WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Potter

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ My Fired Uncle Is a Genius Guitarist? ◈

Chapter 4: I Ended Up Lying

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“Your timing is right, so why are you killing the sound before it can ring out?”

Bae Somi froze with the water bottle halfway to their mouth.

After saying it, I hesitated too. I was a stand-in who had been shoved into a corner because I couldn’t even take care of my fingertips. It wasn’t really my place to step in. But the words were already out.

“Your timing is precise. Like you swallowed a metronome. But you mute too soon. The strings are still ringing, and your hand cuts them off first. The sound isn’t dying because you made a mistake. You stop it because you’re afraid you might make one.”

The rehearsal room went quiet. Yun Taerin pointed the tip of a drumstick back and forth between Somi and me.

“What? What do you mean? Somi’s timing is good.”

“I’m not talking about timing. I’m talking about the sound.”

Hugging the water bottle, Bae Somi’s eyes wandered. The floor, the amp, their bass, then the floor again. After a long while, their voice finally slipped out, barely audible.

“...I know. I know my sound is too quiet.”

“It isn’t quiet. You’re killing it. You know how to let it out, but you don’t. You hide.”

“...”

They didn’t deny it. That meant they knew better than anyone.

“Want to try the chorus one more time?”

Bae Somi glanced toward Cha Sion. Only after Sion gave a small nod did Somi readjust the bass. Yun Taerin counted us in, and we went into the chorus.

It was definitely different.

In the first measure, the bass rang all the way through. With a foundation beneath it, the drums had room to play, and the whole band seemed to move half a step forward.

“Huh?”

Yun Taerin’s eyes went round as the drumming stopped. They might not have known exactly what had changed, but they knew something had.

But that only lasted so long.

By the third measure, the sound had started shortening again. By the fourth, Bae Somi had completely returned to their old self.

The playing eventually stopped. Somi was the most flustered of all.

“Huh? Why am I...?”

“You made it through two measures, then died. Your head understood, but your hands couldn’t shake the old habit.”

It was only natural. This went beyond a playing habit. It was part of their personality. The same shyness that buried the ends of their greetings in the floor had seeped all the way into their fingertips. Did anyone think a habit rooted in someone’s personality could be fixed with one sentence? If it could, every music teacher in the world would have starved long ago.

Understanding something and being able to do it were entirely different matters. My left hand in this room understood that gap better than anyone.

“Just remember one thing today. Notice the moment your sound dies. Fixing it comes after that.”

“...Okay.”

Beside Bae Somi, Cha Sion was staring at me with her chin resting on the guitar neck.

“Mister.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Sion swallowed whatever she had been about to say. After looking down at Somi’s right hand once, she shifted her gaze back to me. It was different from the look she had given my old guitar case by the door. It was the look of someone rewriting an estimate from scratch.

“...Let’s keep going. We’re wasting time.”

It wasn’t much different from what she had said earlier, but her voice seemed about half a degree warmer.

#

I took out the tape I had bought at the pharmacy. I had never intended to just sit around and watch.

I wrapped tape around my split fingertips. Avoiding the joints, I pressed down the ends at an angle. I had done this every time long tours cracked my fingertips, so my hands moved on their own before I even had to think. Changing strings, taping fingers, the knowledge was all still there. It was only my body that had stiffened up.

The problem was that the more tape I wrapped, the duller my senses became. It felt less like fretting strings and more like using chopsticks with gloves on. My chord changes lagged by half a beat, and my hammer-ons came out muddy half the time.

Still, I could keep going. Numb was better than pain.

“Uncle, can you really hold out with that hand?”

“I have to try.”

“...I’m worried.”

We slowly worked through the two songs again. Stop, fix things, start again. It was still creaky, but at least it was beginning to resemble an actual rehearsal.

The point where we stopped moved a little farther back each time. Earlier, we had fallen apart in the pre-chorus. This time, we made it to the start of the chorus. The four of us were gradually filling each other’s gaps with our clumsy sounds. I knew this process. I had gone through it endlessly in Hongdae basements.

The difference was that back then, I had been the best player in the room.

Now I was the biggest hole.

Before our third run, Cha Sion pulled the mic stand in front of her.

“I’ll add vocals this time. We don’t have much time to get in sync before the competition.”

The intro to “Fall Toward You” began again.

She was good.

Her pitch was precise as a ruler, and her rhythm and breathing were clean. Just as I had confirmed from her humming. But more than simply being good, her voice was insane.

Clear, but not hollow. A weighty texture that had no business coming from a high school girl’s throat. A distinct grain that would never blend with another voice once you heard it. I had heard countless voices people called great over sixteen years, but this sound didn’t fit any category in my head. I gave up trying to classify it for a moment.

