Park Jin Young Finally Reveals How He Wrote One Of K-Pop’s Most Iconic Songs

Over the years, Park Jin Young, AKA J.Y. Park, has crafted many iconic songs including legendary tracks like Wonder Girls‘ “So Hot” and recently, he gave everyone a peek into how an iconic song like “So Hot” was created.

Back in 2008, when the Wonder Girls released “So Hot” the song immediately proved itself to be a huge hit as it quickly shot to the top of the music charts. Later, “So Hot” continued to prove its popularity as it was nominated for and won several awards. Since then, its popularity hasn’t wavered and to this day it’s regarded as one of the most iconic K-Pop songs around.

Although it’s been more than 10 years since the legendary song dropped, Park Jin Young recently uploaded a clip on his YouTube channel sharing how it was created.

Today, I would like to show you how ‘So Hot’ was made. Usually, there are two ways to make music. You can start making the melody first and then make the track or you can make the track first and then the melody. In the case of ‘Tell Me’, I made the track first. In the case of ‘So Hot’, I made the melody first.

— Park Jin Young

With the melody hook already in mind, Park Jin Young needed to make the track next. To do so he started off by creating the drum layer made up of “kicks” and “claps.”

As we all know, there are ‘Kicks’ and ‘Claps’ when creating the drum sound. Usually, I go with the ‘Kick’ first then I’ll add the ‘Claps’ to give more character to the song.

— Park Jin Young

To add more groove to the song, his next step was to add some hi-hat sounds and more percussion. The kicks, claps, hi-hat, and percussion sounds combined to make up the song’s rhythm.

Now that we have the kick and clap, I’ll add other percussions to give it groove.

— Park Jin Young

After creating the rhythm, the next part of the process was creating the main theme. In this case, he chose a synthesizer sound as the starting point and added more sounds on top of it like bass and the analog ‘Lead” which was used to add an edgy techno tone to the song.

For each song, it’s crucial to decide the instrument for the main theme. In the case of ‘So Hot’, I chose one of my favorite synthesizer sounds. This became the main theme and other sounds were added on top of that.

— Park Jin Young

Combining these parts together created the track for “So Hot”!

All done! I showed you how all the instruments are put together. This is how ‘So Hot’ was made.

— Park Jin Young

Watch JYP create the iconic song layer by layer for yourself below: