British duo Space Primates have pivoted from wannabe session guitarists to top‑tier K‑pop producers, with impressive results!

Having enrolled at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in London with the aim of becoming session guitarists, Marc Sibley and Nathan Cunningham realised “that well was drying up”. So, after graduating in 2013, they decided instead to form a production duo, and shut themselves away to learn the trade.

“A few things aligned at that time, including working on music at Nathan’s parents’ farm, which was pretty isolated so there weren’t as many outside distractions,” recalls Sibley. “During three months of intense work, we improved exponentially to where we felt we produced great music and had a competitive skill set. Something clicked in the quality of our work. Before that we had reached out to tons of people, and there was no response. When we reached out after those three months, most people got back to us.”

“It was a matter of putting in the hours,” adds Cunningham. “Initially, we spent a good amount of time copying tracks. I think the first thing Marc and I ever did together was copy Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream’. We studied many of the instrumentals on the website Hipstrumentals and tried to replicate them, and then made things that were just different enough so we could use them, but that were heavily inspired. Sound On Sound also was a massive resource for us, and still is, actually. In 2014, we got to the next stage, which was being original. We found our own sound.”

When Space Primates sent out their new, original tracks, one was heard by rapper LunchMoney Lewis, who was signed to Dr Luke’s publishing company Prescription Songs. Before Sibley and Cunningham knew it, they were in Dr Luke’s studio in LA, working with the famous producer and LunchMoney. Space Primates had sampled the Dazz Band song ‘Let It Whip’. The resulting track, LunchMoney Lewis’ second single ‘Whip It!’, became a hit in Australia and Germany, and Space Primates signed to Prescription. “That song kick‑started everything,” recalls Cunningham, “and allowed us to move to Los Angeles.”

Pulling Strings

Since then, Space Primates have worked with artists across a wide range of genres, such as Flo Rida, the Vamps, David Guetta, Seeb, Jonas Brothers, Enrique Iglesias, Dvbbs, Alesso and Katy Perry. A significant number of K‑pop acts have been among them, including Red Velvet, Kai, Taeyeon, Monsta X, Enhyphen, and Stray Kids, who recently topped the US album charts with the mixtape Do It, the title track of which was co‑written and co‑produced by Space Primates.

“I’d say about 50 percent of our songs start on guitar,” says Cunningham, “even if they may not have a guitar in them at the end. Having studied guitar at college definitely helped us. Being good at an instrument has always given us an edge over the average beatmaker, because your ears are more developed in a way that you don’t get if you don’t play an instrument.”

“Naturally, because we grew up playing guitar, we’re comfortable with that, and many ideas come from noodling around on guitars,” continues Sibley. “The results are not necessarily better or worse, but we often arrive at different places. Apart from when we’re playing guitars, everything is in the box. The most unused pieces of gear in our studio are our Roland Jupiter and Moog synths!”

When Cunningham and Sibley are creating tracks at their studio, in addition to noodling on guitars, “ideas can come from all sorts of places”, according to the latter. “We may be playing a keyboard, or pull up something cool from Splice or a sample pack, like a random loop that we chop up that may become the start of a drum beat or a melody. Or we program drums completely from scratch. Or we start from a soft synth patch. It might be from Spectrasonics Omnisphere, Xfer Serum 2, the Synapse Audio The Legend or Dune, or something from Native Instruments Kontakt, or samples we’ve harvested online or from previous sessions.”

Look East

Over the last two years, Space Primates have been increasingly involved in K‑pop, culminating in the number one success of the Stray Kids’ Do It mix tape. Cunningham: “The first K‑pop thing we did was a track [‘Carpool’] for Red Velvet in 2019. Our K‑pop career developed from there. K‑pop is highly collaborative, and works with many international writers and producers. K‑pop operates with a different system, more comparable to Pop Idol, American Idol, where labels search for top talent who are great dancers and singers, but not necessarily songwriters. Their schedules also are incredibly intense, and, other than Stray Kids, most of them don’t necessarily have time to even think about writing music. So K‑pop is always looking for pitches.”

