Discipline: Music

Once I had about ten songs, I decided to try recording them.
For drums, I had neither mics nor a multichannel mixer, so I tried doing it all in MIDI — installed Cakewalk (which I’d used before at Yeol’s place) and tested every drum MIDI sound I could find, but man, it all sounded way too mechanical.
I went browsing used drum machines at Nagwon Arcade and found a Roland R-8 with a pretty realistic acoustic drum sound I liked, so I bought it for something like 160,000 won.
It had pads built in, so I ran a metronome and played the basic beat by finger, then refined it bit by bit afterward.
I didn’t have a bass amp, so I recorded bass by running it direct through a SansAmp Bass Driver DI box I’d been using as an effects pedal; guitar went through a Line 6 POD, and for vocals I just used the SM57 I already had.
I had no idea how mixing or mastering actually worked, so I just did whatever sounded good to my ear — I remember losing whole days to it, completely lost in the fun without even noticing time pass.
I burned exactly 30 CDs, and for the cover I just photocopied a rough sketch I’d doodled on A4 paper.
Whatever the case, it was my first demo, my first actual finished thing. Since only 30 copies exist, I even indulged in the ridiculous fantasy that if we ever got as famous as Green Day, each copy might be worth a hundred million won.

After getting an early discharge from the army, I wrote some more songs.
There was a friend at school named Yeol — a total computer genius.
He was into music too, and we spent a lot of time together back then, copying Gary Moore licks and talking about some band called Rancid, that kind of thing.
One day I played him something I’d recorded, and he said,
“Hyung, don’t do it like that — come to my place, I’ll take care of it.”
Huh?
His studio apartment was on the 3rd floor, right across from the
“Underground Club”
in Hongdae.
He had three computers going and all kinds of music gear scattered around.
A few mouse clicks and one measure of a drum clip was done.
He copied and pasted it a dozen-plus times, dropped in a few fills between the verse and chorus, and the whole drum track was finished.
He opened a new bass channel underneath and recorded the bass.
I kept messing up and wanting to redo it, but he told me not to bother — just play through to the end and only redo the parts that were wrong.
I had no idea what was even happening, so I just did whatever he told me.
Guitar and vocals went the same way, done in a matter of hours, and just like that a demo existed.
What kind of new world was this?
I was floored — genuinely shook to my core — and the whole way home a thousand ideas and plans came flooding in.
The plan went straight into action.
I ran off to Yongsan and dropped over 2 million won.
A Pentium III, 256MB of RAM — graphics cards weren’t really a thing yet — and about 400,000–500,000 won went into a Hoontech sound card.
The problem was I was completely computer-illiterate at the time and had no idea what to do, so I wrestled with the stuff for days and nights, and Yeol would come over and pull all-nighters with me.
Back then, Windows 98 machines had terrible hardware compatibility, so I’d change an IRQ number, revert it, reboot — hundreds of times over — get the sound card recognized and the network would drop, that kind of thing.
I didn’t even know where the power switch was on a computer, and little by little I was falling down the path of becoming a full nerd.
I became totally confident that you didn’t need 100 million won worth of pro audio gear — just 2 million won could get you a home studio — and around the time a savings plan my mom had talked me into was a little over half-filled, that confidence is what pushed me to use it as collateral and take out a 20 million won loan.
Everything moved forward without a hitch after that.
I went around real estate offices near Hongdae hunting for a decent basement space, and ended up signing a lease on a place behind-behind-behind-behind President Kim Dae-jung’s private residence, down an alley by the train tracks.
My Donggyo-dong life began.
I was 23.