three days before that.
I see.
And it looks like we've known each other for years.
That's how he treats people.
And he's not just kind.
He's funny.
He's funny as hell.
Right, he is.
And the jokes in there, just the deadpan.
Yeah, he's so wonderful.
I can't believe he's 94.
Well, he looks still very young.
You know, my piano tuner, Telly, she's like best friend with him.
So I still get updates from.
I mean, I was actually at the premiere of that movie.
My adult student at the time was the PR.
And I happened to play this concert at Lesztosky and he was there.
And I had a friend and he was like, oh, Claire from Kansas, you're back.
Where are you?
You know, it's like after all these years, he still remembers you.
And that's just like, oh my God, you know, how can that be possible?
Anyway.
This concludes part one of our interview with Ben Lottie.
Tune in next time to learn how ToneBase integrates with traditional lessons and their plans for
expanding in the future.