Falcom Sound Team jdk (#293)

[Headbanger]

Anyone know what J.D.K. means?

[Datschge]

Just Don't Know

(Nobody knows, seriously.)

[ritsukai]

Japan Dynamite Kids or Jumping Digital Kids according to this

[Xenofan 29A]

That passage ends with 「真相は不明である。」, though, so that may or may not be the actual truth.

[GoldfishX]

Has a nice ring to it. If that's what it truly is, I can't say I'm disappointed.

[Matron]

w00t!

[dissident93]

any backstory on that?

[Matron]

Originally Posted by dissident93

any backstory on that?

It's just a print screen of a certain part of this video.

[doppel9014]

An interview in Falcom Music Chroncicle mentioned about JDK

So Masayuki Kato was asked what does JDK stands for and here is his answer:
"It's just like 'AKB' (smile), though I can explain to you in detail, it's not something interesting."

Followed by Mieko Ishikawa, said that "the question was once raised in Falcom's AGM, where Mr. Kondo(Toshihiro Kondo) answered that 'Although I want to answer this, we would prefer you understand that "there are things better kept secret"'. The shareholder replied that he understood and sat back. In fact, even Mr. Kondo didn't know what is JDK. (Smile) He said that 'I just answered what I know, and they understood me'. "

-

Again, 真相は不明である。

[Datschge]

So essentially Just Don't Know is actually canon.

[Carl]

I like the page from the Chronicle Book where they talk about the inter-relation of various bands that some of Falcom's Arrangers and Performers came from...

[Matron]

They just don't remember what J.D.K. stands for anymore!

[CHz]

Yo, Falcomheads. I was poking around the archives of Falcom's old MIDI site "Falcom MIDI club" after I saw it linked in the booklet of the Brandish MIDI Collection to see if there was anything interesting there. Aside from an old photo of Hirofumi Matsuoka, I also found four JDK interviews. Anyone ever seen these before?

• Vantage Master #1: Hirofumi Matsuoka & Atsushi Shirakawa
• Vantage Master #2: Hirofumi Matsuoka, Hayato Sonoda, & Kaname Ohara
• Legend of Heroes IV: Atsushi Shirakawa, Hayato Sonoda, Wataru Ishibashi, & Hirokazu Matsumura (Matsuoka asking the questions)
• Legend of Heroes V: Atsushi Shirakawa, Hayato Sonoda, Wataru Ishibashi, Hirokazu Matsumura, & Masaru Nakajima (Matsuoka asking the questions)

They don't seem very in-depth or anything, but there might be some interesting tidbits if someone wants to translate them (I think Shirakawa says he did Vantage Master's opening and ending themes, for instance).

[Matron]

Originally Posted by CHz

Yo, Falcomheads. I was poking around the archives of Falcom's old MIDI site "Falcom MIDI club" after I saw it linked in the booklet of the Brandish MIDI Collection to see if there was anything interesting there. Aside from an old photo of Hirofumi Matsuoka, I also found four JDK interviews. Anyone ever seen these before?

• Vantage Master #1: Hirofumi Matsuoka & Atsushi Shirakawa
• Vantage Master #2: Hirofumi Matsuoka, Hayato Sonoda, & Kaname Ohara
• Legend of Heroes IV: Hirofumi Matsuoka, Atsushi Shirakawa, & Hayato Sonoda
• Legend of Heroes V: Atsushi Shirakawa, Hayato Sonoda, Wataru Ishibashi, Hirokazu Matsumura, & Masaru Nakajima

They don't seem very in-depth or anything, but there might be some interesting tidbits if someone wants to translate them (I think Shirakawa says he did Vantage Master's opening and ending themes, for instance).

Have you struck gold, CHz?! This blows my Hayato Sonoda's discoveries out of the water! Unfortunately I don't know Japanese (I'm beginning to learn it, though), but I can try to pass this to someone else. Maybe Floofy is interested.

[Dag]

If I get it correctly...

VM:
Shirakawa did mainly S.E., also the opening. Did the ending too but was rejected.
Sonoda and Ohara did music. Their senior's songs [ie.- not theirs] they liked were the snow stage (Sonoda/Ohara) and the volcano (Ohara).

