A lot of times when I’m working on tracks, I associate colors with sounds.
Sometimes, I’ll listen to a song and I’ll just see a lot of like shades of orange or
shades of blue maybe.
When I listen to “Euphoria,” I just see like shades of the rainbow.
“Euphoria” is a solo song with Jungkook who’s one of the seven members of BTS.
I sent it to them and I mean, he’s such an incredible singer and I heard this amazing
vocal back and they added some really cool vocal harmonies in the hook which I thought
just added so much more to the drop.
To me, creatively, they’re pushing the boundaries so far.
There’s a lot of fearlessness in the art that they make and how they create it.
When I started “Euphoria,” initially, it was an idea from a writer who I was working
with, Candace Sosa.
She plays guitar and I was inspired by the sound that was in this initial little demo
and I said, “Alright, let me take that and work with it.”
It sort of all just came together really fluidly and naturally.
You know, musically, when the song starts with that guitar, it’s like, “Oh man."
"This just feels so good.”
It just kind of warms the air.
And then it’s layered with a second guitar.
One is panned to the left.
One is panned a little to the right.
By itself, it’s a very simple part.
Together, you just get some nice harmonics off the two and it feels great.
Once I have that, the piano comes in.
The piano is really driving the song melodically from the chords and just where the song is moving.
There’s an Alicia Keys piano and then a Greg Wells piano plugin that adds a little
delay, a little bit of a chorus.
Brightens the piano up a little bit.
Those two guitar sounds and the piano basically start off the song.
That’s the intro of the song.
And then also the first four bars of the first verse.
The chords are just so pretty and they lend themselves to really nice vocal melodies on
top of it so that was a really good foundation for where the rest of the song went.
So from there, the next thing that I add is a drum loop which just helps add a little
bit of rhythm so that the vocals have a place to sit.
It’s a melodic tom loop and I use four different sounds for it.
As you can tell, they move with the chords.
I just added a simple kick drum.
After that, we added a splash snare that just sort of creates a lot of space.
So after the drums were added, we have the guitar and the piano.
Just in that second half of the verse, I added two pad sounds.
It just allows the song to grow a little bit and it sort of anticipates what’s gonna
happen next.
And so once those pads were added, that was basically the entire section.
So after the verse, the B section comes in and this is really where the song is growing
to at this point.
The song is called “Euphoria,” I wanted a B section that would be really just open
and bright.
And so we’ve done a ton of stuff in here to sort of achieve that.
The main instrument there are these synth string sounds.
I just took the initial piano chords from the intro but it’s played with more rhythm.
I was messing around with Serum.
I found this cool sound in there that I modified a little bit.
So after I added the strings, the next thing I wanted to add was a synth pad.
I found this really cool preset in Sylenth which I then modified a bit called Pong.
Then the way that I processed it is I added a filter that would open up as the section
moved along making our way towards the chorus.
So once I had those basic chord layers down and the energy going the way that I wanted,
Candace added a guitar in this section which sort of acts as the lead melody.
I think it just adds a nice counter melody to the initial chords that are in there.
Anchoring this entire section, there’s a sub bass.
It’s just a sign wave bass.
It’s about as simple as sound as you can get.
In all the tracks that I produce, I try to make sure that every fifteen seconds, there’s
something new that happens.
Something that just keeps your brain thinking and on its toes.
These little vocal chops are really just meant to compliment the lead vocal.
So after a few other smaller sounds are added, this is what that entire B section sounds like.
So then coming out of that B section leading into the chorus, there’s just a couple ear
candy sounds that were added just to be a nice little moment before the chorus dropped.
Sometimes, music is like a collage and you just take these cool sounds and you try to
see how they can play off one another and how they fit in.
A lot of it is just experimenting and messing around with it.
So now once we get to the chorus, this is sort of the release for the whole song.
Everything opens up so it gets nice and bright.
The energy changes.
This whole section was built around a main stab chord sound.
I just found this really interesting synth and it’s got a slow attack on it.
I’ve layered it with a filtered version just to get a little more low end out of the EQ.
So once I had that main chord sound, I layered it with two other sounds just to add a little
bit more attack to it and just raise the energy just a bit.
I’m playing the exact same thing.
It’s just some sonic layers.
And then finally, the last thing that was layered was the same strings from the B section.
So once I had all those main chords, the next thing I added was a bass pluck sound and I’ve
actually filtered out a lot of the low end frequencies from it.
I think it just added some interesting rhythms in between what was happening with the chords.
There’s already a lot going on in the hook synth wise.
But there is a bass there that sort of just follows the same chords that all those synths
are doing.
It’s just there to anchor all of those sounds.
So then finally in the chorus, we get to the drums.
As you can see, there is a lot of drums but if I play them all together, I don’t think
it really sounds like it’s a lot.
A lot of these little percussion things just happen one time or they hit at little moments
just to get a nice bounce happening.
I’ll start adding them one by one so you can see what happened there.
A lot of that is just auditioning sounds and looking for cool, interesting new sounds that
I maybe haven’t heard before or haven’t used before.
And eventually, as you spend enough time on it, all these sort of sounds start to fit
in as a puzzle, and they start to fit in together and find their home.
Once you add the main kick and snare, the hook drums sound like this.
The last final sound which is really the driving
melodic layer of the chorus is this vocal chop.
Really, it started as layers of our initial demo vocal.
I chopped it up in a way where melodically, I just liked what it did melodically.
I didn’t care if the words made sense or anything because then I processed it quite
heavily so that none of the words are discernible anymore.
So that’s just actually Candace’s vocal and at the end, a bit of Jungkook’s vocal.
Once the vocal was processed in a way where it was nice and compressed and EQ’d the
way I wanted, I added a little alterboy.
This sort of pitches the vocal up.
I added a bunch of reverb and I added a side chain to it.
There was some other little frequencies that were jumping out that I didn’t like so there’s
a DS-er on it.
And finally, some delay.
When I first sent BTS and their label my original demo of the song, it already had this vocal
chop in it.
And then once I got vocals back from Jungkook, I implemented some of his vocal layers into
it just so it would blend with the vocals that were happening in the chorus and it would
just end up being a double layer of what he was already doing in the chorus.
And so here’s how the whole chorus sounds.
So that’s basically all of the main elements of the record and there are some other layers
in there.
As you can tell, it’s a fairly complex production.
There’s a lot of different pieces of ear candy and layers that come and go but I tried
to cover the most important parts.
That’s “Euphoria.”
Working with BTS, it’s really been incredible.
I just sort of built a relationship with the team over there
and started sending them some records.
This is one of the first ones that they picked.
It’s just been amazing to see what they’ve been able to achieve.
Two number one albums in the same year from a foreign language act in America.
That’s like a huge achievement.
Nobody’s ever done that before.
It’s just exciting.
I’m glad I’m apart of it and I’m hoping their success will continue.