EA's Music Process
Biggs Writes:
I’ve been doing some research on types of jobs at EA. I came to the conclusion that the type of job I wanted would be in the same Dept as Steve Schnur, He is the head of the music dept. for EA. The only thing is, I dont know what kind of schooling I would have to go to in order to work in his department . Can anybody help?
Ken Replies:
I will tell you what I know about Steve and the current EA music process:
Steve comes from the music business and film business. I know he was the music supervisor on a few films. The big change in our policy is that we have shown that putting the name of the song, artist, and label on the screen while our game is running has great value. Steve leverages that value to the max.
I would suspect that a deep music and music licensing background plus being an avid gamer would what Steve would look for if he had a position to fill in the EA music dept.
I doubt Steve is editing tracks in PT or SoundForge but knowing the current audio tools is a big plus.
The process of getting music in EA games today has nothing at all to do with how we put music in the games just four years ago. I think we have improved the quality of our music in general. However, I doubt that the young, talented, hungry, just trying to get into game business, composers out there would agree with me. I’ve been involved with putting music in EA game for over nine years. We did it in many, many ways. A few were good. Most were not. I can say with confidence that our customers are getting better musical value today.
Updated on October 11th, 2013
Removed the link to Biggs’ email. Added a link for Ken.