String Player Gamer (he/him)

Diwa de Leon (String Player Gamer) is a Filipino composer, music producer, violinist, and content creator born and raised in the Philippines.

After falling in love with the music of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, eleven-year-old Diwa de Leon’s video game music journey took root. Fast forward to many years later, and hundreds of video games beaten and immersed in, Diwa, now a professional musician who goes by the name String Player Gamer aims to amplify his childhood nerd nostalgia into high quality, musical productions for everyone to enjoy.

Diwa comes from a very musical family in which the study and appreciation of music was a normalcy in everyday life. He studied piano as early as 4 years old and already dabbled in composing at age 5. Upon his mom’s recommendation, he began taking violin lessons at 8, reluctantly. Feeling the pressure of being pigeonholed into a musical career, Diwa shied away from music and began taking more interest in the visual arts.

He attended high school at the Philippine High School for the Arts, the only public arts high school in the country, as a visual arts major. He graduated as the valedictorian in 1997. He took one year of landscape architecture in college but quickly got bored of it. By this time, his musical roots were banging at the door and he could not escape it. He finally accepted his fate and shifted to music, majoring in composition at the University of the Philippines in 1999.

A bevy of musical adventures begins including forming the world fusion band, Makiling Ensemble with high school buddies, who produced 3 studio albums and graced international and local stages for more than a decade, a film and tv composing career that started in 2006 which gave him projects such as writing music for Survivor Philippines, Netflix’s AMO, and a dozen film awards and nominations.

In 2008, Diwa began to upload video game music covers on his YouTube channel as an experiment. His video called “Legend of Zelda Violin Medley” became an unexpected viral hit in his channel and received shout-outs in big gaming sites such as Kotaku. Diwa used this momentum to try and build up a name for himself on YouTube. In 2013, he made a crucial decision to take his YouTube game to the next level by uploading weekly video game covers, and rebranding his channel as “String Player Gamer”. It was this moment that started his now YouTube career.

In 2017, he abandoned a lucrative and lauded career as a film composer in the Philippines and moved to the United States after being accepted under the extraordinary ability visa, to work as a full-time musician and content creator working in the video game music industry, building up on his initial success of producing high-quality video game music covers.

His videos on YouTube have been viewed over 40 million times, with 148,000 subscribers which he calls “Stringees”. His music has been played over 45 million times on Spotify.

He is currently based in the Washington, DC area. For bookings and general inquiries, send an email to Diwa directly.