Dealer Focus: Alto Music
A Universal Store!
How do you create a Disneyland for musicians and audio geeks? If you’re Jon Haber, owner and president of Alto Music in Middletown New York, you find an old roller rink, buy up a bunch of top-of-the-line retail racks, guitar hooks and glass counters from a bankrupt music chain store and call up your old pal, industrial designer Paul Hirsch, to put it all together for you. Walk through the double glass doors that used to usher in pig-tailed girls with white skates draped around their necks and you’ll agree that the end result is breath-taking! Like the Grand Canyon, it’s difficult to covey with words just how LARGE this store is. It’s 30,000 square feet are at once totally open, yet neatly divided into guitar, keyboard, drum, accessory, live sound and recording departments. While Alto is packed with the latest gear, it does not have that cramped, stacked to the rafters feel of so many music stores. Customers can casually stroll through the departments, stopping here to pluck out a few notes on a Martin guitar and there to plunk out a few on a Kurzweil electronic piano.
"UA products are great and the people who work there are great also. Often customers who call up buy multiple UA products based upon our recommendation.”
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Alto Music
180 Carpenter Ave Middletown, NY 10940 phone # 845-692-6922 altomusic@altomusic.com www.altomusic.com |
All this did not happen by accident. Haber and Hirsch (they even sound like a architectural firm) put long hours into the “flow” of the store. Their goal was to build a place where customers would feel comfortable, welcome and would encourage to stroll about and get their hands on instruments. Every day musicians, studio owners and rental houses make the drive up from Manhattan, New Jersey and elsewhere to bask in the Alto experience, so we’d have to say that they’ve succeeded!
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