Discipline: Recording

We’d each knocked back a bottle of soju at the practice room, and Bongguk and I were trying to figure out what to do — decided to head out to Hongdae and see if anything was going on.
We were going to walk, but this guy started the car.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“Let’s take the car!”
“You’ve been drinking.”
“It’s fine, it’s five minutes away, what’s gonna happen?”
He turned left down an alley to park on the main street, and there was a cop waiting.
The second I thought, oh, we’re screwed — he floors it.
“Hey, hey, hey, what are you doing?!”
“I’m screwed, I’m on a license suspension right now — got caught coming back from the ski slopes last week. If they catch me now, I’m done!!!”
He sprinted flat-out for about 300 meters, then turned right toward Hapjeong station, left, left, right — I looked back.
No one there.
“Oh man, that was close”
— right as he let out a sigh of relief, a police car pulled up behind us.
A five-minute chase followed.
I was just riding shotgun, a bit player in this whole action scene, but my heart was pounding harder than the lead’s.
The road kept narrowing and my field of view shrank down to a pinhole.
As we hit the end of the alley, Bongguk said:
“Hyung. We’re not gonna make it, are we?”

Bongguk got taken in, and showed up at the practice room the next day.
Luckily they took the circumstances into account — a 910,000 won fine, license revoked, and released with a warning.
Normally you’d get an on-the-spot summary judgment as caught-in-the-act, but he got lucky and ran into a decent cop.

Having seen the potential in
“We Are the Punx,”
Bongguk talked some board-clothing company’s president into it and put together
“Save Your Mind — For the Extreme Riders,”
a tribute album for skateboard and snowboard fans.
Nine skate-punk bands, two tracks each, eighteen tracks total — and without me even knowing, a remastered version got re-released in 2024.
Half Brothers had two tracks on it too, of course.
The money from this finally got Bongguk out of homelessness.
It only lasted a few months, but he had a place of his own, and for the first time in his life I got to mooch actual meat off him. lol

Bongguk, who was supposed to show up for practice, went missing.
No contact for three weeks.
Had he died somewhere?
I went by his place, called everyone I knew who might know him — dead silence, nothing.
One Sunday afternoon a call came in to the practice room.
“Hello?”
“Do you know a Jeon Bongguk?”
“Uh, yeah — who’s this?”
“Go to the Yeongdeungpo Detention Center.”
The line went dead.
I went to the detention center.
He was there.
Head shaved down to nothing, wearing prison-issue rubber shoes, he walked into the visiting booth.
I don’t know why the tears came so fast —
“you son of a bitch”
came out of me before anything else did.
Turns out he’d been stalling on paying that 910,000 won fine, and one day he got caught in a random ID check at a crosswalk and arrested on the spot.
Well done.
Really well done.
At the detention center, they knock 30,000 won off the fine per day — but you have to fold paper bags for it.
910,000 won meant a three-month sentence.
He’d been in for three weeks, and I paid 600,000–700,000 won to get him out.
Goddamn it, the things I end up doing because of this guy.

About a year after I started my studio, I was talking with Jonghee and the idea came up to put together a punk compilation — thirty bands from all over the country, one track each, adding up to an album around 80 minutes long.
The project ran for almost six months.
After every recording session we’d have a drink together, and I got to know all kinds of punks along the way — bands coming up from the provinces, I’d put them up and get them drinking before recording.
By the time the last band was more or less done recording, I did the math on the total runtime: 81 minutes and change.
That’s a problem — a CD can hold about 80 minutes of tracks, and go over that and you risk burn failures or skipping during playback, so we had to trim it down under 80.
I cut the fade-outs at the ends of tracks as hard as I could get away with, cut the count-ins before songs, and for a couple of bands I called them up to ask if it’d be okay to trim this or that part — and somehow we barely made it fit.
Ridiculous.
I didn’t have any proper monitoring gear, so every day I’d remix and check it on whatever I could get my hands on — earphones, headphones, car audio, the stereo at home, anything.
I had zero mastering experience and tried to farm it out, but it was way too expensive, so with the excuse of
“well, we’re punk anyway,”
I just slapped on a compressor and limiter, cranked the volume to the max, and shipped it off to the CD plant.
Meanwhile Jonghee, who always dreamed big, tried to get this thing released through a major label.
Funny even thinking about it now — the two of us threw on semi-formal outfits that didn’t suit us at all and went to Seoul Records in Jongno.
“Hyung, if we look like kids they might lowball us in the negotiation.”
“Oh yeah? So what do we do? We are kids.”
“…”
We got lowballed.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that album ended up having a bigger impact on the punk scene than expected, and to this day it’s become a one-of-a-kind, hard-to-find classic.

