WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Potter
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ My Fired Uncle Is a Genius Guitarist? ◈
Chapter 12: If It Doesn't Exist, We Can Make It
──────
Sunday evening. I arrived at Exit 3 of the subway station ten minutes before our appointment.
I had already worked out the repair estimate in my head. The neck in the photos was straight, and the crackling from the volume control was almost certainly a bad pot. The only variables left were the parts that had not shown up in the pictures.
Before long, a seller in their twenties emerged from the exit with a guitar case slung over their back.
“I’m the one who messaged you.”
“Ah, yes. Here it is.”
The seller opened the case. The electric guitar from the photos appeared exactly as advertised.
“Like I said, there’s a crackling sound from the volume control when you plug it into an amp. Other than that, it’s fine.”
That much was true. The neck was straight, and the frets were not badly worn. I ran my eyes over the fretboard and slowly turned the volume knob. It caught slightly at a certain point. Combined with the symptom the seller had mentioned, that settled the estimate.
‘Just like I thought. The pot.’
The diagnosis I had made from the photos and text alone was exactly right. With the repair estimate settled, only the price negotiation remained. I turned the body over a few times, then stopped at the tone knob.
“There wasn’t anything about this crack in the knob in the photos.”
“Ah... It doesn’t affect the sound.”
“It doesn’t. But the strap pin is loose too. With the noise and all these little defects added together, you’ll easily spend tens of thousands of won on labor and parts the moment you take it to a repair shop.”
“...So how much were you thinking?”
“Give it to me for 150,000 won, taking the repair cost into account. I’ll pay cash right now.”
“...I listed it for 250,000.”
“At that price, it’ll be hard to sell unless you find some clueless sucker.”
I cut 100,000 won off the price in one go. The seller bit their lip and thought it over for a moment, then nodded.
“...All right. Take it.”
I counted out the cash, handed it over, and took the case. From checking its condition to paying, it had taken five minutes. Unlike last time, I had not wasted an hour traveling back and forth, and I had not needed to argue with a seller trying to pull one over on me.
‘This is why I do direct deals.’
The case weighed heavily on my shoulder when I slung it over my back.
On the subway ride home, I took out my phone and reset the alerts in the secondhand trading app. Electric guitar, broken, cheap.
Where would the third listing turn up?
#
The parts I had ordered arrived Tuesday evening. I spread newspaper on the floor of my studio apartment, opened the pickguard, removed the old pot, fitted the new one, and soldered it in. Cleaning the fretboard, putting on new strings, and finishing the neck setup took less than two hours. I had only done it once before, but my hands had already gotten used to it.
I had no amp, so Jaedong Music would handle the final test again. The next evening, I stopped by home to pick up the guitar and stood beneath the tiny sign.
Jingle.
“I’m back again.”
“You brought it quickly.”
Oh Jaedong took the guitar and plugged it into an amp. He turned the volume all the way up and down, switched pickups, and picked out a few bars. The crackling noise was completely gone.
Oh Jaedong took his hand from the knob, then rubbed the cracked tone knob with his thumb.
“You left the knob as it was.”
“It doesn’t affect the sound. I’m selling it anyway, so there was no reason to spend more on parts.”
Oh Jaedong nodded briefly. That was the end of the inspection. He had heard it, and that seemed to mean there was nothing more to ask.
“Four hundred thousand.”
“Yes.”
There was no bargaining, either. While Oh Jaedong counted the cash at the counter, I looked over the used guitars hanging on display. It was still a shop with impeccable maintenance.
“If the next one is repaired as well as this one, I’ll pay around the same.”
“Yes. I’ll come again.”
We had spoken a little more than last time. For someone as taciturn as him, maybe that counted as regular-customer treatment.
As I left the shop, I did the math in my head. I had bought it for 150,000 won and spent another 10,000 on parts and supplies. I sold it for 400,000, leaving a net profit of 240,000 won. The margin was clearly wider than on the first guitar, which had made me 190,000 won.
‘One or two more deals, and I’ll have the minimum recording setup.’
I carefully slipped the bills into my wallet. It had been a while since my wallet had felt so pleasantly thick.
But that feeling was overturned just a day later.
