Korea Travel Goal: A BTS "The Truth Untold" Duet at KING STUDIO
Two first-time singers from the USA recorded BTS "The Truth Untold" as a duet at KING STUDIO — a Korea travel surprise from a mom to her ARMY daughter, delivered as a finished mastered track.
Can you record a real BTS song in a professional Seoul studio with zero singing experience? Yes — KING STUDIO's DIAMOND session lets two visitors record BTS "The Truth Untold" as a duet and take home a fully mixed and mastered track, no vocal training required. That is exactly what a mother and daughter from the USA did on their Korea travel itinerary this season: 120-plus minutes in a Gangnam recording booth with a vocal director, a pronunciation coach, and one of the most beloved ballads in the BTS catalog. If you're an ARMY planning a trip to Korea and wondering whether this experience is really doable for ordinary fans — this is what their session actually looked like, step by step.
- Why "The Truth Untold" — a mom's surprise for her ARMY daughter
- Inside the DIAMOND session: recording "The Truth Untold" step by step
- BTS spots near the studio — KING STUDIO's picks
- In their own words
- KING STUDIO services — quick FAQ
Why "The Truth Untold" — a mom's surprise for her ARMY daughter
Every DIAMOND session starts with one question: which song, and why? For Julia and Kiara, the answer was planned before they ever landed in Seoul. Julia isn't the K-pop fan in the family — her daughter Kiara is, and BTS is her group. So when Julia was building their family trip to Korea, she quietly added one event Kiara didn't see coming: a professional duet recording of a BTS song at KING STUDIO, booked as a surprise gift from mother to daughter. The song they chose together was "The Truth Untold."
It's a meaningful pick, and a brave one. "The Truth Untold" (전하지 못한 진심) was released in May 2018 on BTS's album Love Yourself: Tear, performed by the group's vocal line — Jin, Jimin, V, and Jungkook — with production by Steve Aoki. It's a quiet, piano-driven ballad about feelings left unspoken: longing hidden behind a mask, the things you can't quite say to someone you love. Fans have treasured it for years precisely because it isn't a performance piece — it's a confession. For a mother and daughter recording together, a song about unspoken feelings between people who love each other lands differently than any dance track could.
It's also, honestly, one of the harder songs a visitor can bring into the booth. Two reasons. First, the lyrics are almost entirely in Korean — beautiful, image-heavy Korean about gardens and masks and sandcastles — and neither Julia nor Kiara speaks the language. Every line would need to be learned sound by sound and then corrected in real time. Second, the original is carried by four trained vocalists trading delicate, exposed lines over little more than a piano. There's nowhere to hide in this song. Splitting four voices' worth of parts between two first-time singers, and finding a single key that fits both a mother's voice and her daughter's, was going to be the real work of the day.
There was also a purely musical problem hiding inside the sentimental one. A duet needs one key, and Julia and Kiara don't have the same voice — different ranges, different comfortable registers, a generation apart. The original key belongs to four professional male vocalists; it was never going to fit either of them as written. Someone would have to find the single key where a mother's voice and a daughter's voice could both live for the length of the song, and then decide, line by line, who sings what.
That's the challenge they walked in with: not "can we sound like BTS" — nobody's asking that — but can two people who've never recorded anything get through one of BTS's most emotionally exposed ballads, in Korean, together? The DIAMOND format exists for exactly this situation: a vocal director runs the session line by line, the recording is done part by part, and the engineering — tuning, mixing, mastering — turns two honest amateur performances into one finished track the family keeps forever. Here's how it actually went.
Inside the DIAMOND session: recording "The Truth Untold" step by step
Step 1 — Meeting the team: vocal director Jiseon and manager Jinny
Julia and Kiara arrived at KING STUDIO in Gangnam for their first-ever visit, and the session opened with introductions: Jiseon, the vocal director who would run their recording, and Jinny, the manager who would support the session — and, as it turned out, become their Korean pronunciation coach for the day. For a surprise-gift session like this one, the first few minutes matter: two people who have never stood in a recording booth are about to sing an emotional ballad in a language they don't speak, and the team's job is to make that feel possible rather than terrifying.
Step 2 — Dialing in the monitoring: piano, voice, and reverb
Before any serious singing, the engineering side gets personal. Through a full run of the track, the team balanced what Julia and Kiara each heard in their headphones — the instrumental, their own voice, and the amount of reverb on it — until the mix felt natural to sing into. This step is easy to underestimate. A first-time singer who can't hear themselves clearly goes flat; one drowning in reverb loses the beat. And because this was a duet, the balance had to work twice over — Julia's ideal mix and Kiara's aren't identical. Setting an ideal monitoring environment for each singer individually is part of why a DIAMOND session produces a track that sounds intentional rather than karaoke-shaped.
Step 3 — Warm-up: pitch and rhythm first
Jiseon opened the vocal work with training focused on the two fundamentals: pitch and timing. This doubled as a diagnosis — within the warm-up, she was already analyzing how Julia and Kiara each naturally sang, where their comfortable ranges sat, and what tendencies would need attention once the red light came on. With a ballad this exposed, there's no percussion to lean on for rhythm and no wall of sound to cover a drifting note, so the warm-up wasn't a formality. It was the map for everything that followed.
Step 4 — Splitting a four-voice ballad into two parts — and finding one key
Here was the session's central puzzle. "The Truth Untold" was written for four vocalists; Julia and Kiara are two. So before recording, they worked with Jiseon to divide the song into a mother part and a daughter part — deciding who would carry which lines and where their voices would meet.
