Thanks to her brother, Finneas, we already knew that Billie Eilish is a bit of a beast when it comes to comping her vocals, and now he’s confirmed he’s encouraging her to continue her journey into the production side of music-making by equipping her with a basic studio setup.
“I’ve been setting up Billie’s recording studio for her so she can do home production without me, because she’s very good at it!” he tells Guitar.com. “And it’s funny, I’ve been giving her, like, the bare minimum of stuff, just so that she learns it all. Y’know what I mean? I’m like ‘Listen, I could give you all the stuff that I use now, but it took me years to even have a use for it. And, if I give you this basic thing, it’ll make sense to you right away.’”
As has been said many times before, there can be great value in restricting the amount of gear you’re working with and learning it inside out. Given her history of working with Finneas, we’re guessing that Eilish is using a Mac with a copy of Logic Pro, but we wouldn’t like to guess at what she has beyond that (beyond saying some studio monitors, an audio interface, a MIDI keyboard and a microphone).
Of his own introduction to music production, Finneas told Consequence of Sound in 2021: “When I was 13 or 14 I got Logic Pro on my computer. The price had gone down, which was why I could afford it… and I started to love music production.”
However, he also admitted that it took him a while to create something that he was happy with.
“I recorded terrible little demos and stuff, and I didn’t really make anything that I thought sounded good at all for probably five years. It was about five years of making stuff all the time, and thinking it was all really bad.”
Of course, by helping Eilish learn the production ropes, there’s always the risk that Finneas could end up doing himself out of a job. However, given that he also co-writes his sister’s songs, we doubt that, somehow.
That said, it does remind us of what Max Martin confided to Ryan Tedder after they’d both won Grammys for working on Taylor Swift’s 1989 album.
“He kind of laughed, he pointed to all the other producers on the album, and he's like, ‘If she had, like, three more hours in the day, she would just figure out what we do and she would do it,’” recalled Tedder, “‘And she wouldn't need any of us.’”
