44 Facts About Jeremy Soule

Jeremy Soule is an American composer of soundtracks for film, television, and video games.

Jeremy Soule has composed soundtracks for over 60 games and over a dozen other works during his career, including The Elder Scrolls, Guild Wars, Total Annihilation, and the Harry Potter series.

Jeremy Soule became an employee of Square in 1994 after several years of private composition studies.

Several of Jeremy Soule's soundtracks were created with the help of his brother, Julian Jeremy Soule.

Jeremy Soule was born in 1975 in Keokuk, Iowa to a public school music teacher father and a graphic designer mother.

Jeremy Soule became interested in music and symphony orchestras at the age of five.

Jeremy Soule began taking piano lessons at an early age and became entranced with music, even writing music notation in the margins of his math homework; after his teachers and his father realized his talent, he began taking private lessons with professors from Western Illinois University when he was in sixth grade.

Jeremy Soule was split between trying to become a concert pianist and a composer when he grew up; he ended up deciding to become a composer once he realized how difficult it would be to do both.

Jeremy Soule began working at Square in Seattle only two weeks after first submitting his demo tapes.

Jeremy Soule was given the task by Square to score Secret of Evermore.

When Ron Gilbert of LucasArts left to form his own company, Humongous Entertainment, and Square moved from Seattle to Los Angeles, Jeremy Soule quit Square to score Gilbert's children's adventure game series, Putt-Putt; he was the company's third employee.

Jeremy Soule composed the soundtracks to several children's games over the next three years, including games in the Putt-Putt, Pajama Sam, and Freddi Fish series.

Jeremy Soule convinced Taylor that, given the large number of other real-time strategy games coming out at the same time as Total Annihilation with techno scores, that to separate themselves they needed to do a large orchestral score.

Jeremy Soule wagered a year's worth of pay that doing so would be successful; Gilbert felt that it was after the first sentence of the first review of the game he read was about the music.

Jeremy Soule spent the next two years composing music for the game's two expansion packs and for children's games.

The first large project that Jeremy Soule worked on through the company was 2000's Icewind Dale, which won the best music of the year award from both IGN and GameSpot.

In 2001, Jeremy Soule scored the first of five Harry Potter games that he would work on between then and 2005.

Jeremy Soule was in a major car accident in the mid 2000s, during which he had a momentary realisation that life is precious.

Jeremy Soule stated that the experience provided inspiration during his subsequent compositions.

Jeremy Soule worked on another of Chris Taylor's real-time strategy titles in 2007, with the launch of Supreme Commander.

Jeremy Soule says that the traffic numbers for DirectSong had surpassed some major record labels at times.

Jeremy Soule used DirectSong to sell "expansion packs" of music for games such as Guild Wars that could be played in game like the rest of the soundtrack.

Jeremy Soule worked on several major titles in the early 2010s, including The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Guild Wars 2.

Jeremy Soule would go on to compose the music for two of the official DLC packs for the game, Dragonborn and Dawnguard, both released in 2012.

Jeremy Soule was replaced as lead composer on the project later that year, with subsequent releases being composed by Maclaine Diemer.

In March 2013, Jeremy Soule launched a Kickstarter project to fund a classical music album called The Northerner: Jeremy Soule Symphony No 1, seeking $10,000 for the album.

The project features vocals in Old Norse, with Jeremy Soule citing the successful use of the similar Icelandic language by Malukah in one of her own projects during development.

Jeremy Soule began accepting refunds for the unreleased symphony in 2016.

In 2014, Jeremy Soule signed an MMO exclusivity deal with Sony Online Entertainment, to compose music for EverQuest Next and Landmark.

In 2015, Jeremy Soule composed a Dota 2 music pack, along with his brother Julian.

In 2014, Julian and Jeremy Soule co-founded an audio company named Virtual Sonics.

Jeremy Soule entered into a joint venture with Roland Corporation in 2016, with Soule appointed co-director.

Jeremy Soule denied the accusations, and was never charged with a crime.

Jeremy Soule's music has been featured in numerous top-selling games; he once estimated in an interview that around 10 million games with his music in them were sold in 2006 alone.

Selections of remixes of Jeremy Soule's work appear on English remixing websites such as OverClocked ReMix.

Jeremy Soule is a supporter of the game music arrangement community, even going so far as to submit his own arrangement to OverClocked ReMix.

Jeremy Soule did so to help promote and inspire younger and newer composers.

The track, "Squaresoft Variation", arranges the Final Fantasy VI piece "Terra"; Jeremy Soule has said that he chose the piece to remix because when he first started at Square he spent some time debugging the game before his composition duties for Evermore started.

Jeremy Soule rarely gets to see the game he is composing for in any sort of completed state before he begins work; as a result he bases many of his musical decisions on the company's previous games.

Jeremy Soule finds it much easier to compose a soundtrack to a game that is very visual in nature, such as a role-playing game.

Jeremy Soule tries to compose all of a game's soundtrack himself rather than in a team, though he sometimes collaborates with his brother.

Jeremy Soule prefers to call himself a "music practitioner", or someone who creates music in general rather than just one type of music as he is capable of many styles, such as Japanese pop, which he has written along with Jeff Miyahara.

Jeremy Soule considers music to be like a language, which can be arranged in many different ways if you understand the structure.

Jeremy Soule has said that the games he would most like to work on that he has not already are ones by Shigeru Miyamoto, a Final Fantasy game, and a Metroid game.