Sibley adds: “Meanwhile, pitch music has really shrunk over the 10 years we’ve been in the US. To get placements with artists in the US, you usually need to be in the room with them, and when you are, they tend to be allergic to you presenting full ideas. They want to express themselves, so playing them a finished song usually doesn’t go down well, unless you’ve got a really good rapport with them. At the same time, we make sure to always have some tracks with us, just in case, because there are sessions, particularly when the ideas that are developed from scratch haven’t quite clicked, when an artist asks, ‘Play us some of your tracks.’ You need to be prepared.

“K‑pop acts also are always looking for songs because they tend to release two mini albums and one full album every year. These may all be songs that were pitched. On top of that, K‑pop is more popular than ever. In 2020, there might have been one K‑pop song on US pop radio. Now there are 10! Spotify is also populated with tons of K‑pop songs, and many of them are full‑blown hits in the West. So K‑pop needs a lot of music... and we make a lot of music!

“When we create tracks, in general, we’ll do everything apart from the singing, and we’ll send these demos to labels. But with K‑pop, again outside of Stray Kids, we tend to do full songs, with vocals, harmonies and everything. We do a lot of stuff where we get in a demo singer because we don’t have voices that will sell a record. While writing, we’ll use AI tools like Antares Metamorph, which can change our voices into a female voice. But these are purely for our own purposes, we never send these AI voices out to anyone.”

Nathan Cunningham: Many of our songs are placed by us not sticking to the brief. So we prefer to do something original, because it’s more likely to catch their ears.

Cunningham: “We get sent briefs all the time by the big K‑pop labels — SM, YG, JYP and Hybe — and sometimes we work to them, but we often just make what we think is cool, because we find that what gets placed is completely random. Many of our songs are placed by us not sticking to the brief. So we prefer to do something original, because it’s more likely to catch their ears. Also, it’s hard to make something well and convincingly that you don’t like. And because K‑pop entails so many different genres now, we can push the envelope. Of course, when working on these tracks with K‑pop acts, there’s a lot of back and forth, because they’re very specific about the song structures, and exactly where the raps and verses need to be in a song.”

Sibley: “Max Martin is famous for what people call ‘melodic math’, where a melody matches exactly the same amount of syllables, and repeats for the next line. There are not too many melody or inflection changes within the melody. With K‑pop, that’s not the case. The melodies are changing much more frequently, often every two bars. You might have three or four melodies before you get to the first hook. And there’s no way in K‑pop that the second verse is the same as the first. American pop is only now beginning to have second verses that are different than first verses. K‑pop has always done that.”

Parallel Production

Stray Kids are different from the K‑pop norm, because the eight‑strong group includes its own production team called 3Racha, consisting of Han, Changbin and band leader Bang Chan, who write and produce a large part of Stray Kids’ music and lyrics. Cunningham traces how Space Primates became involved: “We were doing some sessions in LA during which we ended up becoming friendly with JY Park, the founder of JYP Entertainment. Later, in January 2024, he called us and asked us to come over to South Korea to work for a few days with Stray Kids. So we went there, and spent two days with 3Racha at an amazing place called BK Studio [www.latsbk.com].

“We had sent 3Racha a bunch of backing tracks and song ideas, and they picked some, and we managed to get three songs done during those sessions. The other two songs we finished were ‘I Like It’, which was released on their EP Ate, and a song called ‘U’ that was on their EP Hop. [Both were released in 2024 and reached number one in South Korea and the USA.] So ‘Do It’ was released last, almost two years after we worked on it with Stray Kids.”

Before going to South Korea, Cunningham and Sibley had started the track that became ‘Do It’ with a four‑note pitched‑up vocal sample from Splice, with descending notes C#, A, G# and F#, to which they added a folk‑like melody played with a bell sound.

