Quote from Billie Eilish’s’ brother and engineer Finneas
Posted: Feb 15, 2025 12:01 pm
Now I don’t feel as bad with my very minimalist approach- I think her records sound great.
He also mentions recording her vocals with a TLM-103 and an AT 2020.
“Unsurprisingly, given the sentiments he expresses, Finneas is as minimalist in the box as he is out of it. "All of the sounds on 'Ocean Eyes' were Logic stock sounds, which I tweaked a bit with EQ and layered. Now I have quite a few plug-ins, but honestly, I still feel like being very minimalist in my approach. The three plug-ins for sounds that I used the most on Billie's album are Spectrasonics Omnisphere, Keyscape and Trillion. They are very good plug-ins. Keyscape is amazing. I could not talk enough about how much I like that.
"For the rest, most of what I did on the album was play a lot of live acoustic guitar, live electric guitar and live bass. Quantising has had a really big impact on music, so I quantise pretty much all my drums and my bass synths, to make sure they are all locked in with each other. But I don't generally quantise synth or piano patches, and obviously when you are playing real instruments, it's much harder to quantise them and make them sound authentic. I'm a big fan of doing a lot of takes! I just play a part until it is right, even if it is a MIDI part. I think of that as my rehearsal. After playing a tricky part for hours, I am a better player!"
He also mentions recording her vocals with a TLM-103 and an AT 2020.
“Unsurprisingly, given the sentiments he expresses, Finneas is as minimalist in the box as he is out of it. "All of the sounds on 'Ocean Eyes' were Logic stock sounds, which I tweaked a bit with EQ and layered. Now I have quite a few plug-ins, but honestly, I still feel like being very minimalist in my approach. The three plug-ins for sounds that I used the most on Billie's album are Spectrasonics Omnisphere, Keyscape and Trillion. They are very good plug-ins. Keyscape is amazing. I could not talk enough about how much I like that.
"For the rest, most of what I did on the album was play a lot of live acoustic guitar, live electric guitar and live bass. Quantising has had a really big impact on music, so I quantise pretty much all my drums and my bass synths, to make sure they are all locked in with each other. But I don't generally quantise synth or piano patches, and obviously when you are playing real instruments, it's much harder to quantise them and make them sound authentic. I'm a big fan of doing a lot of takes! I just play a part until it is right, even if it is a MIDI part. I think of that as my rehearsal. After playing a tricky part for hours, I am a better player!"