The next morning, the atmosphere in the office was different from usual. Before I could even sit down, Assistant Manager Kim covertly gestured at me over the partition.
“Manager, look over there.”
“What is it?”
“Choi Yeong-rak from Sales Team 2. The department head called him in first thing this morning, and it doesn’t look good.”
A young employee stood in front of the department head’s desk with their head bowed deeply. Soon, the department head’s low voice carried over the partitions.
“So you sold things online while working for this company? For months, even?”
“I’m sorry. I only put up a few small items on an online marketplace...”
“Only? Is that the issue here?”
Bang! The department head slammed the file folder in his hand onto the desk.
“The problem is that the first thing you think of while collecting a company paycheck is making money on the side! The company hired you, paid you, raised you up, and instead of trying to understand your job, you spend that time fooling around outside?”
“I only did it on weekends, so it didn’t affect my work...”
“You’re not a company employee on weekends? Huh? How dare you talk back!”
His voice rose another octave.
“Young people these days think the company is their personal playground. A playground!”
It was nonsense. Of course he was not a company employee on weekends. But no one in the office dared argue. Choi Yeong-rak stood there receiving a lecture for more than ten minutes, and only after the department head brought up a written statement was he finally allowed to return to his desk.
Once Choi Yeong-rak sat down with a blank expression, only the sound of keyboards remained in the office. Everyone pretended not to have seen or heard anything. Still, the topic of today’s lunch break had already been decided.
Assistant Manager Kim whispered to me.
“See? What did I tell you? Last year, Assistant Manager Park got shut down by the department head too.”
“...Does that really warrant a written statement?”
“It’s not like his performance was bad or he did it during work hours. The department head just can’t stand that kind of thing. He sees it as betraying the company.”
“Betrayal, my ass.”
“You know what he’s like. A total old-school authoritarian. Anyway, be careful too, Manager. You’ve been looking at your phone a lot lately. I don’t know if it’s stocks or crypto, but you won’t hear anything nice if the department head finds out.”
“I told you, it’s not that.”
I answered as if it were nothing and turned on my monitor. But my hand was already drifting toward my pants pocket. The 400,000 won in cash I had received from Jaedong Music last night. Until yesterday, the thickness of my wallet had only felt reassuring. Today, it was bothering me more than usual.
‘...The contest prize wasn’t the problem.’
I had foolishly thought it would only become a problem once money came in. I took that back. To that man, the moment anything was discovered, it became a problem.
#
When I opened the rehearsal room door on Saturday, Yun Taerin held up a drumstick as if she had been waiting for me.
“Uncle! Today’s the day we narrow down the candidate songs.”
“It’ll be a miracle if we can narrow them down.”
We decided to properly play through the candidates everyone had brought up last time, from beginning to end. The first was the song Yun Taerin had been pushing. Its drums raced eagerly from the intro onward.
Before the first verse was even over, I raised my hand and stopped the performance.
“Only the drums are having fun in this one.”
“Huh? Wasn’t that good just now?”
“You were the only one having fun. If you rush ahead at that tempo, the whole song falls apart. Couldn’t you feel it while playing?”
“Ah, damn...”
Yun Taerin pressed her drumstick against the innocent snare head.
Next was a song Bae Somi cautiously brought out. It flowed meekly from beginning to end without a single standout point.
“Somi. You picked this song so you could hide, didn’t you?”
“N-No, I didn’t... I just like the song...”
“The bass plays nothing but roots from start to finish. You chose a song where you can’t make mistakes.”
“...”
“The judges will be right in front of you in the main round. If there’s nowhere to make mistakes, there’s nowhere to show what you can do, either.”
When it was Cha Sion’s turn, they only shrugged.
“Anything is fine. I’ll sing if you tell me to.”
“That ‘anything’ is the hardest part, punk.”
In the end, Yun Taerin chose one for them. It was a song built around a female vocal that was apparently popular on the charts these days. When we played it, the problem was the complete opposite. Cha Sion’s voice sailed easily over the song, but the drums had nothing to play and became dull, while the bass practically vanished.
“Only the vocals stand out in this one.”
“Ah, this doesn’t work either?”
“It would pass at karaoke, but onstage, the other three of us become that kid’s accompaniment machines.”
