82 episodes

Hi, my name is Cory Wong. This is my podcast. I'm going to talk to your favorite artists as they discuss their personal tricks of the trade, never-before-heard stories, and the proper response when Sinatra wants to peep your master tapes.

Wong Notes Premier Guitar

    • Music
    • 4.9 • 40 Ratings

Hi, my name is Cory Wong. This is my podcast. I'm going to talk to your favorite artists as they discuss their personal tricks of the trade, never-before-heard stories, and the proper response when Sinatra wants to peep your master tapes.

    Respect, Psychedelics, and the Future of Bluegrass With Billy Strings

    Respect, Psychedelics, and the Future of Bluegrass With Billy Strings

    The ascendant roots shredder shares intimate details from his musical upbringing and gets philosophical on the past and future of bluegrass.
    Millennial folk philosopher Billy Strings joins this episode of Wong Notes. The Grammy-winning acoustic picker is an open book—nothing is off limits with Billy, from recounting his days selling magic mushrooms in exchange for passing grades in math class, to an emotional drunk-driving revelation that might have saved his life.
    Now, Strings can recount war stories of playing with his heroes in the bluegrass scene, and learning important lessons from the greats about respect while onstage. Strings is at the intersection of the old and the new, often stuck between the traditionalists and the new era of American folk music. He says he doesn’t belong to one or the other; his music is more of “a goulash of all the things put together.” Speaking of which, Billy and Cory connect for a brilliant mashup of Cory’s funk stylings and Billy’s bluegrass flatpicking, proving that music really can be a universal language.
    Get 30% off your first year of DistroKid by going here: http://distrokid.com/vip/corywong
    Visit Billy Strings: http://billystrings.com
    Hit us up: wongnotes@premierguitar.com
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    Produced by Jason Shadrick and Cory Wong
    Additional Editing by Shawn Persinger
    Presented by DistroKid

    • 50 min
    Joe Dart Talks Bass Philosophy and the Benefits of High Action

    Joe Dart Talks Bass Philosophy and the Benefits of High Action

    This time on Wong Notes, Cory is joined by his Vulfpeck and Fearless Flyers copilot Joe Dart. Wong doesn’t waste any time, diving in by asking Dart, by now renowned as a modern bass wizard with flawless fundamentals, how he developed he signature “voice” on the bass. As Dart explains, it came from listening to players who had their own distinct “voice,” who sound like “they’re singing a part within the song,” he says. These “philosophers of the low-end,” like Flea, imprinted the value of total intention and feeling in every note, as if any single one could be your last.
    Dart throws it back to his first bass—a Samick—and remembers how it’s ridiculously high action was like weight training for the rest of his career. He still likes his strings suspended up higher than most, which allows his “brute force” slapping. Wong and Dart trade notes on practice regimes, and Dart offers advice for young players: Learn your scales, sure, but most importantly, “play with as many different people as you can.” Plus, Dart breaks down his differing approaches to instrumental and vocal tracks.
    Later on, the bandmates ponder the mental trap of the social media comparison game, and wonder at how algorithms impact which music rises to the top of the heap. What does Dart hope to remembered for? With any luck, he’ll have works as iconic as his grandfather’s, Israel Baker, whose violin playing you’ll recognize not just from collabs with Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, but some of the most famous film scores and TV show theme songs.
    Listen to the full episode here: https://bit.ly/WongNotes
    Get 30% off your first year of DistroKid by going here: http://distrokid.com/vip/corywong

    Visit Joe Dart:
    Hit us up: wongnotes@premierguitar.com
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    • 1 hr 3 min
    The Rich Musical World of Louis Cato

