ROLI is coming to Japan with Yamaha

We're thrilled to share our vision in a country that contributes so profoundly to support musical instrument culture.

21 April 2026

I got my first paid job in my early teens, washing dishes for $4.25 an hour at Checkers Villa, a pizza restaurant in a low-roofed, one-story shack near where I grew up.

I remember the plates would regularly come back with pools of deep orange grease, often with cigarette butts extinguished in the remains of the crusts. It was repetitive work, but I had a very specific goal in mind. I was saving up for my first real purchase: a Yamaha Clavinova. I needed it so I could practice with headphones at all hours and accelerate my path to mastery of the piano.

I had to wash a lot of dishes, but it was worth it.

Over the years, I’ve owned and loved many Yamaha instruments. To this day, my whole family still plays on that original Clavinova. And it plays as well now as the day I proudly brought it home—a testament to a level of craftsmanship that is increasingly rare in our world.

So with this in mind, I am incredibly proud that ROLI will be officially launching in Japan, partnering with Yamaha Music Japan as our exclusive distributor, with products available in stores in Japan in the coming months.

I’ve had a lifelong interest in Japan, particularly the culture of “Monozukuri”—the art of making things with a soul. And Japan is, in many ways, the musical instrument capital of the world. It is home to the industry’s most legendary companies and a population more dedicated to music learning than perhaps anywhere else on earth.

This commitment to musicality isn't accidental. It began nearly 140 years ago during the Meiji era. As Japan opened itself to the wider world, the government issued a mandate that every child should learn an instrument, introducing Western scales and pedagogies to the national musical imagination.

One of the first entrepreneurs to meet this demand was Torakusu Yamaha. After repairing an old foreign organ at a local elementary school, he realised that it could be made in Japan. Not a musician himself, legend has it he carried his organ prototype across the mountains and brought it to the Tokyo Music School Authority for review, and ultimately studied music theory there. He realized that for the instrument to be truly expressive, it needed to be perfectly tuned. He famously said that it doesn't matter how perfectly an instrument is crafted if it is out of tune. This is why the Yamaha logo has three tuning forks.

“We realized that technology could also make learning easier and expression more powerful by understanding the gestures people use when they play. “

ROLI started over fifteen years ago. I was then in my first semester as a student at the Royal College of Art studying design. I had no background in design and felt lost. Then I saw an announcement that the Yamaha Design team was sponsoring a project on the future of musical instruments. I jumped at the opportunity and began brainstorming.

I remember sitting at the piano, thinking about the way a blues player slides from a black note to a white note. They are implying a glissando, but the physical interface of the piano prevents them from truly achieving it. I realised this was also about attunement; what if the instrument could tune itself to the player’s gestures? What if the piano could be redesigned to deliver that actual, fluid expression? That thought became the Seaboard— we tuned the physical interface to the expressive capabilities of the human hand, helping to create a new, more emotional approach to digital music making.

From there, we realized that technology could also make learning easier and expression more powerful by understanding the gestures people use when they play. This became Airwave.

Now, we are entering the age of AI. Our "AI Coach" is the first step in a much larger vision: creating instruments that ultimately tune themselves to you—to your specific interests, your unique needs, and your personal style. We are entering an era where music technology transcends the sound of music, and fosters many levels of relational resonance.

We're thrilled to share this vision in a country that contributes so profoundly to support musical instrument culture. And to celebrate doing so in partnership with Yamaha, the company that started it all here in Japan and played such a big role in my personal musical journey, as well as making a pivotal contribution to ROLI's existence, here's a video where I'm exploring the synergy of a Yamaha Transacoustic Grand Piano with Airwave.

The joy of musical learning and expression is a right, not a privilege, and today is a step forward in realising this vision.

Free the music.

Roland Lamb
Founder, ROLI

About Roland Lamb

Roland Lamb is co-founder and CEO of ROLI. He first had the idea for Seaboard while a student at the Royal College of Art, spinning ROLI out of his PhD. Roland has helped invent numerous innovations in music technology, including Seaboard, a pivotal role in establishing MPE, BLOCKS, LUMI, and most recently, the Airwave platform.

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