Studio Silkyoak

Ken Nakagawa from Japan is a composer and arranger. He was strongly influenced by Jazz / Fusion when he was a teenager. But his favorite music was very difficult and he could not play alone. His musical experience is limited and he has only participated in the marching band and recorder ensemble teams when he was in elementary school. Therefore he was interested in composing rather than playing an instrument. He wanted to sound all the instruments himself, so he bought a sequencer and started to compose. Then he became addicted to music.

There is another opportunity to broaden the musicality of his composition. One day he was given a tape from a friend. It was magnificent music all made with a synthesizer. With this experience, he not only expressed the original jazz / fusion songs on the synthesizer, but also constantly came to seek a new style.

When he grew up, there were several job choices that made use of the sequencer. One is midi data programming for karaoke which is a culture unique to Japan. The other was the creation of ringtones for cell phones. He examined both, but it was difficult to get a new job from them. This is because that the market shrink was already forecasted at the time. He had no career but decided to work as a composer. He sent demo tapes to several productions and started to work on soundtrack production at a small company. Most of them were BGM production on the PlayStation, but it was a huge experience. During this time his composition was separate from jazz and fusion, but instead he was able to gain new musicality. He was highly regarded for his synthesizer expression using a wind controller. That he played the ethnic wind instrument himself and did the music production was accepted as a novel thing at that time. Perhaps his childhood experience would have helped.

Currently, he leaves the company and works not only as a composer and arranger, but also works on the creation of original libraries for music creators or application developers.