Nobunari Yanagisawa is the president of the company his father established just before World War II. The company began as a repair shop, which focused on the saxophone. The factory was ...
Isao Tomita was the world-renowned composer of electronic music who famously used the Moog synthesizers to create award winning music that influenced a generation of music makers! Among ...
Ken Taniguchi runs the store his father opened in 1936 in Ochanomizu, Japan. The store started as a repair shop for accordions in the years before World War II. When US soldiers came in...
Kazuhiko Shima is the director of the Hamamatsu Musical Instrument Museum, which opened to the public in 1995. He was hired the year before to help assemble the instruments and create th...
Tadahiro Sato loved music and baseball! In fact after playing baseball for many years in his youth, he joined the music industry while playing baseball all along. His sister's husband e...
Hiroaki Oh-oka sat on a thin mat in front of a leg-less table in his traditional Japanese home where he outlined the history of the bamboo flutes his five- man company produced. The compa...
Hiro Miyaji is the president of Miyaji Music, which opened in 1917 in Japan. He later expanded the wholesale business his grandfather started to include retailing. The company began pro...
Yutaha Kurihara formed his own case company in Japan, which came into its own in the 1989s when he introduced a line of cases in a variety of colors. Since that time Yutaha has been very...
Takeshi Inomata is the noted jazz drummer who, among other things, helped design the first percussive instruments for Yamaha. His work with Yamaha took place during the early 1960s when ...
Toru Hora was classically trained on the piano and attended Juilliard. He joined the Buffet Crampon company in 1964 and both established and served as president of the Buffet Japan branch...
Motohichi Harada led the movement that brought the very first marching band to Japan, which took place in 1963. He has since worked for the NHK for over thirty years and formed the Japan...
Kenji Chiwaki followed in the footsteps of Toru Hora as the president of Buffet Crampon Japan. Hora-san opened the branch in Tokyo in 1967 and helped establish the brand within the Asian...
Quincy Jones! How can you write a few sentences to describe Quincy Jones? His long and amazing career in music has produced the soundtrack to many of our own life experiences and his driv...
Sanjiro Kawamorita was drafted into the Japanese Army during World War II. He served under Shigeru Kawai who hired Kawamorita-San and other soldiers from his unit after the war. He remain...
Ryoichi Sasaki was hired by Yamaha in 1967 working in the method book division. In 1978, he formed his own publishing company, Rittor Music, which focuses on producing music-themed magaz...
Akio Hiyoshi was on the engineering team at Yamaha in 1959 that designed the Electone Organ, which brought the small piano manufacturer into the electronic musical instrument market, wher...
Ken Oda was hired by Yamaha in 1967 to run their retail store in San Francisco, California. He continued to work for the company until his retirement at which point he joined Fender Musi...
Hirokazu Kato took part in the innovative engineering team at Yamaha in Japan who utilized FM Synthesis to create an electronic musical instrument, first the TRX prototype and then the re...
Mitsuo Kasahara served as the first president of Yamaha Corporation of America after setting up the branch office in Southern California in 1961. Three years earlier he established the f...
Kazuo Matsushita is the son of the founder of Audio-Technica, a creative and innovative company that has been an important part of the music industry since the early 1960s. When Kazuo b...
Katie Yu first heard about Tom Lee Music Company in Hong Kong while her children were taking music lessons. In 1991, she began working in the administrative office for the store. She fou...
Kenny Lee began playing music in grade school and has been passionate about it ever since those early years. When he heard from a friend about a job at Tom Lee Music Company in Hong Kong...
Frank Lee’s parents established Tom Lee Music Company in Hong Kong to bring quality musical instruments to their customers. As President of the company, Frank has focused on those origin...
Louis Ip was given a lead from a friend that Tom Lee Music in Hong Kong was hiring and he raced down to apply. He has since enjoyed one of the longest employments with the company, fifty...
Keith Chen joined the Tom Lee Music Company in Hong Kong as a guitar salesman. The large store had a small guitar department when Keith first joined the company and he took great pride i...
Neville Marten has enjoyed a long career as editor of Guitar Techniques, one of the magazines represented by his firm Future Publishing. Prior to that, he was editor of Guitarist magazin...
Clive Roberts has wonderful memories of his parent’s passion for music. His mother played piano and his father performed his own songs on the ukulele-banjo for the troops during World Wa...
David Marshall grew up in a musical home and played piano and cello at an early age. As part of the Wessex Youth Orchestra he played in many prestigious concerts including the Schools Pr...
Anthony Macari is the Managing Director of the music shop in London, England named by his father. Macari’s Musical Instruments first opened in 1958 and was established by Joe and Larry M...
Alun Hughes grew up in Wales, which has a very much musical community, which he became very active and interested. Playing saxophone, flute and clarinet, Alun realized at an early age th...