A voice like that couldn’t be trained into existence. You were born with it. People said Kang Taeo’s voice was blessed, but hers was another level entirely.

Yun Taerin and Bae Somi, meanwhile, played their parts like nothing was unusual. Then again, they heard this voice every day, without knowing what they had.

The chorus was easy for her. The upper range had been carved to fit Kang Taeo’s narrow vocal range in the first place, so of course there was plenty left over for a woman’s voice. That part wasn’t surprising.

The issue was the other end, the low range.

The verse. Keeping the song in a male key put the low notes at basement level for a woman. It was the sort of range where half the sound should have crumbled and died.

She couldn’t fully bring it to life. But it wasn’t empty, either. The sound lay thin, but the core of it remained intact.

‘...She can hold that.’

Still, dying was dying. I waited for the song to end before speaking.

“Wait. Are you keeping this song in this key?”

“What?”

“It’s a male key. Kang Taeo’s key. If a female vocalist sings it in the original key, the whole verse dies. Half of it died just now.”

Yun Taerin scratched their head with a drumstick.

“Uh... What can we do? That’s how the original song is.”

“Raise the key. Three semitones.”

Cha Sion looked at me over the mic stand.

“...Three semitones?”

“Yeah. The verse will move into the range where your voice comes out properly, and the chorus will move to where you can actually put some power into it. Right now, the chorus is so low for you that it has no tension at all.”

“We only have a week left. You want to change the key now?”

Yun Taerin cut in. It was a fair objection.

“The drums aren’t affected anyway. Guitar and bass just need to shift positions. It’ll settle into your hands in half a day.”

“What about your hand? You said Uncle was the biggest problem.”

“...My hands are relearning every position from scratch anyway.”

Cha Sion looked into space for a moment, as though measuring something, then reached a quick conclusion.

“Let’s try it.”

The transposition didn’t take long. Everyone shifted their positions, checked the parts in short runs, then started again from the beginning in the higher key.

The same song became a completely different song.

The verse came alive. The sound that had been half dead before now moved forward clearly in her natural range. Yun Taerin’s eyes widened as they drummed, apparently hearing it too.

Then came the chorus.

It wasn’t easy for Cha Sion anymore. The end of a chorus raised three semitones was a range that demanded power even from a woman’s voice. Usually, one of three things happened there. The volume shrank, the throat tightened, or the tone became thin.

But none of them did.

Her voice neither weakened nor cracked as it rose. The tone never thinned, and not a single tendon stood out in her neck. The same weight and density she had in the low notes simply settled into the higher range.

And she had no idea how insane that was.

‘...It isn’t just that her high notes are high.’

The shift between vocal registers itself was ridiculously effortless for her.

My ears, honed by sixteen years of shaping and refining songs to suit singers’ voices, immediately made the call.

Vocalists who could hit high notes were everywhere. But vocalists whose own sound remained intact all the way to the top were exceedingly rare. And those were the singers rock stages always demanded. A voice that turned thin at the peak of a chorus could never cut through the air in a stadium.

So where was her limit?

I didn’t know. From hearing her for the first time today, I couldn’t even begin to measure her ceiling.

Not knowing someone’s limit.

There was nothing more terrifying in this business.

For the same reason, we raised the go-to cover song by two semitones as well, and the result was the same. She stepped over the chorus, notorious for catching inexperienced vocalists, without a problem, even raised by two semitones.

Something silently collapsed in my mind.

What a waste.

That thought hit me first. A monstrous voice like hers was being used to sing songs shaved down to fit Kang Taeo’s voice. She was following flimsy melodies where synthesizers exploded in place of the vocalist wherever the vocals should have burst open.

Suddenly, my last day in my previous life overlapped with the present. The sentence Kang Taeo had said in the meeting room while avoiding my eyes.

“There’s no one who can sing your songs.”

After that, a drawer had opened.

The original version of “Breakneck Run.” The chorus I had written imagining a high D5. Then all the real songs I had stacked away one by one, never once letting them see the light of day, flashed through my mind.

Unreleased songs, still in their original blueprints from before I had carved them down for Kang Taeo’s voice.

With Cha Sion’s voice...

But the impulse ended there. I quickly came to my senses and did the math.

One week until the competition. These kids were only barely making it through the two cover songs they already had. My hand was only barely functioning with tape around it.

Raising a key could be finished today. But introducing an entirely new original song was a problem on another level. Just getting the scores out of my head, assigning each part, and drilling them into the kids’ hands would take at least two weeks.

There simply wasn’t enough time.

‘Not now.’

I kept my mouth shut and played the next chord.

