Part 1 of Season 1, Episode 16 (Season Finale): Ben Laude, Head of Piano at tonebase.co

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You're listening to The Piano Pod, 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 Piano Pod with Yukimi Song for our season finale. I am Eric Hunter.

I'm Yukimi Song.

And I'm Clara Zhang.

Today our guest is Ben Lotti, a classical pianist and head of piano@tonebase.com. Ben is a graduate of the Juilliard School and the Shepherd 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 Artists and Kingsville International Piano Competitions, among others. He has performed at concert halls around the world, including Carnegie Hall's Weill 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.

Great.

All right, so we are really excited to talk about Tonebase, which has been making waves this past year. Um, for anybody who doesn't know, can you explain to us what is Tonebase? What do you guys do?

Well, the mission of Homebase is to democratize music education, which is a loaded phrase, so let me unpack that a bit. Um, 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 Tomebase 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 masterclass 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, you know, 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? 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.

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 Für Elise, Für Elise, as he says appropriately, correctly. And why is that there? Because it happened to be the last thing I watched. So, you know, 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.

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 Garrick 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?

I think you didn't share your sound, maybe.

That's fine. So you see Garrick 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 Garrick, who, you know, I just— when I directed Garrick, I just pressed his on button and he just poured out this long-form structured lesson about this piece that he's known intimately ever since he heard Rubinstein play it in Carnegie Hall like 50 years ago or whenever. So, uh, this is not something you can get everywhere or really anywhere. YouTube doesn't have it, masterclass.com doesn't have it. There's, there's no real way to experience that level of like very thorough detail, high quality, um, insights, uh, and inspiration into this music that we love and also have resources, a score available, and tools to take notes and an edition that we've created, you know, with space for annotations. 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, um, a big release in a month with Emmanuel Ax. And so that's fantastic, a big deal, right? And just, we can talk about him if you want later. Uh, got to, 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 base I think is important thing, and, and you can get a taste of it there. And I really, 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 Jong 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 shop.

Oh, I see. OK.

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's like— it feels like he is 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 Frederick Chu, 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 ToneBase very distinctive about from, let's say, YouTube, because before ToneBase, I used to go to YouTube and look for more materials to learn from, from these all, all these big names, A-listers. Right. But now with ToneBase, 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 master's 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 ToneBase, I feel like I just get to choose from the home screen with a click of a button. It's, it's just—

that's one of the goals. I, 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 ToneBase 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 ToneBase 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, 1,000 great concert pianists at least touring the world right now. We're only ever going to get a portion of them. But at the same time, Yukimi, that's one of the ideas is that this is a way to experience that in-person festival conservatory concert hall experience, but with the 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, you know, 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— ToneBase is 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 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 with us forever, you know, 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 Tonebase 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 Tonebase or MasterClass or Netflix or any of these premium subscription video content platforms, whether it's entertainment or education, come in handy. You know, 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 we— 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, Yukimi, 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 even YouTube and say, hey guys, like, let's, we want to share this with the world too. And we want to invite you 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 Garrick Olson on Chopin. You know, 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, right? And then you've got other huge names like Leon Fleischer, Gary Graffman, Seymour Bernstein. How did you guys get started?

Let me start with The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song because the, uh, the actual— the pilot platform, if you will, was— is for classical guitar, and that was actually started 2 years before piano. And I was hired once the company raised enough funding to expand, uh, to help launch the piano platform. So I came on in the spring of 2019, and the first 4 to 6 months of my job was almost exclusively trying to recruit artists. So for every Garrick 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 Manny Acs, I was able to return to. He never said no, but what he said was, "Why me? I'm so—" He's so modest. "I don't know what I could offer you that would be useful." And then we weren't able to put something together, but 2 years later when I was able to show him what we did with Garrick, what we did with Lee on 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. They, 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 fees that Carnegie Hall— we're not going to pay him $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 Garrick, I was introduced to him through Nicholas Rizzotto, who's actually the artistic director at 92nd Street Y, wonderful organist. And he knew Garrick from organizing concerts there with him. And he set me up with him by email. Garrick happened to be in New York City when I was, spring or the summer of 2019. We met at the Nice Matin on 79th and Columbus, I think, uh, and, uh, 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, that night and I would have been happy. Um, 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 am branching out to other countries as well. And just gonna start sending basically the same version of the same email to everyone. And that's how I got people like, Simona Dinarsin and Rebecca Penney's 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 Argerich, if you're listening right now, I know, 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 mean, just the camera angles are so informative. You get the over-the-hands shot of, you know, one of these pianists playing, as well as the side angle, and, and just top audio quality, video quality, really good score.

Yes, score, exactly. Yeah, that is very helpful.

Yeah, 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 don't— we're not in a position yet that we can fly a production crew anywhere in the world. So we have really wonderful collaborators, you know, who are videographer and audio crews that, you know, in different parts of the country who we trust and rely on and have just done really great work for us. So, 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. You know, I have my hand in a lot of this, or most of it, but, you know, 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, and it's really a wonderful group of dedicated musicians and web developers, essentially.

So that, you know, brought me to my question, Ben. Um, you know how we— well, I think sometimes, you know, when you keep on thinking about something, that this thing will just show up. So in the beginning of pandemic, when we first started our podcast, and I remember I keep on noticing Tong Pei's, you know, online and online, and I, I registered for this lunch club, and all of a sudden I was connected with Abby, I think, on your team. And then we were like, oh wow, you know, Tonebase. 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, you know, how, um, but I want to know how, what is your role as a head of piano? Like how, uh, obviously you connect all the artists with, uh, you know, and but how does it work as with the programmers and the, you know, the technology? I think it's a very, you know, innovative, you know, because as musicians sometimes we are so used to just hiding in the practice room and practice. But what you guys are doing is so cool.

Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, Abhi is a genius. I think he's like 24, which— Oh really? I don't know. Which means he's very much— And he's one of the founders of ToneBase. 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. Um, Avi was the third founder to be added to the sort of triumvirate that began all of this, but the, uh, the sort of two original musicians who spawned the idea were Igor Lichman and, uh, Chris Garwood. And they are classical guitarists who met at Yale. Yale, right? Yeah, during their master's studying with Ben Verderi. And they met in a class taught by a woman named Astrid Baumgartner. 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 happen 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 Abhi were looking for a piano— 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 is a full-time job. It's what I do all the time. But I, knowing Peter, was looking for a job. I was— I had my doctorate and I was like, let's put this to work, you know, let's apply for the tenure-track positions, let's do the whole thing. And so I was— it was just good timing. It was right in the middle of that season when I was like waiting to hear back from, you know, the Boston University had a job open, you know, 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. Yeah. And Peter forwards it from Astrid, and I read the Tomebase 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 happen to be somebody who always loved media and film, and like every high school project I had in class, 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? 'Cause 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 be, 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, I was like, these are the 5 things that I dedicated my life to. And so I was like, and so I just, I couldn't believe it because I was, I had no idea what was going to be the next chapter in my life. And I wasn't particularly looking forward to it. So I just consider myself extremely lucky that that happened. And then 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. Um, but yeah, but just that connection really helped. And so Igor and Chris and Abhi, they met at this school. And just very briefly, Igor and Chris first started a kind of Facebook, um, 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, let's have great guitarists film their practice sessions, just like open Right, so you have a window in this kind of a— yeah, and then they, they sort of— that was their project for Astrid's class. And then, uh, that summer I believe they got involved with, um, the Yale Management School, who sort of mentored them a bit. And that's when they realized, okay, 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? So that's when they found Abhi, who is 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— and he played piano as a kid, but he leads the product team. And 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 backend 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 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 Emanuel Axe or whatever and had coffee with Garrett Golson. And none of this would even be seen if it weren't for the invisible people behind the scenes, you know, led Abby 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, Yukimi, go ahead.

I'm more interested in about the technical part. So, uh, you have a team of people who does all the cameras and setting up Audios and yeah.

So can you just tell us a little bit? Yeah, 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. Mm-hmm. Fancy. 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, they, some of them are musicians, some of them are coming from the media or the videography world. And Phil Ingle is just an incredible, like he was making music 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 is an audiophile and he just gets this stuff. And so they've helped design this set. They help 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 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 in 8K and you have bad lighting and the color profile's 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 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 are— 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. I should mention, uh, Point of Order Productions, uh, 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, so— 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 Boris Giltberg and and Claire Hong Si 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, with Manny Ax, which is going to be— oh my gosh, I could go watch lots of videos of Ax 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. You know, we have all these like 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. You know, these are like great examples, right? These days we're all like— they're all high-tech, you know, growing up from like a few years old, if they can come up with ideas like this, or, you know, I think TonBase is a great inspiration for the younger generation, right, to just brainstorm. You know, we don't have to be— and also just, I have to tell you a little secret. I was watching you with Seymour Bernstein last night again, probably for the fifth time, and I dropped a little cocktail, you know, tier. I studied with him when I was, um, I— so I moved here from China to Kansas when I was 17, and then at one point my teacher was like, you, you know, if you want to go to New York, go study with Seymour. And so like, I remember writing this email to Seymour in the library or something, and he was like, sure, come. And so like, I dragged my suitcase, come to New York City from Topeka, Kansas, and he was just so nice. He was just so nice to me. Isn't he amazing? He was just, you know, the hand, like you guys were talking about the hand, and he was like, you know, Clara, Clara, like Clara Schumann also touched this hand. I was just like, oh my God.

Well, long story short, 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 will want to be all of your teachers. He's just completely selfless and giving when it comes to, uh, his knowledge of piano. And he's one of the few serious— I mean, he's not like— he's actually weirdly not mainstream in the sense that like you're not going to see him. I mean, he has this incredible biography where he quit performing at 50. Sure. He, 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. Well, there's one called, I think, Angels and Monsters. Yeah. And there's a whole lot of monsters in the world, in the history of piano teaching, um, 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 you should that the job of the teacher is not to push technique and musicality into a student, but to draw it out of them and, and to reveal for them, help them reveal what they already know. Exactly. 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. You were so wonderful, and I, I hope in that session with me you kind of see it happening to me. Oh, for sure. That he's actually— it's, it's a magic trick. It's like he doesn't do anything at all. Uh, he, he doesn't say, that's the moon.

He really does have magic.

He sort of— he helps you look at the moon and discover it for yourself. So 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 them you know, 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, you know, all these things. I don't— did you study with him before you interviewed him or?

No, that's what's crazy. I met him like 3 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 mean, I can't believe he's 94.

Well, he looks still very young. My piano tuner, Telly, she's like best friend with him. So I still get update 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 Let's Just to skate and he was there and, you know, I had a friend and he was like, "Oh, Clara from Kansas, you're back! Where are you?" You know, it's like after all these years he still remembers you. He remembers everyone. And that's just like, oh my God, you know, how can that be possible? Anyway.

This concludes part 1 of our interview with Ben Lodi. Tune in next time to learn how ToneBase integrates with traditional lessons and their plans for expanding in the future.

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