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Chapter 9
Did I say “someday” last time? I need to correct that. Not “someday” but starting from the very first week of exercise, and not “once” but quite a few times.
“Is it hard?”
“Yeah… a lot.”
“See, I told you your stamina isn’t that good, unnie.”
“I want to say something back, but I’m too tired to even do that. Go away…”
“That’s why you should’ve exercised more often.”
“Try going through exam prep, see if you find time to work out…”
She laughs so cheerfully, geez…
Ever since I started working out this week, Ko Hyunseo’s needless worrying has almost completely died down. That’s a relief, at least.
Of course, I’m tired. Extremely tired… Even though I rested thoroughly over the weekend, I feel like my stamina drains the moment I work out.
And I have to go to practice after this? That has to be a joke…
“Aren’t you going to practice? We have to eat now to not be late.”
“I’m going, I’m going…”
How can you eat after working out this hard? Honestly, this kid has no concept of cutting people slack.
Truthfully, I mostly wanted to skip dinner and rest, but…
‘Skipping dinner is something you only do when you’re dieting.’
‘Can’t you cut me some slack?’
‘Eat something light at least. If you eat nothing, your stamina won’t come back up.’
‘…Ugh, seriously, fine.’
Just a few days ago, a brand-new nag about not skipping dinner after working out almost started, so I had no choice.
At 6:30 PM on the Friday of the third week of July, Ko Hyunseo and I headed back to the company building, amicably splitting a sandwich each.
From 7:00 we’d have group practice for the end-of-month evaluation again.
It really is a disaster I brought on myself…
The exercise, and the <Never Give Up> choreography too.
“Jaei, your intro, right here.”
“Is it weird?”
“No, no, it’s not weird. But I think we can bring it out more.”
Honestly, I’m far better suited to being a director than a player.
I have no confidence in being a player who follows a director’s instructions well, and no desire to be one either.
To begin with, I don’t even qualify as a player.
“The first line is fine, okay? But the next line feels a bit flat. What you see is really pretty and flashy…”
“Hmmm…”
“Oh, I don’t mean it badly. The seniors originally just sang it cleanly too… It’s that Jaei is really flashy, you could say, so by comparison the song feels flat? A balance issue.”
I’m confident in bringing out other people’s strengths. I have a decent eye and ear for it, and I’m good at catching things.
What the problem is, why it looks this way, or sounds this way… I’m confident in checking those quickly.
“I think it’d be prettier not to cut down the gestures…”
“I think so too. The problem is that the song sounds flat, so maybe emphasizing the rhythm a bit would be better?”
“How?”
“Let’s pull it forward a little. It’s 4/4, so… can you read sheet music?”
“I can. I played piano too!”
“Mm. Then… the rhythm here goes like this. A quarter note, two eighth notes, a half note. And before this measure there’s one more quarter note like this.”
This mini whiteboard is useful… I can sketch sheet music on the spot.
The team leader said the small whiteboard rarely gets used in the meeting room and told me to just leave it in the practice room, and it’s been genuinely handy.
“Oh, so these aren’t the same measure?”
“Right. It carries over from the last beat of the previous measure… In ‘geo-sen pa-do wa ba-ram-i,’ let’s make ‘sen’ an eighth note and change ‘pa,’ originally an eighth note, to a quarter note. The entrance is the same, but turn the rhythm ‘dan dan da-dan da-an’ into ‘dan da-dan dan da-an.’”
(Translator’s note: the lyric syllables here are Korean; the exact wording is approximated, since the point is the consonant shift.)
Hearing me, Hyun Jaei hummed the same measure to herself a few times, then nodded as if she’d roughly understood.
“If you do this, the pronunciation of ‘sen’ gets closer to a tense ‘ssen,’ right? Then naturally the ‘baram-i’ after it should move closer to ‘ppa’ and ‘pa’ sounds rather than ‘ba.’ That makes the sound and the pronunciation more dynamic… Think you’ll be confused?”
“No! It’s not an especially hard rhythm, I can do it.”
