Adding groove to traditional Japanese sounds

You’ve heard the koto used in Queen’s "The Prophet's Song," played by Brian Jones in Rolling Stones’ “Take It Or Leave It,” Dr. Dre’s “Still D.R.E.,” and many other productions across genres in contemporary and traditional music. It’s a beautiful, versatile ancient Japanese instrument and thanks to Sumie Kaneko, you can incorporate its sounds into your tracks.

For this pack, Kaneko tuned for a very traditional scale and then played melodic patterns, improvising over them. For the loops in this pack, she focused on adding more groove than traditional koto music. She took rhythmic ideas from jazz, then blurred all of these inspirational genres through improvisation.

Kaneko’s career started in 1995 as a winner of the Takasaki International Competition in koto performance. After graduating from Tokyo National University of the Arts, she moved to Boston in 2002 and studied jazz vocals at Berklee College of Music. She has performed at prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Getty Center, Boston Ballet, Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Kaneko also tours overseas as a cultural ambassador. She has been performed in South America with the Japan Foundation and every year since 2013, she is invited to the Middle East and South Asia on behalf of the Embassy of Japan. As an educator, she’s worked with Harvard University, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Princeton University, among other institutions.

Kaneko has released two albums featuring her unique and exquisite sounds. Her passion always lies in crafting original compositions. Currently, she is composing a suite of traditional instrument sounds.

This session was recorded at Aura Studio in Brooklyn, NY and is the first of two packs to be released with Kaneko. To record these sounds, C414 mics were used overhead Avedis Ma5 preamps. Shure SM7s were used to capture sound underneath and were run through a Great River preamp.