LOV4/LOV5:
They talk about recommended listens (Shirakawa: events; Sonoda: events, opening/ending; Ishibashi: events, battles; Matsumura: battles, dungeons, etc) and whatnot, nothing direct.
Sonoda talks about S.E. in LOV5.

[Eriol]

I initially thought it was members at the time like Yukihiro Jindo for J. Jindo was around in 1985, when the name started to float around, right?

I also remember asking a Falcom representative over email a long time ago about that. The response was that so much time had passed, and since the original people who were around during J.D.K.'s time were no longer at the company, nobody currently at the company really knew anymore.

[Phonograph]

personally, I always thought that J was a phonotypo for G
-sound team Guitar.Drums.Keyboards

[jdkluv]

The four members, with the Falcom president, I think. Taken from their mobypicture account.

[Matron]

jdkluv is back in full force!

Bigger photo here.

The photo is from 2011, so there should be 3 composers (Sonoda, Unisaga and Momiyama). I can definitely identify Momiyama behind blurry Sonoda-san's ponytail (damn Sonoda, you're fast!), and I *think* Unisaga is the white guy with the black tie.

[Jormungand]

New Ys game announced for PS4/VitaL
http://gematsu.com/2014/09/ys-announced-ps4-ps-vita

[preta]

Hashimoto has not been a member since early 2016, and as far as I can tell, may not have contributed to any soundtracks at all.

[Jormungand]

—The staff interview page on Falcom’s official website has a new sound creator listed on it that has joined the company in 2019. Have we heard any of the music he’s been involved with in any of the company’s releases yet?

Kondo: “A good observation, but his work has yet to show up.”

https://www.gematsu.com/2020/04/falc...-west-and-more

[《J》]

That's Shuntaro Koguchi / 古口駿太郎 (interview, translation), who previously did quality assurance for Ys IX. He says in his interview that he was mainly in charge of debugging during his first year at Falcom. It appears he's a jazz pianist.

He sounds like a passionate guy, but he also says they already rejected 10 of his tracks and wants to do scenario writing in the future, so who knows how long he'll last. Not like he can be worse than Singa anyway, and being inspired by Takeshita is always good sign. Hopefully he will be easy to tell apart from the others, Ys IX wasn't remotely difficult for the most part.

Too bad this means Unisuga will probably be back down to composing 3-4 tracks per game, like during the Momiyama-Osaki era.

Originally Posted by Headbanger

Anyone know what J.D.K. means?

Just Directed by Kato

[kotorain]

I'm not sure if someone had already known but... finally I found the hi-res scan of sound team jdk member's group photo in 1992 from the album "Dragon Slayer J.D.K. Special" advertisement:
https://archive.org/details/micomBAS.../n202/mode/1up

here is my edited version (cleaned the text above):

https://imgur.com/a/hEaRDAL

[SerenissimusDux]

Originally Posted by kotorain

I'm not sure if someone had already known but... finally I found the hi-res scan of sound team jdk member's group photo in 1992 from the album "Dragon Slayer J.D.K. Special" advertisement:
https://archive.org/details/micomBAS.../n202/mode/1up

here is my edited version (cleaned the text above):
https://imgur.com/a/hEaRDAL

Nice! Anyone want to break down who's who? Most obvious ones would probably be the guy in the middle with the Umbrella as Tenmon, and I should hope the lady needs no introduction to anyone reading this, so can take that for granted.

No idea about anyone else though.

[《J》]

Originally Posted by SerenissimusDux

Nice! Anyone want to break down who's who? Most obvious ones would probably be the guy in the middle with the Umbrella as Tenmon, and I should hope the lady needs no introduction to anyone reading this, so can take that for granted.

No idea about anyone else though.

The man at the right looks a lot like Kaneda in Music from Brandish 3's booklet (the guy with the glasses -- Kaneda himself confirmed it). As for the others, Nakajima and Matsuoka can also be inferred by comparing with their profile photos, so probably upper left = Matsuoka and bottom left = Nakajima. Tsunashima should be the one with the microphone, he mentions in the Ys IV J.D.K. Special interview (translation) his passion for singing and karaoke.

Excellent work as always, Kotora! Given Falcom's lack of proper crediting and their restrictions on employee appearances/representation, this picture is very precious.