older brother. He loved listening to Larry
Carlton, Lee Ritenour, George Benson
and Pat Metheny. Around the same time,
he developed a profound fascination
with electronics, sparked by a shared
interest with his peers in amateur radio
and hi-fi audio.
Immediately upon graduating from high
school, he landed a job in electronics—
assembling synthesizers. For Roland.
It was 1978.
“My first job was assembling the GR-500,
so I bought one—and a JC-120. I
assembled GR-500, GR-300, Jupiter-4,
RE-201, CR-78 and so on for more than
five years.”
During this time, Yoshi made a decision:
he wanted to become an engineer. So,
during the day, he worked his assembly
job and at night, helped out on the
research and development team.
Eventually—luckily, he says—Yoshi found
12
INTERVIEW //
himself with a full-time desk in the R&D
department.
His first project was the SDE-3000, a
rackmount unit that the venerable Steve
Vai once called one of “the finest digital
delays I believe [has] ever been made.”
Vai purchased a pair of SDE-3000s in
1985 and details their illustrious
journey—as well as a couple of
memorable encounters with Yoshi—on
his blog. The post is a year old at this
point, but is still well worth the read.
Spoiler alert: three decades later, Vai
gave the delays back to Yoshi as a thank
you for making them in the first place.
“I used them ALL THE TIME,” says
Vai. “No other delays seemed to be
made with the care and attention to
quality as these units.
That level of meticulousness—one that
relied on the profoundly simple exercise
of just listening to the sound of all the
The Boss of Boss: A Tone Report interview with Yoshi Ikegami