How to Write a #1 Album in a Bedroom

we have to have the first track of the album just beat that my Invisalign has five I have taken out my Invisalign my Invisalign and this is [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] Billy eilish is one of if not the most influential artist of the modern era Dave Grohl even compared her effect on younger generations to what Nirvana did during the 90s the year her breakout album when we all fall asleep where did we go came out she was the second most streamed artist in the World Behind only post Malone and you know what I'm gonna say next right they recorded it in their bedroom at home that's cool right genius not to mention actually they also recorded it on tour like in and out of hotel rooms and these songs aren't just good for being recorded in a bedroom they're not even like a good in a Lo-Fi way many consider phineas's work as a producer and an audio engineer on this album to be the gold standard for modern contemporary recording seriously I can't tell you how many times in audio school either a professor or a guest speaker would say if you want to be the next Phineas we just make music in a bedroom together we still do that and they let us do that this is to all of the kids who are making music in their bedroom today you're going to get one of these so here is what we're going to do we're going to analyze the production of this album in depth from the gear they use to the plugins to the mixing choices all the small granular details that kind of combine together to make the Billy eilish sound so that you can use these techniques for yourself or maybe just nerd out on some cool Billy eilish stuff so let's start with some backstory shall we we'll go through this kind of quick because I think a lot of people already know this door what is that is that 2001 A Space Odyssey that's kind of crazy I've been wanting to watch that movie forever and here it is in in my own video how I don't understand oh that's because I got a surf shark VPN and that gives us access to 98 different versions of Netflix across a bunch of different countries this one this is Japan you you always wanted to go to Japan right well you did it congrats good job I was thinking next we could go to Denmark to see the Lord of the Rings series what do you think dude that's awesome thanks for doing this yeah don't thank me I'm literally you anyways surfsharkvpn helps you out in a bunch of other ways besides just seeing a bunch of cool movies and Netflix and stuff like that surf shark VPN helps you browse the web way more securely protects you from identity theft it hides your locations from advertisers did you know that they can actually track your location and change the price depending on where you live oh really yeah they really can um anyways you're safe now you're welcome um now say the thing I told you to say please go on oh um you can use code audio Haze to get three months for free actually thanks to surfsharkvpn for sponsoring this video anyways where do you want to go next I was thinking Australia yeah maybe okay so Billy and Phineas grew up homeschooled in La they had a two-bedroom house and each one of them had a bedroom and their parents slept on a futon in the living room I would not do that for my child also I don't have a child this is a this is a theoretical child now the reason this is important is because they had more time and were encouraged to be creative within their own home everything involved and what we're about to discuss is because of the environment they grew up in we'll touch on this a little bit more towards the end but everything about this album centers around that studio in phineas's bedroom which leads us to our first section I'm a big sort of advocate for not buying a bunch of expensive gear you can make stuff with great stock plug-ins from logic or Ableton so let's go over the gear I was able to nail down while researching I'll link everything in the description if you wanted to go check that gear out they are affiliate links though so I will get a percentage of that Revenue so if you hate me just Google it first up to bat is the Neumann tlm-103 this is one of Neumann's more affordable more affordable transformer-less condenser microphones it is characterized by its smooth mostly neutral tone with a slight presence boost in the upper end it adds kind of a bit of a shine and air and breathiness to a vocal take this is the microphone that is almost exclusively used for vocals on the record he actually uses a Telefunken 251 for Billy now but that was not until the second album also Billy's technique when using this microphone is is really crucial here but we will get to that whenever we break down the production Phineas mixes through a universal Apollo 8 that is going into logic and he mixes out of Yamaha hs8s Billy I believe I saw has hs5s in her room Phineas records drums using either battery or logic's Native drum machine he frequently uses sound toys highly recommend soundtoys is awesome that's kind of where he's getting a lot of this grit and distortion on the low end if you're interested nasty in terms of Hardware instruments you'll often find Phineas using a rolly C board and an op1 but most of it is digital in the box but if you go no no I I compressed it that way on purpose I like it even if it was an accident if you like how it sounds then it's the correct way because taste is everything so with all of that gear in mind let's get down to the nitty-gritty shall we Billy and phineas's production choices here are really unique for a number of different reasons number one all the Rhythm and instrumentation is incredibly sparse often it's just composed of drums a bass line and maybe some pads in the high end to kind of ease up on all that low end buildup and number two nearly all harmonic content in Billy's songs are primarily composed of Billy's voice chordal information and melodic information Billy is often carrying 80 percent of that or at least on most of the tracks okay so I'm gonna break this down into instrumental and vocal then and we'll get a little bit more in depth on both of those and like I love minimum animalism I love simplicity so anything that's just like a wonderful foundation for other things to develop is really exciting to me one thing about the instruments on a billy eilish track is they're really not afraid to overload a signal creatively and what do I mean by that they often aren't afraid to produce in the wrong way letting instruments clip and distort until they are completely beyond their original tone this also kind of fills out the stereo information a little bit more because there aren't that many tracks something like a typical 808 sound that exists almost entirely in the sub bass it kind of fills out the mid-range and extends further than a traditional sort of sub-bass Might here check out this clip this this is what she sent me and so I layered one EQ band One compressor to sound as distorted another EQ band anywhere another series of compressors and another EQ band in talking about Rhythm you'll often find that a lot of these sounds are sampled and found sounds rather than your standard snare or hi-hat and this kind of allows them to subvert the traditional expectation for these instruments