Tanaka, Kouhei

Kouhei Tanaka is a Japanese composer, arranger and singer. He is affiliated with the music production company IMAGINE. He has created numerous musical scores for famous anime TV series, OVAs, movies, computer games and tokusatsu series. Tanaka was born in Ebisubashi, Osaka, Osaka Prefecture on February 14, 1954.

He has created sweeping orchestral works for a range of formats, from anime audio CDs to Japanese game soundtracks.

Tanaka attended Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (Music Faculty, Composition Department), studying under Tomojiro Ikenouchi and other professors. Tanaka worked for three years at Victor Music Industries after he had graduated. He attended the Berklee College of Music for two years after he had left Victor. After returning to Japan, Tanaka started working as a composer.

Though he had playing at the hotel at first, he was requested to compose an inserted song of "Arcadia of My Youth: Endless Orbit SSX", a 1982 TV anime, and it became his first work as a composer. Afterwards, he handled some compositions of the inserted songs for the Super Sentai series and did the composition of the background music for a TV anime, Konpora Kid, in 1985 for the first time.

Notably, the Top o Nerae's (Gunbuster) BGM made his name and talent very famous among anime fans and is recognized as one of the his most important works. He also handled the composition of Top o Nerae 2 (Diebuster) and showed a peculiar arrangement to his own work 17 years ago.

His composition is especially known by the hot strings of that. Another his most important work is often enumerated Yuusha Ou GaoGaiGar (The King of Braves GaoGaiGar), a 1997 TV anime, and GaoGaiGar Final, 2000 OVA.

In 2002, he won the first Tokyo Anime Award for Best Music for the music of TV series Overman King Gainer.

On February 14, 2008, he opened an official web site and announced his intention to work also as a singer in the future. On July 4, he released his first album called Kokorone song 1st.