Paul Togioka [musician] - Kvic - Tv3

Hi, my name is Paul Togioka, I’m originally from Kekaha. I’m an electrical engineer by education, but now I work for the county as a civil engineer. Believe it or not, I actually started off playing music professionally as a bluegrass banjo player. The 5 string banjo and the G slack key tuning are the same thing, so it was easy for me to transition over. That’s why in my slack key playing there’s traits of bluegrass music, or I use banjo techniques. I do compose original music, I could be just driving in the car or at work and I would hear the melodies in my head. If I’m not around a guitar, what I usually do is call my home phone, wait until the voice recorder picks up and I hum the melody in there so that later on I can get back in there and try and learn the song, because it’s gone if you don’t record it fast. So an example being, on my next album that’s coming out, there’s a song named Kiahuna Plantation Shuffle, and I was driving around Koloa and that melody popped into my head. Luckily I had my guitar, but I needed a place to actually figure out the chords. So I pulled into a parking lot and started learning the song, and it just so happened to be the Kiahuna plantation, so that’s how that song got it’s name. Another song that I wrote is called The Journey Home. It was my uncle’s 86th birthday party, and he was in failing health, so I decided to show up, and when I got there, his health had deteriorated much more than I had expected. I was standing in the doorway of his home looking in and he was surrounded by his family, his children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters, and no more than 15 minutes since I got there he had passed on. And I wasn’t sure what to do, because for me it was a really uncomfortable feeling, so I started backpedaling out the doorway. When I got to the garage, a strong gust of wind came blowing through, and I’m not spiritual, but that kind of made me realize that he’s probably still here with us, maybe not in a physical form, but his passing was the building blocks for something else to come. Those are moments that inspire me to write or a melody pops into my head, and for me I call home to my voicemail, and I hum the song, and sometimes I can’t even recognize my humming, so you just lose the song, but that’s how it goes. People can find my music mostly online. There’s local kiosks like Paradise Music, but mostly everything you can get is online these days. I do have a website and it’s www.paultogioka.com. I’d like to thank my family, my parents and my sisters, I’d like to thank Dr. Roger Netzer, he was the one that gave me the encouragement to actually play professionally. I’d also like to thank Hal Kinneman for teaching me how to play the slack key guitar. Taught me how to play the piano. Milton Lau of Ka Hoku Productions and Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Festivals for taking me under his wing and taking me on tour and making me feel comfortable at those events.