Keiji Yamagishi

Born October 27, 1967? Keiji Yamagishi is a Japanese composer, sound designer, and sound programmer. His love for music started around high school when he wrote something on the guitar. Because he was shy about sharing his work, nobody really got the chance to listen to his music. While he was attending college, he bought a four track multitrack recorder, which led him into creating demo tapes. Unfortunately, he didn't really have friends to share his work with and never ended up sending his work to record companies or entering them in contests since he originally intended to be a pilot. Yoshihito Kakihara, the founder of Tecmo found out about Keiji when he attended an informational session for the company. After he found out Keiji played in a band, he asked Keiji to compose music for his company's games and Keiji took the job. Keiji finds it funny since Yoshihito didn't even ask for a sample of his work and just hired him on the spot, since nowadays, game developers require skilled musicians. Keiji's first project was the NES version of Star Force, in which he had to arrange the music from the arcade game. The first game in which he actually composed his own music was Tsuppari Ozumo for the Famicom. He liked that his music would finally be listened to by others. While working for Tecmo, it was tough for Keiji to create music on the NES since he could not use MIDI files and instead had to program the music in 6502 assembly. He also programmed the sound driver at Tecmo. His most prominent work was for the first Ninja Gaiden game, in which he went by the name 'More Yamasan'. According to Keiji, this was a name he used while attending college. Around the development of Ninja Gaiden and Captain Tsubasa, he was requested to create digitized drum samples for the NES. Keiji started his work at Tecmo in 1987 and ended it in 1993 when he went to work for Koei. Keiji no longer composes music for games, but he does still enjoy creating chiptunes and creates ringtones for mobile phones. He uses Logic to create his music and uses an EXS 24 for the instruments.