We ran through several more songs. The result was similar. In some, only the vocals stood out. In others, only the drums came alive. In yet others, the bass got buried.
“Ah, Uncle, then what do we do? You’re saying none of them work.”
“You don’t choose songs you play well. You choose songs that make you look your best.”
“What’s the difference?”
“A song you play well is a song you’re comfortable with. A song that makes you look your best is one that makes the judges clearly see your strengths. In all these candidates, only one person stands out at a time.”
“No, what song like that even exists?”
“Then we need to find one.”
As Cha Sion picked up their water bottle, they casually tossed out a comment.
“If it doesn’t exist, we can make it.”
“Right! Let’s do an original song, an original song! They give bonus points for original songs in the main round too!”
Yun Taerin enthusiastically answered, striking the cymbal with her stick. Clang!
I sighed in disbelief before anything else.
“Do you have the ability to make one?”
“Uh... Wouldn’t it work if the four of us just noodled around together? Everyone does that.”
“What is a song, instant cup noodles? You pour in hot water, wait three minutes, and it comes out?”
Bae Somi quietly shook her head. Even Cha Sion, who had brought it up in the first place, only shrugged as if it were someone else’s problem.
“See? There’s no one who can write a song right now. Quit talking nonsense and narrow down the cover songs first. Original songs can come after that.”
We decided to take a ten-minute break and scattered. Yun Taerin tapped the snare rim in a messy offbeat rhythm, tap, tap, while Bae Somi held her bass and plucked its open strings low, thrum, thrum. As Cha Sion set down their plastic bottle after drinking, they softly hummed about half a line from the chorus they had been singing earlier.
The three sounds had nothing to do with one another. They were only fragments circling the cramped empty space.
But my ears began working on their own.
I smoothed out the messy offbeat Yun Taerin had been tapping and used it as the framework. I laid the note Bae Somi had plucked at the bottom as the root. Finally, I found the ideal range for Cha Sion’s voice to ring out clearly and set it over the top.
Then a guitar riff to fill the space between them began rolling through my head on its own.
‘...Wait.’
It was a riff I had never heard before. It was not among the hundreds of songs in my drawer. It was not a song I possessed.
“Uncle, what are you doing? Stop spacing out and come over.”
Yun Taerin’s voice snapped me back to my senses. I deliberately did not hold on to the riff that had surfaced in my mind. I let it scatter, because if I caught it now, it felt like it would grow out of control.
“Yeah. I’m coming.”
We spent the rest of the time narrowing things down to the two least bad candidates and playing them over and over. The final decision was postponed until next weekend.
After all, it would only matter if we passed the preliminaries.
#
On Wednesday, when the results were supposed to be announced, I could not focus on work from the morning.
I checked my phone while processing purchase orders, then checked it again, and again. We only knew the results would be posted that day. No one knew the exact time. There was no news from the Plugged channel even by lunchtime.
At lunch, I even went up to the emergency stairwell and kept refreshing. The list remained unchanged. Here I was, at my age, clutching my phone on a landing while waiting for the results. It felt like I had returned to my days as a college applicant waiting for the acceptance list.
“Manager, you’re looking at your phone even more than usual today.”
“Assistant Manager Kim, stop worrying about other people and do your job.”
“I am doing my job. You’re the one who isn’t.”
“...”
A little after three in the afternoon, the department head left for an outside appointment, and Assistant Manager Kim had brought back their third cup of coffee. I absentmindedly refreshed the page. My phone screen flashed white, then a new list of videos updated in bold at the top of the main page.
[Best Band Survival 4: Preliminary Round Teams Announced]
When I tapped it, dozens of videos flooded into the playlist all at once. With the purchase-order window open on my monitor, I busily scrolled down the phone screen with my thumb.
University practical-music teams, office-worker bands with experience written all over them, and unfamiliar names. The farther I scrolled, the drier my mouth became. Most of the teams were made up of adults.
Then my scrolling thumb stopped.
Among the countless videos, one image stood out sharply.
Cha Sion in ripped jeans, staring as if they could pierce straight through the camera lens. It was the exact angle my older sister had captured at the preliminary shoot.
And beneath it, a name printed clearly.
[Black Rabbit]
There it was.
Our team’s video.
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