Ichika Nito

Biography

Ichika Nito is the Japanese guitarist who turned a phone camera and a headless guitar into a global following, with a two-handed style so fluid that viewers regularly accuse him of faking it. He was born July 7, 1994, in Osaka Prefecture, and his first instrument was not the guitar at all. At three he started learning jazz piano from his grandmother, a piano teacher, and his father's Bill Evans CDs left a mark that you can still hear in the soft, extended chords running through his music. As a teenager he went the other way and fell hard for heavy metal, learning every song on Iron Maiden's Killers and soaking up Van Halen.

He chose the guitar on purpose. Piano, he reasoned, already had a complete system and an enormous number of great players, while the guitar and bass still had room to explore. He wanted to move people with a single instrument, so he set out to build his own approach almost entirely by himself, working out tapping, two-handed parts and his own sense of rhythm without a teacher. He started posting short performance clips to Instagram in 2016, and their dreamy melodies and impossible-looking hand work spread fast both in Japan and overseas.

Here is the gem. Ichika was a university researcher studying viruses and was set to begin graduate school in April 2017. Then his debut EP, forn, came out that January and the response was so much bigger than expected that he dropped grad school to do music full time. Within months Ibanez signed him, he released an EP with guitarist gen as the duo Among the Sleep, and in July 2017 he played his first ever live show, opening for DADARAY at BIGCAT in Osaka. In 2021 Ibanez gave him the ICHI10, the first signature model the company had ever made for a Japanese artist and part of its first run of headless guitars.

His career since has run on several tracks at once. In 2018 he formed the instrumental band ichikoro at the invitation of Enon Kawatani, and in 2021 he started the band Dios with vocalist Tanaka and producer Sasanomaly, whose debut album CASTLE arrived in 2022. That same year he co-wrote and co-produced "more than life" with Travis Barker for the deluxe edition of Machine Gun Kelly's Mainstream Sellout. Total Guitar readers voted him the number eight guitarist in the world in 2020, his social following has passed five million with most of it outside Japan, and in January 2026 he released his first full-length solo album, The Moon's Elbow. He now headlines his own shows across Europe, North America and Asia, a long way from a lab bench in Japan.

Legendary Performance

First US Performance, Ibanez Stage, NAMM Show 2022

June 2022 · Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim, California

In June 2022, Ichika Nito stepped onto the Ibanez stage at the NAMM Show in Anaheim, California, and played for an American audience for the first time. For years his reputation had been built almost entirely online, through short clips filmed at home, and plenty of viewers wondered whether the impossibly smooth two-handed parts could be pulled off in front of a crowd without editing. At NAMM, the biggest gathering of the music products industry, he answered that question in real time.

The appearance came a year after Ibanez launched his ICHI10 signature model, the company's first signature guitar for a Japanese artist, so the booth was packed with players who had learned his name from Instagram. Footage of the set spread across YouTube and guitar news sites, which called it a rare chance to see him play live. Afterward he posted a simple message to concert promoters, asking for shows in many more countries.

They listened. NAMM was the turning point that moved him from internet phenomenon to touring artist. By 2024 he was headlining London's Union Chapel and playing Paris, Barcelona, Madrid and Manchester, and in 2025 he headlined the Echoplex in Los Angeles and The Crocodile in Seattle with sets built on songs like "I Miss You," "Isolation" and "Drowsy." The first American performance at a trade show booth became the starting point of a real live career.

Gear

Ibanez ICHI10 signature (headless) (2021)

Known for: Ibanez's first signature model for a Japanese artist

Ichika Nito's signature Ibanez ICHI10, announced in June 2021, is a headless guitar based on the Quest Q54 design, with a rounded neck profile and a cream finish inspired by the Ibanez Talman. It has a lightweight nyatoh body, a three-piece maple and bubinga neck, a roasted birdseye maple fretboard with 24 Jescar EVO Gold frets, and three R1 single-coil pickups, a deliberate break from the humbuckers used on the other Quest models.

Those choices fit his playing. The single coils give clear, glassy definition to every tapped note in his chords, which matters when both hands are playing different parts at once, and the headless design keeps the guitar small and light. Ichika has said that the light weight is the biggest benefit, and that he feels less stress and practices more with it. Ibanez has since added more Ichika models, including the ICHI00.

Signature Technique

Two-Handed Tapping and Jazz-Piano Harmony

The heart of Ichika Nito's style is two-handed playing. Instead of using his picking hand only to strike strings, he uses it to fret and tap notes on the neck, so both hands play independent parts like a pianist's left and right hands. One hand can hold a bass line or a rhythmic pattern while the other taps chords and melody higher up, and the result sounds like two guitarists, or a keyboard, playing at once.

His harmony comes from his jazz piano roots. He leans on soft, extended chords and voicings inspired by players like Bill Evans, and he moves them in ways that create a dreamy, emotional mood rather than the aggressive energy often associated with tapping. Natural harmonics, slides and percussive hits on the strings add sparkle and groove, and his clean tone keeps every note audible.

He developed nearly all of this on his own. He has explained that he worked out his tapping, two-handed parts and approach to rhythm by himself, and that he writes by building ideas in his head piece by piece, playing each part on the guitar, recording it and then assembling the song. He usually records in a single take, which means a lot of practice before the camera rolls, and it is why his one-take videos have become his best answer to people who claim his playing is fake.

His influence has been enormous for a player who came up online. Alongside Polyphia, Yvette Young and Plini, he helped spark the 2010s and 2020s wave of melodic, technical instrumental guitar, and countless young players around the world have learned to tap by trying to copy his short clips. He showed that a guitarist could build a global audience from a bedroom in Japan, one carefully crafted video at a time.