That winter, I was out drinking at some barbecue place when I ran into Won Jonghee from Rux, who was home on leave from the army.
We talked about this and that and went our separate ways, and then one day Jonghee showed up at the practice room.
“Hyung! Let’s just record one of our songs for fun!”
I’d only ever recorded our own band’s demos — recording someone else’s band hadn’t even crossed my mind — but hey, why not, let’s give it a shot.
We didn’t have enough mics for the drums or a proper booth, so we just recorded by yelling cues back and forth at each other.
Whoa, this is actually fun.
It was Rux’s cover of Cock Sparrer’s
“Take ’em All”
— my first outside recording, and the song was great too.
From that day on Jonghee spread the word around, and I started recording punk bands.
I began getting paid a little, upgrading gear little by little, and that’s how my small studio got its start.
Since it had already begun, I wanted to do it properly, so I tore everything out and set out to build a real DIY booth.
At the materials shop they sold sandwich panels, so I ordered about ten of them and built a room roughly 4m by 6m.
I’d seen it done somewhere, so I went to Euljiro, bought twenty sheets of egg-crate foam, and lined the inside walls with it.
Man, my buddy and I got a little high on the adhesive fumes and were in a great mood for a while.
Hahaha.
I thought that was basically the whole job.
I had the guy helping me step outside the door while I went inside the room and shut it.
In theory, whatever I said shouldn’t have been audible to him outside.
So I shouted,
“Hey, can you hear me?”
and he answered,
“Yeah, loud and clear.”
And that answer came back to my own ear as clear as a whisper.
Uh, this isn’t right, this is a wash.
Hahaha.
That’s when it finally clicked why studio construction costs tens of millions of won — well, obviously, I didn’t have tens of millions of won.

I needed a different approach — a room inside a room, floating in mid-air.
First I got a dozen or so scrap tires from a local garage, laid them on the floor, and built the actual floor about 50cm off the walls using wood beams and 12mm plywood.
I put up walls with sandwich panels and fitted a ceiling on top.
Hung a door, lined the inside of the walls edge-to-edge with 10mm rubber sheeting, and then wallpapered over that with egg-crate foam again.
God, that adhesive smell — I don’t have much sense of smell, but that stuff didn’t feel like a smell so much as something acting directly on the brain, haha.
Either way, the booth was now physically disconnected from the building structure anywhere.
I picked up some glass someone had thrown out on the street, cut it into two 80cm x 120cm panes, and mounted one on the inner wall and one on the outer wall, making a rough communication channel between inside and outside.
Once I installed a jack box for the mic cables and put in an air conditioner, it started looking like the real thing.
A studio, finally?

Guitar amp: Hughes & Kettner TUBE 50
Bass amp: Peavey Combo 115
Drums: TAMA Swingstar
Mixer: Mackie 1604
Mics: assorted Rode, AKG, Shure
Monitors: Yamaha NS10
Audio interface: a domestic 8-channel unit
Software: Nuendo and assorted plugins, all pirated off torrents
In my own way, I’d scraped together the bare minimum gear.

Sometime around fall, I was washing my hair at the sink, head full of suds, when someone walked into the practice room.
“Who’s there?”
“I live upstairs!”
“What’s going on?”
“It’s so goddamn loud I can’t live like this!”
My eyes were stinging from the suds, so I did a quick rinse of just my face and kept talking.
He said he couldn’t take it anymore.
I asked what should we do, how loud is it exactly — he said it rattled his brain.
So I told him, go play the drums yourself, I’ll go up and listen.
It rattled my brain too.
Still, I didn’t think it was that loud and figured he was overreacting — then the cops showed up, then the landlord showed up.
After weeks of back-and-forth, we finally worked out a deal: only when upstairs was empty, before 9pm, that kind of thing, and barely kept the place running.
Once again, it taught me exactly why people sink tens of millions of won into building a studio.

