Career
Tanaka has played the piano from an early age. After graduating from the Osaka Seiko Gakuin High School, Tanaka attended Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (Music faculty - composition department), studying under Tomojirō Ikenouchi and other professors. Tanaka worked for three years at the advertising department of Victor Music Industries after he had graduated. He attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts for two years after he left Victor. After returning to Japan, Tanaka started his activities as composer in earnest.
While employed playing the piano in a hotel lounge, he was requested to arrange a song in Arcadia of My Youth: Endless Orbit SSX, a 1982 TV anime, and it became his first work as a composer. Afterwards, he produced some songs and arrangements for the Super Sentai series and his first work as the main composer was for the TV anime Konpora Kid (コンポラキッド, Konpora Kiddo?) in 1985.
His compositions are especially known for the "hot" strings and piano that he combines masterfully. He often produces orchestral compositions with brass instruments and the timpani that are simple and easy to listen to, and these are often used as the background music in TV programs. Because his early works were a little on the heavy and rock-ish side, it came to be that people would only request such music from him. This disappointed him for a while, as he wanted to create more varied music, but with the computer game Sakura Wars he was finally able to compose freely and prove his talents in other genres as well.
Notably, the background music in Gunbuster made his name and talent very famous among anime fans and is recognized as one of his most important works. He also handled the composition of Diebuster, a sequel series of Gunbuster, and showed a peculiar arrangement to his own work 17 years ago.
Another one of his most important works is often said to be The King of Braves GaoGaiGar, a 1997 TV anime, and GaoGaiGar Final, 2000 OVA.
He hosted the Dai Anime Hakurankai radio show on Tokai Radio together with the voice actress Konami Yoshida from April 1993 to September 1994. His discussions with Toshio Okada and Hiroshi Yamamoto about anime, originally published in the hm3 voice acting magazine, have been republished in book form.
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.
Read more about this topic: Kohei Tanaka (composer)
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