When the song ended, Yun Taerin grabbed the ringing cymbal with both hands and grinned.

“So, Uncle? Our vocalist’s pretty good, right?”

“Yeah. Pretty good.”

I swallowed the words that would have said she was far more than pretty good. If I started talking about that, I wasn’t sure where I would stop.

Only Cha Sion took a step back from the mic and glanced at me, looking displeased by my lukewarm answer.

#

Back in my studio apartment, I first peeled off the tape wrapped around my fingers. The fingertips I had forcibly pressed down were swollen and red. After dipping them in ice water, I picked up the guitar again.

I started with chromatic exercises. One-two-three-four, fretting one note per fret from my index finger to my pinky. I set the metronome to sixty.

A crawling pace.

Whenever my mind started to wander even a little, I raised the tempo by five. Until my fingers stumbled and tangled. I poured every bit of attention into nothing but the strings and my fingertips.

I repeated it until past midnight. Whenever my fingertips went on strike, ice water. When they loosened up, chromatic exercises again. Repetition without even a speck of fun in it. But this boring repetition was what had brought thirteen-year-old me to the stage in the first place.

#

The next day’s rehearsal started at one in the afternoon. There was no reason to stop kids who looked ready to throw away their entire weekend. I desperately needed time to loosen up my hands too.

“Uncle, you seem a little better today.”

“I wrapped the tape properly. I gave up sensation and bought time.”

“...Is that a good thing?”

“No one expects delicate playing from me right now anyway.”

“Yeah, no one does.”

“...You’re supposed to deny it, even if you don’t mean it. This is why you need some real-world experience.”

Both songs were definitely smoother than yesterday.

The song we had raised three semitones had settled in somewhat after only a day, and we had noticeably fewer stops and restarts.

Still, we couldn’t finish.

The interruptions were usually in my part. My mind had already reached the end of the song, but my hands gave out in the middle because they couldn’t even survive two songs. Should I at least take comfort in the fact that I lasted longer than yesterday?

“If Uncle didn’t stop, we could probably finish.”

“...You guys are only even rehearsing like this because I’m filling in for you.”

Bae Somi’s sound was still dying. When Somi focused on it, the notes stretched out fairly well, but whenever they got caught up in playing, the old habit came back without fail. Still, it felt a little better than yesterday.

“Oh, Somi. You made it through the fifth measure just now. You’re improving fast.”

“I keep paying attention while I play... but it’s hard.”

“If you could fix it in one day, it wouldn’t be a habit. You’re headed in the right direction, so keep at it.”

“...Okay.”

There was a little more strength in Somi’s voice. They couldn’t change overnight, but what mattered was that a positive shift had begun.

Around the time we were packing up, Yun Taerin held up their phone calendar.

“You know we have to film the preliminary video next weekend, right? We’re filming Saturday, so we absolutely have to be able to finish before then. Got it, Uncle?”

“Why are you only saying that to me?”

“Because Uncle is the biggest problem!”

...Damn it. It was true, so I couldn’t argue.

“But there is one good thing about having Uncle around.”

“What?”

“We can use the rehearsal room without worrying about the time. When it was just us pooling our dues, we were nervous about renting even two hours.”

“...”

“Adults really are different. See you Tuesday too, our generous patron.”

“Yes, yes. Leave it to me.”

Another number would be added to my overdraft account, but it would have been ridiculous to make the kids split the cost with me.

As I put the guitar into its case, Cha Sion casually said one thing.

“Your hand. Make sure it’s still attached next week.”

“Don’t worry. These are hands I can put on and take off.”

Then I showed her the trick where I pulled my thumb out, and she snorted like I was absurd.

As Yun Taerin slung on their bag, they added as if they had just remembered.

“Oh, right. Uncle, we’re filming a video, so lose some weight. You’re over a hundred kilos now, right?”

“I’m not, brat. What do you take your uncle for?”

I snapped back, but honestly, I had no idea. I had never weighed myself.

“I think you are...”

Cha Sion muttered with a serious expression.

Why was she looking me up and down like that?

“Anyway, take tomorrow off and let’s meet Tuesday evening. Good work, Uncle. Go home, get plenty of rest, and don’t do anything stupid.”

“Wow. Didn’t you sound just like my mom?”

The moment I got back to my studio apartment after we split up, I started looking for a scale.

There was one. It was crammed between the desk and bed, covered in a thick layer of dust. Apparently, this body’s previous owner had bought it but never stepped on it even once. I understood that feeling completely.

I wiped away the dust with some tissue, held my breath, and stepped onto it. The number on the display climbed at a terrifying speed.

‘...One hundred and five kilos.’

Without meaning to, I had ended up lying to my niece.

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