How did you begin working with Roland?
I've been a musician since grade school. Trumpet was my instrument. I took to it really quickly – Music just became part of my DNA. Roland was always my favorite brand. In high school, I discovered this storage room that had a Roland SYSTEM-100 [synthesizer] and a TEAC A-3440 open reel recorder. Nobody was using it! Some of my first experiments were learning how to recreate Kraftwerk and Devo songs one track at a time, and then mic'ing a snare drum and whatnot. I just got hooked. A big part of it was Roland’s slogan at the time, "We Design the Future." For me, as a young musician and reading lots of science fiction, that slogan really pulled me in. For a couple of years right after high school, I was playing in bands. I wanted to do the rock star thing; specifically progressive rock. I ended up working in Vancouver's largest music store, and pretty soon was working with keyboards, synthesizers, and kind of the first stages of computers in music in '85 and '86.
Oh man, those must have been exciting times!
I mean, yeah. Super, super exciting times. Everything was just exploding and there was a new story every week. I'd come into work and there was something new from someone. And, of course, MIDI was only a couple of years old at that point, so it was starting to propagate and have its influence. Computers were coming in; first for sequencing, then digital audio with the [Alesis] ADAT and TASCAM DA-88 and things like that. It just so happened that the founder of Roland Canada was from Vancouver, so fortunately I got a chance to join Roland in 1992 as a Product Specialist, which meant I went everywhere – from music stores to libraries and museums – doing clinics and seminars, teaching people how to use this technology that was new to pretty much everybody. I discovered that not only did I really enjoy doing that, but I had a bit of a gift for taking really complex topics and distilling them down to language that very right-brained creative people could wrap their heads around. Eventually, I moved into marketing roles. Flash forward to 2008, and I was asked to take over the presidency of the Canadian company by the person who created Roland, Mr. [Ikutaro] Kakehashi. This was something I never had my hand up for – I was this synth geek, composer, sound designer, and wannabe rock star. But though the people in this role before me had come from a business or finance background, Mr. Kakehashi felt that my background in product and customer experience prepared me well.
How then did you make your way to the Roland Future Design Lab?
Eventually, I was asked to move to Los Angeles to help start the company's first global marketing organization. I did a similar thing, again, for what we eventually called "global customer experience," or GCX which is really everything that happens after you buy something, from support to service and so on. Throughout that time, several of the people who had gone onto become the president of the worldwide company were my friends. Many of them were engineers. One of those people, Mr. [Masahiro] Minowa, who's now our CEO, was who I reported to directly for a period of time. He and I had this kind of rolling conversation, which started with our mutual appreciation for that phrase that Roland had introduced in the '80s, "We Design the Future." He always felt that if we could ever make this our decision, we need to bring that slogan back. But make it more than a slogan – let's point to a real, solid reason as to why we're bringing it back. This conversation rolled nicely into a related topic – one of the long-standing problems that all tech companies face, Roland included, is that there are hundreds of engineers between hardware, software, platform, and core technologies, who are working on all of our products across all of our brands around the world. There's a necessary focus on the near term – say, a three-to-five year window – where people are proposing the ideas, building the roadmaps, designing and building the products that drive revenue, that form the lifeblood of the company. But it's difficult to look out past that. We felt that perhaps what was needed was a form of incubation zone, a sort of think tank, where people can experiment and where they can fail fast and fall forward.
It sounds like you're describing Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.
That's exactly right. The biggest, most successful tech brands of today – Apple, Meta, Google, etc. – all have something like this in one way or another. Some brands make these efforts more forward-facing, like for example Sony CSL (Computer Science Labs). But some of them keep this stuff more backroom, below ground. I started to lean into this idea and Mr. Minowa very much agreed and had his own ideas in this area, and a few months later he asked me to head what became the Roland Future Design Lab, which is now in its second year. Our objective isn't necessarily to build finished things that we commercialize. Rather, we scan the horizon and look for opportunities in emerging technologies, such as AI and machine learning, extended reality, the Internet of Things (IoT), and find a way to bring them into music creation. And one of the things that's really important for us is that, with anything we do, we try and get it into the public view as early as we dare – to build something to a functional but not necessarily finished form, get it into people's hands, and get feedback.
