When Billie Eilish spoke to Rolling Stone last month, one of the tidbits that emerged was that she came up with the name of her new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, after thinking that it was the name of a synth (or more likely synth preset) in Logic Pro.
Following extensive research - we searched the sound library - it became apparent that there is no preset of that name (or anything like it) in Logic’s built-in plugins, so we asked you if you had any idea what the real inspiration might be.
Step forward Maarten van der Peet, who we think might have cracked the case. He’s brought it to our attention that there’s a preset called ‘Hit me Soft, Hit me Hard’ in FabFilter Twin 3 (we think it was also included in Twin 2), which sounds remarkably like the name of Eilish’s album.
Are Eilish and Finneas - her brother and producer - FabFilter Twin users, though? It turns out that they are; in fact, in a Tweet dating from 2021, Finneas confirmed that Twin is one of the plugins that makes its way onto “every production I touch” (Spetrasonics Omnisphere and Keyscape and XLN Audio's RC-20 Retro Color being among the others). This being the case, it’s highly likely that Eilish has seen it, too.
Because I think it’s only fair- the plug-ins that make their way onto every production I touch are- Omnisphere, Keyscape, 808 Studio II, RC-Color, Fab Filter Twin and TRack Suite 5. Also- logic’s new sampler engines have completely completely changed the way I do drums. https://t.co/GpJkiPW8bLJune 26, 2021
Unless anyone has anything further to add, then, we’re happy to close the book on this one: Billie Eilish’s new album is named after a FabFilter Twin preset (sort of), not a Logic Pro one.
Explaining why she liked the sound of the title, Eilish told Rolling Stone: “I thought it was such a perfect encapsulation of what this album does. It’s an impossible request: You can’t be hit hard and soft. You can’t do anything hard and soft at the same time. I’m a pretty extremist person, and I really like when things are really intense physically, but I also love when things are very tender and sweet. I want two things at once. So I thought that was a really good way to describe me, and I love that it’s not possible.”
Hit Me Hard and Soft is released on 17 May.