    The Rich Musical World of Louis Cato

    Multi-instrumentalist Louis Cato has had a lot on his plate since taking over as bandleader for Jon Batiste on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in late 2022, but has been enjoying every minute of it. "I feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, with exactly the people I'm supposed to be there with," he tells Cory on this episode of Wong Notes. Of course, given his role there is a fulltime gig, the release of his second solo album, Reflections, last August was kind of a big deal. Its music was largely inspired by things Cato was forced to confront when the pandemic hit, including "self-analysis, putting on the mask, the egotistical parts of attraction and love songs, and things of that nature," he shares.
    Early on in the conversation, Louis answers Cory's question about how his approach to chord voicings is so different from the norm. A lot of it comes from his childhood influence of Ron Kenoly's praise and worship music, featuring Abe Laboriel Sr. on bass. His first guitar was from a yard sale and had just four strings, and his experience learning Laboriel's bass lines on it still informs how he approaches voice leading on the guitar today. There was also his mother, the pianist, from whom he absorbed into his guitar methods the piano style of playing octaves in the left hand and triads in the right.
    After Louis shares about what makes his creativity tick as a multi-instrumentalist, he and Cory get into the meat of the biggest mistakes a guitar player can make. A lot of it, for Cato, has to do a lack of dynamics and inflection, or playing 10 notes where you should just play two, he says. Towards the end of the ep, Louis hops on a drumset in the room to illustrate how drummers can also create a "jerky" beat if they don't stick with just straight or just swingin'. Listen to the full ep to get a deep dive into the mind of the Late Show bandleader.
    Visit Louis Cato: https://louiscato.com/
    Get 30% off your first year of DistroKid by going here: http://distrokid.com/vip/corywong
    Hit us up: wongnotes@premierguitar.com
    Visit Cory: https://www.corywongmusic.com
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    • 52 min
    Aaron Sterling’s Pedalboard Approach to the Drums

    Aaron Sterling’s Pedalboard Approach to the Drums

    Session drum ace Aaron Sterling might have fusion roots, but his bread-and-butter work lives at the top of the charts, where’s he’s featured on tracks by artists such as John Mayer, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and Lana Del Rey. He tells Cory what brought him to Los Angeles, why he’s “meant to be in the studio” instead of the stage, and he shares the surreal story of playing with EVH in a florist’s parking lot for Tracy Morgan.
    Sterling defines his approach to recording in his studio as a “pedalboard approach” and explains:
    “When guitar players started getting more pedals, in the old days, and then they started getting a pedalboard. And then there’s the rack. This was this evolution where you guys started controlling more and more of your sound and it was less waiting for a mixer to do interesting things later. And you were just like, ‘Here’s the sound.’ You have your own plugin, you have all this stuff that you’re doing to control your sound so that there’s less work later.I got inspired by that concept when I started recording, even before I had my own studio, to give an engineer the most amount of stuff that’s done. So that when I started recording myself, my philosophy was always the pedalboard philosophy, which is I’ll give you the sounds, I’m not just gonna play the drums and let you do stuff later. I don’t wanna think of myself as a drummer. I’ll think of myself as a creator using drums to give you sounds that hopefully are the right thing for the song.”Stick around for the drummer’s opinion of the Beatles’ “Now and Then” and learn why he prefers large cymbals.
    Get 30% off your first year of DistroKid by going here: http://distrokid.com/vip/corywong

    Visit Aaron Sterling: https://aaronsterling.com/
    Hit us up: wongnotes@premierguitar.com
    Visit Cory: https://www.corywongmusic.com
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    • 1 hr 3 min
    How Bruce Lee Inspired Margaret Glaspy’s New Record