Both can be heard right at the start of the finished song. Sibley: “The vocal sample came from a pack called Vocal Shouts. Once we had those two parts, we added the drums. The drums are almost entirely programmed by us, apart from two percussion loops. We use Ableton drum racks that we have created for each drum sound, like kick, snare, and so on.”

“We drag in a bunch of kick samples or a bunch of snare samples into each rack, which is a bit like an MPC or a sampler, that allows us to spread the kicks across a musical keyboard,” adds Cunningham. “There’ll be like 16 or more one‑shot kick or snare samples, each under a square, and then we assign effects to macros on the drums. It allows us to tweak knobs really quickly, rather than having to add plug‑ins.

“On the right of the rack one can see the actual sample, and the green dots underneath mean that they’re assigned to a macro, like Resonance, Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release, Drive, Compression and so on. We’ll cycle through the kicks, or the snares, or whatever the samples are, to see which one sounds best in context, and then treat that with the macros. After the drums, we also added some brass, and a bass sound from Dune and a sub‑bass from Serum.”

Fine Tuning

In South Korea, the reggaeton‑influenced track underwent several changes. “We changed bits and pieces to the backing track to suit the group members, because they’re very specific about needing parts for each member,” recalls Sibley. “They need sections for raps, individual vocals, group vocals, and where they can dance. So, for example, we added a bridge section. They added their vocal parts and a lot of vocal layering, and single vocals in the verses, for contrast.”

“Bang Chan speaks fluent English because he’s Australian and Korean, which helped with communication,” says Cunningham. “3Racha had their input in the production, and we were involved in writing vocal melodies. We had brought a writer called JBach, who we had worked with on the song ‘Barbie Dreams’, which we contributed to Barbie The Album, and who has also done a lot of K‑pop. For the raps, Changbin and Han left the room, and came back 20 minutes later with the raps written. During the sessions at BK, they laid down rough vocals using a Shure SM7, and they later recorded finished vocals without us present.”

Sibley: “Once we were back in Los Angeles, we were asked to do several different versions of the instrumental, because they wanted the song to be more maximalist and aggressive. We added harder‑hitting drums and more stabs, and actually did a full reproduction, but in the end they settled on something that’s mostly from our original session. For Stray Kids, and K‑pop in general, the song as it was released isn’t that over the top.”

Not So Rough

Although the final mix of ‘Do It’ was conducted by Josh Gudwin, Space Primates spent considerable time at their LA studio completing the track and getting it ready for the final mix. “At some point we were told that they wanted to release ‘Do It’ as a single, and they asked us to finish the production as we saw fit,” explains Sibley. “They sent vocals over, which we put into our session. We went back and forth a number of times with different versions, but by this stage the changes were minute. Generally we mix as we go, and all our sounds are already quite developed while we build the track. If we’re going to do a sort of final mix, it’s an extra step afterwards where we make sure that everything sounds good together. We get our rough mixes pretty close. For the first song from that Stray Kids session, ‘I Like It’, they ended up using our rough mix.

“Normally we also produce the vocals, but in this case they sent us comped and tuned vocals, so this was an unusual situation for us. The vocals were dry, so we applied our treatments. We would then have sent Josh both the wet and dry vocals. Serban [Ghenea] has always been our favourite mixer, and he mixed some of our songs. We use a kind of second‑hand Serban template on vocals, that includes the Metric Halo Channel Strip.”

“I guess our foundation in production was EDM electro‑house‑type pop music, with for example Skrillex’s songs sounding louder than everyone else,” says Cunningham. “But today, we don’t have to make it that loud. It’s not our job anyway, but rather that of mixers and mastering engineers. Plus the streaming platforms normalise loudness. The main thing that we have to deal with is in making pop music, which now is going between so many different genres, is that you want the low end to compete with hip‑hop tracks, the high end with shiny bubblegum pop, and the midrange with rock. Plus there’s more focus on fidelity again, which we like. So we need to make the whole thing sound as good in every frequency range as in each of those genres.”