“Okay. Then when we run it again later, let’s try it this way.”
“Yes!”
I’m glad Hyun Jaei is a quick study. She’s such an eye-catching kid that if her vocals are filled out just a little, her overall performance polish will shoot up in no time.
The problem is…
“Ah… missed here again.”
“Where? Oh, the dance break.”
“Yeah. Beyond being late on the beat, I keep dropping moves one by one.”
“Hey, it’s fine. If we were perfect we’d have debuted already, right?”
“True, but… it just bothers me.”
“Hm?”
“I mean, it bothers me. Me.”
Right, the problem is me.
The system won’t give me quest points, so I can’t level up rapidly, and I have to keep up with the dance purely on my own ability…
I don’t like the word “roughly.”
It’s just… my temperament is built that way.
If I put my name on music and the rough handling shows, I’d absolutely hate it, and if I compromised with laziness and released something half-done when I could have made it better, I’d regret it forever.
Because of that, I don’t think I ever properly took a vacation in my past life. Money problems were part of it, but the biggest was that damned temperament, which poured all my time into work…
Well, despite saying all this, I’ve never really thought my personality itself was bad. I went that far because I liked it, too.
It’s just that with a personality like this, I figured I couldn’t be a player.
A player, meaning someone who stands on stage or sings directly, I think needs to know how to compromise.
Can someone who’s only satisfied when their live matches the recording, and gets hugely stressed over the smallest mistake, become a good singer? I don’t think so.
In my case, even if I wanted to be a good singer, my personality wouldn’t allow it.
If I’d chosen the singer-songwriter path in my past life, I’d have been the type to get enormous stress from every single performance…
I feel at ease only with recordings that meet my standards before going public. Live performances, where mistakes can slip out depending on condition no matter how much you practice, don’t suit me.
Let’s think. Even if I were a singer who only sang, I’d be the type to get extremely stressed.
But idols aren’t singers who only sing. They have to dance, be good on variety shows, and manage their looks as a must.
Even this monthly evaluation has dance in it as a matter of course.
However I think about it, whatever the criteria were, the system seems to have judged wrong. With a temperament like this, what idol…?
I’d figured out my own personality properly and was living well within my station, and suddenly I’m told to be an idol, which doesn’t suit me at all?
“Tsk.”
“Ow, that hurts! Stop it, Kang Sua.”
“Dear customer, first of all, your shoulders are extremely knotted.”
“It hurts, ah!”
“And you need to remember you haven’t even been dancing for a month. Please straighten your shoulders as you walk~”
“No, I know that…”
Ouch… Kang Sua suddenly started pressing into my shoulders, and why is her grip so strong?
Of course I know about beginner limits. I know that, for a beginner, I’m overdoing it like crazy to show something like a “one-month miracle.”
As Kang Sua said, for someone who’s practiced one month.
“But thinking about after debut, the public won’t view us while considering how long we practiced, right?”
“Wow… that’s true, but Jion, you’re seriously relentless.”
“Ah, I used to hear that at every band session…”
“I did hear from people who played sessions with you. That you’re a relentless guy who can’t stand gaps in the sound.”
“That’s because they were people capable of that much. It’s their major.”
“But I never expected your cutoff for your own work to be this ridiculously high.”
“If I’d gone easy on myself and only nagged the others, wouldn’t I have heard something worse than ‘relentless’?”
“That’s true. But dance isn’t even your major…”
“It’s also not an excuse that will work after debut, and… honestly, it’s just my personality problem.”
“Ugh, I should just stop talking. Anyway, go easier, you… you friend. Your eyes are about to crack the Apple Pad.”
“You were about to say ‘brat,’ weren’t you?”
“Let’s let it slide in recognition of my effort to use proper and pretty language.”
Kang Sua’s deadpan tone made me laugh without meaning to. The point was that I’d do my best as far as I could, so I hope she understood.
“But friend, our dance break can’t be perfectly matched anyway.”
“What are you going to say?”
“I’m in a similar situation to you…”
Ah.