All kinds of punks drifted in and out of the practice room. Recording or no recording, just having a hangout spot near Hongdae was enough — people would wander in on a whim, or crash out on the floor whenever they’d been drinking and had nowhere else to go.
One day I came in late and found something like twenty people asleep in the place, with no owner even home.

Bangsori brought in a kitten once, and it was so cute I told him to just leave it with me — so he said, take good care of him then, and actually left it behind. It had odd eyes and turned out to be male, so I named him Bbowi, and the two of us became inseparable.
We were recording Couch once, and Sharon asked if she was hearing a cat somewhere in the middle of the song. We listened together and weren’t sure — it kind of sounded like it, maybe…
I fired up the computer, muted the guitar, bass, and drums, and soloed just the gang-vocal channel — and there was Bbowi’s voice, meowing away, yaoooong yaoooong, hahaha. He must have crawled underneath the booth during the gang-vocal take, gotten stuck, and meowed his way straight into the recording.
Some time later, on a rainy day, Changrae rescued a little orange kitten he found shivering under a car in the rain and brought her to the practice room. She was female, and to rhyme with Bbowi we named her Bbojji. The two of them became a couple.
A year or two later, Bbojji’s belly started swelling. Oh my god — she was pregnant. Bbojji went into special care and got to enjoy the luxury of wet food.
Late one night, alone in the studio, Bbojji was struggling next to the TV, glancing over at me every so often and meowing. Guess they’re coming, I thought, guess they’re coming.
Pop, pop, pop — the kittens came out one by one, every 5 to 10 minutes. Five of them, though sadly two came out already dead.
The kittens grew fast and were constantly turning the practice room into chaos. One day the landlord asked me if I was keeping cats. I said yes, and he told me the entire building reeked of cat piss.
He told me to get rid of the cats. I said I couldn’t do that, so he told me to move out. I couldn’t do that either. After a lot of back and forth, it settled into: I’d rehome the kittens, keep Bbowi and Bbojji, and promise to manage things properly from then on.
Since I can’t smell anything, and Bongguk lived there too so maybe his nose had just gone numb to it, either way we tracked down where the smell was actually coming from — the floor of the recording booth. Since I’d built the booth on top of a tire foundation, there was about 20cm of empty space underneath it, and it turned out the kittens couldn’t share their parents’ litter box, so they’d been crawling down there and pissing and shitting everywhere. Disaster. How was I even supposed to clean that. No idea — I just dumped every chemical I had, Febreze, bleach, all of it, down there and sealed the whole area off with sponge and blankets.
I figured whoever eventually demolished that practice room someday was in for quite an experience. Hahaha.

Munhwasagidan got in touch — they wanted each band to record and release its own EP. One winter day I went down into some basement in Ewha, and there was Jaejun-hyung, a Tascam 24-channel console, three or four decks stacked up that took VHS tapes, and the drums had been mic’d up after a fashion. There was no separate booth, so everything happened in one room. Jaejun-hyung said let’s just go one take. You know the kind — if one guy screws up, everybody starts over. Hahaha.
Cues were by hand, or just by yelling — stop, stop, stop!! go, go, go!! Obviously there were no headphones or any monitoring system, and no metronome — not that we had the chops to use one anyway. After every take we’d all crowd around Jaejun-hyung’s spot to listen back, over and over.
I had no idea Bongguk’s guitar sounded this much like a mess, the drums were all over the place, the bass swung loud and quiet with no consistency — when we made our own demos we’d polish everything take by take so it came out relatively clean, but trying to nail it in one shot, every single one of us turned out to be a disaster.

The album came out, and I was so embarrassed by the sound quality and our playing that I never listened to it. But funnily enough, that album — now already twenty years old — started growing on me a few years back, and these days whenever I feel like listening to old Half Brothers songs, that’s the album I reach for first.
Back then I genuinely had no idea it was pure, raw energy itself. I guess you could call it the particular charm only a one-take recording has.

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.