HOW TO K-POP

back in December I made a video about how an old remake of mine had been used in an actual kpop production this meant that on all levels except credential I am a kpop producer and as an authority on the genre I felt I owed it to you to show you how to make one of the biggest growing global phenomena in music today this is how to kpop [Music] so let's get this out of the way kpop pop music from South Korea is still pop music and while a lot of this tutorial could just be explaining the concepts of pop I'll focus more on what makes kpop unique from Western pop music and it is worth bringing up Western pop music as kpop is not only influenced by Western pop music but Western pop often has a hand in creating kpop let's go behind the scenes of this BTS album and you might see some familiar names Ed Sheeran Fred Gibson Ed Sheeran's producer Troye Sivan Ally tamposi who wrote let me love you senorita and Havana EDM Steve Aoki Andrew Taggart of the EDM chainsmokers English bad arcades EDM Audion there's also lots of names I've never heard of that seem to be producers that also have had a hand in many Western pop productions this isn't to say all kpop is made by Western songwriters or producers it really isn't but there was a lot more overlap than I was expecting I think one of the first noticeable things about kpop from an outsider perspective is the size of the axe western pop is currently dominated by single person acts whereas the top kpop acts are these huge group clusters of people here we go ETS have seven minutes twice have nine once the boy's eyes e1 and Luna all have 12 each EXO used to have 12 but then three members due to contact disputes 17 ironically has 13 14 you had 14 until they disbanded very sad 13 ironically has 17 just kidding I made that one up NCT has 21 [Music] because k-pop groups have so many members some groups will split the members into subunits let's take the 21 member group NCT as an example here are the subunits NCT u NCT 127 NCT dream instant E&L wavy and I think a wave you got the memo on how to name their subunit anyways let's get into the music now I'm gonna do this a little differently this time as there isn't just one style of k-pop music you have trappy songs the housey songs [Music] everything's gonna be okay go the RMB songs [Music] Linna boo boo yeah let's talk about the girl [Music] and future bassy checks a group will take on multiple of these styles all in the same album I'm not going to be breaking down each individual genre like I did for that for a riot video as I am but a mere shell man for myself one thing I did notice between all different styles are the chord progressions whether it's house or future bass or an arm vs bridge during a trap song there are a lot of sweet sounding chord progressions more complex than your average western pop 4 chord song these chord progressions make the use of cool chord extensions and dominant chords so we're gonna break some down now let's take a look at this core progression from Lunas subunit group odd-eyes circles track club girlfriend oh that was a mouthful this is the simplified version just some major and minor triad chords in the same key I'm gonna add a seventh to the major minor chords however it's already sounding a bit sweeter and more colorful now note this part of the progression that to 5:1 is a very common progression especially in jazz that dominant five one progression is especially strong why you ask just play the five whole progression and you'll hear it has a river resolving sound to it this can be attributed to the be resolving to the C and the F to the e as well if I just play the major scale and stop right at the last note before reaching the note where the scale begins and ends or the tonic you feel that tension and you're waiting for it to resolve there we go this same tension and resolution is happening in the five one progression and why it's used a lot let's add a bit of rhythm and instead of just having these shortened notes just play the same chord how about a bit of variation the court is really an inverse of the G major chord but having such a drastic jump between the chords is kind of jarring but we can easily voice it better by changing the octaves if you were to play this on piano it'd be a lot easier as you only need to change the one finger instead of moving your whole hand with this in mind I'll often duplicate chords and then change the notes from there and see what cool chord can come up with instead of writing each chord from the ground up as the next chord is higher how about we find a chord that works as a cool transition I could use the D minor 7 here and that's not wrong it's part of the scale and everything but it's just kind of boring remember I mentioned that the five one progression is a very strong progression well it's so strong that the five chord doesn't even need to be in the same scale that you're in so if we imagine this II - seven chord was temporarily our one chord we could put a five chord in front of it making a strong flyphone progression the fifth of e is B so that's what will make the dominant chord the F sharp isn't in scale but it doesn't matter because that five one progression is stronger than love we can make it a dominant nine chord - I really like the ninth though so we could try luring it cool what have we extended this upward movement by moving the root note to the third also cool for this transition we could do something where we take the whole chord and shift it down to go between these two chords [Music] let me just voice EES course different just to fill up this space and make it look like the chords flow together with all these little tricks we've just managed to change what was a simple and kind of stale chord progression into something a lot more sweet and interesting to listen to here's some other corporations used in kpop tracks what you often do is just repeat the corporation twice but then the second time has some differences it might just be adding some extra notes or it could be changing one or more chords you can also see more of that five one or two five one progression so now we need some sounds to go with our notes if you're making a chap beat then of course you're gonna use an 808 but for other stuff this future house II plug is used quite often [Music] [Music] there's two ways of achieving this the simple way is just a funky sawtooth pluck [Music] but often it sounds a little bit more complex than this so I've layered these sounds together this one is a modified version of a virtual riot preset most of the plucks on comes from this wave table that seems to be the secret choosing a good wave table I tried putting some hard bass tones into serum and I got alright results but there's probably better samples to be using for this and sometimes there's a bass guitar instead [Music] [Music] then we have the classic brass hit [Music] you could use a grass library for this but I just looked for good brass samples one-shots and ended up laying them together some other common sounds are electric piano [Music] these xylophone e plucks as most of these X are big groups you're gonna have to take turns on who is singing this is commonly referred to in the trade as the line distribution basically breaking down what percentage of the track each singer is actually singing there are channels devoted to telling up the seconds of each of Oakley's like we're betting on a horse races of course it's not always just one person singing sometimes they sing in unison this usually happens on the chorus to create that big crowd chanting type feel although these songs are in Korean and my understanding of Korean is non-existent the zactly loss of english phrases thrown into the lyrics like a phrase or a line here or there oh boy baby I'm full a twosie cool cool cool hot Suzu a-to-z this is a different song this is not the same song hard-rock scalp Samuel Jackson what's up got an automatic dick got an automatic stick sexy free and single I'm ready too bingo also I came across this weird vocal thing that happens in multiple songs it's like Nana Nana Nana Nana [Music] I just found it funny I like it when I find these reoccurring themes like a hidden pattern that I've discovered when recording vocals there's a couple tricks you can do to make your vocal track sound cooler than just one vocal on its own one trick is doubling where you record the same part again and layer it over the original vocal you can pan to voices left and right from each other if you want or have a main voice in the middle and two of the voices left and right there's really no universal rule on this but in my opinion I think it's important that the syllables have a similar timing to each other they don't have to be sample accurate but if they're too far apart the doubling just feels sloppy another thing you can do is harmonize the vocal that's like doubling except you're singing a different melody line that works nicely with the original vocal you can harmonize above or even below and now we're ready to put all the pieces together into one complete song I worked on this track with fellow producer Henry Young he's on Spotify and SoundCloud links in the description and we also have amazing vocals from Ashley Alicia you can check her Instagram and YouTube in the description too [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] three of you me- unnie baby can't you say [Music] Oh [Music] Oh [Music] [Music] children and can't you see [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] you can listen to this song again on Spotify no one's stopping you thank you to all the collaborators again a lot of effort went into this one any support is appreciated thank you for watching this video and I'll see you in the next video yeah goodbye [Music]

Channel: Dylan Tallchief

Views: 193,027

Rating: 4.9722891 out of 5

Keywords: Free, FL, Studio, Remake, FLP, EDM, Dance, Dubstep, Trap, House, Future, how, to, make, tutorial, kpop, k-pop, loona, stan loona, bts, nct, red velvet, gfriend, gfriend sweety

Id: CHVFmXOxJGU

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020