wait that happens in Australia that's that's just every time you cross a street in Australia you hear that wow all right yeah the thing people think are hi-hats and bad guy is actually just that duh now as we already mentioned oftentimes these instruments occupy primarily the low end leaving tons of open room for the vocal to sit atop of these beats are often pretty simple and they fill What's called the pocket something to serve as a foundation for the vocals to build off of and when they are they aren't very huge if that makes sense Phineas and Billy are big fans of what I call the anti-chorus or the anti-drop call it what you want but essentially what it is is building up this anticipation for this big giant chorus or something like that and then dropping into a much quieter groove-based pocket-based section you can also kind of think of like Dua lipas don't start now or Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes as example of using instruments to fulfill what would be kind of a larger chorus I can always like figure out a Harmony and Phineas is pretty much the same it's because we spent so much time in a choir right okay so vocal production this is huge in more ways than one because the recording techniques and the production used are all really built to make the vocals massive which is a bit ironic because in order to achieve this Billy sings incredibly quietly [Music] and that quiet singing that is the key here billy gets right up on top of this microphone almost treating a very sensitive condenser microphone like a dynamic and for Billy this works out marvelously but why because she's taking advantage of what we call the proximity effect whenever an artist is recording and gets closer to a microphone kind of like this a few things happen first an increase in bass and low end that makes Billy's vocals sound pretty massive pretty large for how quiet they are second it minimizes room Reflections that's important for any environment that isn't properly acoustically treated like a bedroom Studio like mine like anyone's the farther away you get you're going to hear more of the room more Reverb but by getting right on top of the microphone you get this sort of ASMR effect in fact that is exactly how ASMR artists achieve that effect the tlm-103 is a very sensitive microphone own and by recording it's such close proximity you're left with a very clean very large vocal now the reason I say for Billy specifically the way Billy sings is a very quiet her vocal technique lacks plosives a lot of times the P sounds like the sounds that can distort a sensitive microphone and there's not a lot of dynamic range in her vocal takes so she can be kind of quiet and be right up on the microphone but if she gets louder if they're gonna have to cut or she's gonna have to move back so this brings me to the next part of Billy's vocals the sheer amount of layers I don't have a final count on the vocal tracks but probably around a hundred we've already established that the instruments exist primarily in the low end and they are kind of the foundation to build the vocals on but Billy carries nearly all of the other harmonic information through her use of Harmony and her use of vocal doubling or essentially tracking the same part twice three times four times five times Etc in a row do you hear how exact every single letter is like listening to it I didn't sing the word white right that's not the right it's not the right way so whenever I was researching this video there was one Trope that kept showing up an obsession to detail in general but specifically an obsession with getting the right take those are all separate audio files that have been put into one take we got up to like 87 takes wow it's important to point out that across Billy's whole discography there is no vocal pitching no Auto-Tune the only point in time where they do auto-tune is if it's like a creative choice but that's really uncommon which we've done by the way one of yeah and everybody hated it so we're not doing it again I know it sounds like it if you would have asked me I would have said that there was some tuning there but they are obsessed with getting the perfect take not only on like the lead vocal but even like vocal throws like the duh and bad guy you don't know how many takes a duh you did 34. duh duh keep them coming now it may not seem like a big deal at first after all a lot of artists are obsessed with getting the right take but when you compound that across multiple layers of vocal harmonies sometimes 20 to 50 layers or even a hundred layers that's when the Perfection of all these takes really starts to take hold and you get the glossy Perfect Production value but you do it without vocal tuning it's really cool there's such a kind of a like private feeling to what we're doing because we're not at a recording studio where different people are there every day and people are down the hall like it's our house and it's where we live and it's where we have experienced everything now we all love analyzing the more measurable stuff what gear was used what techniques were used in production and mixing and no doubt that has a huge impact on the final product especially for something new and novel like this album was but more than anything I want to emphasize the power of the environment that this album was recorded in for those of you who know me you know my goal is to show you how amazing of a song a production of a mix that you can make without expensive gear and specifically doing it in your own home but the home studio can run deeper than that without the environment they grew up in without the relationship that Billy and Phineas have a home where you're encouraged to be creative where you have the time to write and record this record would have never existed create a space that you're comfortable with with people that you're also comfortable with that's the foundations of this record and that's what's really awesome about it this really could not have been done in five to six sessions in a professional studio that cost like two hundred dollars per hour no it wouldn't have happened like this and maybe your album can't either who knows and I know Phineas and Billy aren't using the cheapest gear out there but hey ocean eyes their breakout single was recorded on a 100 microphone called the at2020 I would assume that Scarlet 18i20 that is sitting above his fancy Apollo that was probably what they used to record on so if you have a Scarlet 2i2 you have that gear and that song is currently over a billion streams so look around at what you have now pick it up and start recording and with that cheesy note thank you so much if you made it this far I really never asked this but people are saying I should so I will Please Subscribe I guess that's it see you later

Channel: AudioHaze

Views: 190,611

Keywords: Billie Eilish, Billie Eilish Video Essay, Video essay Billie Eilish, When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go Video Essay, Video Essay When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go, Finneas Video Essay, Video Essay Finneas, Video, Essay, Billie, Eilish, Finneas, Billie Eilish studio, AudioHaze, Audio Haze

Id: -Oab5hUo7LY

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023