When we’d been monitoring the dance break, I’d been so focused only on myself that I noticed late, but thinking about it, Kang Sua hadn’t followed the dance break well either…
“I think it’s hopeless for both of us to keep up with this short dance break by Wednesday, you know?”
“That’s very true. But it’s a little infuriating.”
“No, listen. Let’s just do what we’re good at.”
What we’re good at?
When I tilted my head slightly, Kang Sua whispered in a small voice as if sharing a secret operation.
“If we can’t match it, let’s step out to the side.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let’s add an ad-lib part! In the dance break section.”
“…? Go on, tell me more.”
My head, which had gone idle expecting only a joke, started turning again at Kang Sua’s single remark.
Honestly, the dance break would look much prettier with me and Kang Sua out of it… If we could step out naturally right before, that would be the best.
If only it worked.
Really, if only it worked!
“So you two unnies just step out to the side here?”
“Yes. If you listen here, there’s humming laid under the MR, right? If we add an ad-lib part following that humming line and step to the side, it solves the problem of not keeping up with the dance break, and the energy would get stronger.”
Maybe because she’s a major, Kang Sua clearly has the basic ear and sense for making things.
She pointed out something I hadn’t even thought of, since I’d been fixated on needing to follow the dance break.
Strictly speaking, the part Kang Sua mentioned isn’t humming but a section using a vocal chops source.
You know, those things. Sounds that are clearly human voice, but you wonder whether anyone could record that one by one: effect-drenched, voice-altered sounds. That’s vocal chops.
They’re usually treated as sample tracks rather than vocals, so… it’s something I hadn’t thought of at all.
In <Never Give Up>, a short dance break comes right after the second chorus, and from the bridge that follows, the song goes up half a key.
The already strongly rising energy explodes, or you could say it swells with emotion. Something like that, anyway.
After the dance break it’s closer to what you’d call a vocal power show… and honestly, that made the dance break feel even more burdensome.
What this means is that the dance break is a build-up.
A part that stacks up energy so that when it bursts, the burst doesn’t feel awkward.
While the electric guitar rages flamboyantly, a soft woo— sound is laid underneath. Kang Sua caught that and proposed using it.
“Isn’t it too high? Unnies sing almost all of the back part…”
“It’s not high. If we add the ad-lib line like that, the top note is E-flat, right?”
“Yeah, it should be E-flat. And if we’re singing the final ad-lib as is anyway, we go up to F-sharp, so…”
“I find it so amazing that you unnies say that note isn’t high…”
It’s a range we have to sing anyway? When Kang Sua shrugged, Hyun Jaei stared at us as if marveling.
Well, from our side, you’re the amazing one…
“Honestly, if it’s a choice between nailing the dance break details or adding the ad-lib line, I’m for the ad-lib. In terms of polish too, it seems better for us to be out of the dance break.”
The kids who’d looked doubtful when Kang Sua said it now nodded with expressions of “she must have a plan,” now that I’d voiced my agreement too.
As expected, Lee Hanbyeol’s officially certified mental age of a kindergartener is steadily losing trust… Joke around a little less.
“But if we do this, Sua and I have to step to the side right after verse two, so because of the movement lines, someone other than me has to sing the last bar of the second chorus, okay?”
It’s not a super high-difficulty part, but the song starts really building here, so the pitch is high and it needs a bit more care.
Honestly, I’d decided who to hand this part to the moment I made the plan to slip out for the ad-lib.
“Hanbyeol, do you want to take this?”
“Me…?!”
“I think it’d suit you. If possible I’d like Hanbyeol to do it, what do you think?”
In the big picture of my plan, Lee Hanbyeol will be the voice that carries Evergreat’s identity. Every team has one voice that comes to mind, that kind of role.
Lee Hanbyeol needs to be able to handle important parts with her own unique, pretty vocal tone going forward.
I’ll be giving her parts often anyway, so it’s good to start now. There’s still some time left, so it’s quite doable.
When a chance to grow someone comes, a good producer shouldn’t miss it!
…This is absolutely not an excuse for dodging the dance break. Really.