Then came the key: through short rehearsal passes, Jiseon adjusted the song's key and fine-tuned the part split until she found the version both of them could actually sing — not the original key, but their key. This rehearsal-driven adjustment is a signature DIAMOND step: the song is rebuilt around the singers in the room, not the other way around.
Step 5 — Ninety minutes of directing, line by line
Then the real recording began: roughly an hour and a half of part-by-part directing. Jiseon, who had analyzed each part in advance, worked through the song section by section — repeating the beat, the pitch, and crucially the meaning of each Korean line, so Julia and Kiara weren't just mimicking sounds but singing a lyric they understood.
On every Korean passage, Jinny stepped in continuously to correct pronunciation, syllable by syllable, until the words landed cleanly. The Korean coaching ran as its own parallel track: "The Truth Untold" is dense with soft consonants and vowel shapes English doesn't use, and getting them wrong doesn't just sound off — it changes the words. So Jinny's corrections continued through the entire ninety minutes, line after line, not as a one-time lesson at the start. They recorded in order: Julia's parts were completed first, then Kiara's — each of them tracking their lines idol-style, in takes, while the other listened from the control room. Recording separately like this is what makes the later engineering possible: each voice lands on its own track, so each can be tuned and balanced on its own before the two are blended back into one duet. Ninety minutes of "one more time" sounds grueling; in the booth, with a director who keeps explaining why each retake will be better, it turns into the part visitors talk about most.
Step 6 — The Sweet Spot listen-back — and the master they take home
With recording done, Julia and Kiara sat down for the final monitoring in what KING STUDIO calls the Sweet Spot — the acoustically ideal listening position in the studio, where the monitors converge and you hear the recording the way the engineer does. It's a different experience from headphones in the booth: sitting in that one chair, the two voices they'd recorded separately over the past ninety minutes played back as a single duet for the first time. Hearing your own recording full-range in that seat, minutes after your last take, is the emotional payoff of the day. And it's only the preview: after the session, the recording goes through pitch and timing correction, mixing, and mastering, and the finished take-home master — the actual DIAMOND deliverable — is sent to the customer, typically within about two weeks. The song Julia planned as a surprise becomes a file the family keeps: mother and daughter, singing "The Truth Untold" together in Seoul.
BTS spots near the studio — KING STUDIO's picks
Yoojung Sikdang
Nonhyeon-dong, Gangnam. BTS's trainee-era regular restaurant, featured in Rookie King; still open, walls lined with fan memorabilia. Go before the lunch rush; mains roughly $8–15; ~10 minutes by taxi from KING STUDIO.
📍Address (Google) : 14, Dosan-daero 28-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
📍Address (Naver) : 서울특별시 강남구 도산대로28길 14
Former Big Hit building
Nonhyeon-dong, Gangnam. The modest old headquarters from BTS's pre-fame years; an exterior photo stop a short walk from Yoojung Sikdang. Free, anytime.
📍Address (Google) : 13-20 Dosan-daero 16-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
📍Address (Naver) : 서울특별시 강남구 도산대로16길 13-20
HYBE headquarters
Yongsan. Not open for tours, but the exterior is a pilgrimage photo, and since March 2026 a first-floor pop-up space hosts rotating HYBE-artist exhibitions (reserve via Weverse). ~30 minutes from the studio.
📍Address (Google) : 42, Hangang-daero, Yongsan-gu, Seoul
📍Address (Naver) : 서울 용산구 한강대로 42
In their own words
"Today we recorded a very nice song, and they were very, very nice people. They also had a lot of patience with our very unskilled work. So, thank you very much."
"Patience with our very unskilled work" — that's the honest version of what a vocal-directed session is. You don't arrive skilled. You leave with a master anyway.
KING STUDIO services — quick FAQ
Q. What exactly does DIAMOND include?
A. Your chosen song recorded part by part under a vocal director, then pitch/timing correction, mixing, and mastering into a finished take-home master — this session's format. Two people can record as a duet, as Julia and Kiara did. Take-home produced tracks begin at this tier.
Q. What is GOLD (Personal Vocal)?
A. A 120-minute vocal-training session: diagnosis of your range, timbre, and habits, targeted coaching, personalized song recommendations, plus a ~30-minute in-booth recording experience and a PDF Personal Vocal report. The recording is an unedited experience — there's no take-home audio file at this tier
Q. What about PREMIUM?
A. Everything in DIAMOND, plus a K-pop style music video filmed during your session.
Q. And the K-Pop Making Class?
A. For groups of 2–15: one song split into idol-style parts, with each member recording their own lines, combined into a single group track.
Current pricing and availability are always on the KING STUDIO recording guide.
Make it part of your Korea travel plan
A duet like Julia and Kiara's takes one booking and zero experience — the directing, pronunciation coaching, and engineering are the studio's job. If a BTS song belongs on your Korea travel itinerary, start with the complete KING STUDIO recording guide and book your DIAMOND experience directly. And tell us — which BTS spot is on YOUR Seoul bucket list, ARMY? We'd love to see more mother-daughter duets walk through the door.
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🌐 Visit us: https://kingstudio.co.kr/en
💎 Read more about DIAMOND : kingstudio.co.kr/blog/diamond
📍Address (Google) : B1 52, Samseong-ro 75-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
📍Address (Naver) : 서울시 강남구 삼성로 75길 52 B1
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