A standard guitar has six strings. ISAO’s main instruments have seven and eight. The extra strings are the starting point for almost everything he does.
Osaka
ISAO was born on 29 December 1977 in Ibaraki, a city in Osaka Prefecture. He made his major-label debut in 2000 with the band bright-NOA. In 2005 he formed the trio Cube-ray with bassist IKUO and drummer Koji Hasegawa, and he has also led a project of his own called Spark7 and released solo albums including A STRIDE and Gravity Core.
In 2014 he signed with the guitar maker ESP. His signature models carry the name RAIDEN: the eight-string RAIDEN-8 and the seven-string RAIDEN-7.
The Kami Band
In 2015, ISAO became one of the guitarists of the Kami Band, the backing group for BABYMETAL. It put him in the same pool of players as Takayoshi Ohmura and bassist BOH.
soLi
Around 2018 he met the violinist Saori Hoshino. The two formed an instrumental duo, soLi: an eight-string guitar and a violin, with no singer.
The pairing covers a lot of ground between two people. The violin sits at the top. The guitar’s added low strings reach down towards where a bass would be. The middle is shared.
The duo has been productive. A self-titled first album came in 2020, My Garden… in December 2021, Rebellion on 25 October 2023, and The Mother in August 2025. That is four albums in five years.
Why It Matters
Instrumental guitar records can be lonely things: one player and a backing track. ISAO went the other way and found a partner whose instrument could answer his. For a guitarist who had already been in bands for nearly two decades, starting a duo with a violinist was a real change of direction, and he has stuck with it.
Start with Rebellion, then The Mother.