    How Bruce Lee Inspired Margaret Glaspy’s New Record

    Cory Wong sits down with indie-rock bandleader Margaret Glaspy for an in-depth dialogue on artistry, celebrity, and the wisdom of Bruce Lee.
    Glaspy shares how she cut her latest record, Echo The Diamond, live off the floor, with most of the “homework” happening beforehand and studio performances happening in-the-moment. “It really felt like air blew through the studio and then the record was made,” she says. “What you’re hearing is mostly what happening.” The songs are like photographs of a particular moment, rather than an essential, unchanging thing; Glaspy says she values the “dying art” of taking risks in music.
    Glaspy runs down how she and husband Julian Lage work on each other’s projects, and highlights one of their key criteria in assessing performances: are you your best guitar player right now? “Would you hire yourself or fire yourself?” poses Glaspy.
    The conversation turns to Glaspy’s rig on the record—she played through a Magic Amps rendition of a black-panel Fender Princeton, plus a Fender Champ combo—before revealing that these days, she’s bypassing her tuner pedal and letting the audience hear the process between songs. “Let’s not hide what’s needed to make this actually go,” she laughs.Wong and Glaspy swap notes on Bruce Lee’s winning combo of talent and work ethic (and how one of his quotes inspired Glaspy’s record) before finishing with a fascinating philosophical dissection of artistry, pop culture, and celebrity. “The business of celebrity intertwines them in a way that’s hard to escape,” says Glaspy, who sees a clash between surface-level fantasy and bone-deep darkness in pop culture.
    Tune in to the episode to learn all the gems from Echo The Diamond.
    Listen to the full episode here: https://bit.ly/WongNotes
    Get 30% off your first year of DistroKid by going here: http://distrokid.com/vip/corywong

    Visit Margaret Glaspy: https://margaretglaspy.com/
    Hit us up: wongnotes@premierguitar.com
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    Twitter: a...

    • 53 min
    Charlie Hunter: Graduating Busking Boot Camp

    Charlie Hunter: Graduating Busking Boot Camp

    "I don't consider myself a jazz musician," says guitarist Charlie Hunter on this episode of Wong Notes—essentially refuting how he's known in the music world. "I am maybe jazz adjacent." Most listeners probably wouldn't agree, but if nothing else, Hunter is experimental. He's known for playing a guitar that's strung with both bass and electric guitar strings, that has two pickups—one for bass and one for guitar—and two input jacks, which go to separate amps for the respective sounds.
    As the conversation unfolds, Charlie shares with Cory about the importance of interdependence, especially in jamming. "All I want to do is be a part of an extension of [the drummer's] beat," he explains. "Everything has to take a backseat to that." He compares the level of resources he had with young musicians today—back then, for better or for worse, all he had was a metronome and the discipline exemplified by the older musicians he played with. Something else that shapes modern musical culture, he says, is globalization: Having access to every genre and the music of every guitar player can make it harder for people learning to pick a specialty.
    Charlie goes on to share about how he got his stripes largely from his time performing as a street musician in Europe. "I would not trade those three, four years of being a street musician for anything," he says, describing the experience as a kind of boot camp. His first lessons were in playing 12 hours a day on an unfamiliar instrument at the time—acoustic bass—on the streets of Zurich.
    Towards the end of the interview, Charlie and Cory reflect together on the values of bonding with your musical community in person, something that's more of a challenge with the rise of internet culture. However, Charlie has lately been using Instagram as a vehicle to share the music of Blind Blake, someone who he thinks is "literally better than any of us [on guitar]."
    Listen to the full episode here: https://bit.ly/WongNotes
    Get 30% off your first year of DistroKid by going here: http://distrokid.com/vip/corywong

    Visit Charlie Hunter: http://charliehunter.com
    Hit us up: wongnotes@premierguitar.com
    Visit Cory: https://www.corywongmusic.com
    Visit Premier Guitar: a href="https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbDdydmxPMGc4RWFVbmVLelpSMm1IclNvenU5d3xBQ3Jtc0tuYUVjV3Y1MFdKeWxUUDVnTEdVbGtndTgzNG5EMVZFQjRGOTlEYUdaVEJTYkgxRTBEUmI1dGVQWjZ0YWllNlNUa1AzcnV3NF9xN21zdUV2alZTQm94MmlXQnJCcXlwRTUtMDlEOE9scDJrSHVOS01JZw&q=http%3A%2F%2Fpremierguitar.com" rel="noopener noreferrer"...

    • 52 min

Customer Reviews

4.9 out of 5
40 Ratings

40 Ratings

T677754499999 ,

Great pod

Fun conversations to with a who’s who of the guitar and music world.

Inspiration zone.

Kadizzler ,

Inspirational

This is a great podcast to listen to during lockdown. I reckon I have listened to The Pat Metheny episode 4 times through now.

Looshbaby ,

Fresh and Diverse

Love this guy, funny, interesting, and inspiring. Great range of guests too.

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