With the strumming hand settling into the Wong groove, it's time to draw our attention to the fretting hand. In this unit, we'll be taking single note melody lines, and adding the Cory Wong magic to pull them into the rhythm, rather than lead, category. This means learning how to comfortably mute all the strings around the one you are fretting and co-ordinating your left and right hands with more complex single-note lines (as apposed to just the chord being played). Check out the first video to get started!
If you've ever studied players such as John Frusciante, or SRV, this technique might be familiar to you. It is the idea of being able to play single-note melodies, but make then sound rhythmical by strumming the rest of the strings at the same time. The reality of this technique is that it takes a lot of trial and error, and hours of sounding a bit "naff" before it starts to clean up and sound amazing! This is important to understand as you enter this world of funk playing.
Let's keep it simple to start with by taking the A string 7th fret (E note) and doing one strum per bar of 16th notes. Try and get this as clean as possible and keep your strumming hand loose and moving like a metronome!
This lesson focuses on bar 1 of the tab
Next up, two notes! It does make a surprising difference when it comes to the difficulty level when you have to rotate between two notes. We'll take the 5th and 7th fret on the A string and play them on the "1 e and a", which means two downstrokes. Once again, this is a rhythm more than a lead part, so we'd want to learn it as a rhythm pattern, which is shown in the diagram. This lesson focuses on bar 2 with this strumming pattern:
Just before we learn a cool track that integrates this style of rhythm, we'll step up one final level to learn an exercise that includes moving between strings as well. As you move to the D string notes, you want to either use your thumb or second finger to mute the low E string. Again, you'll need to play around with this concept, and accept it'll be a little messy at first! This lesson focuses on bar 3 with this strumming pattern:
We'll now bring all of these single note ideas to life, with a cool Cory Wong style groove that works in all of these ideas and then takes it to the next level. Use the tab in the materials section to work through the first section of the track, which includes the main groove based around the E minor pentatonic box 3. Be sure you can visualise where these notes fall within the shape, as it's a crucial part of the process!
In this lesson, we complete the tab, which includes that cool little dominant 7th chord shuffle where we pick out just the major 3rd and the flat 7th of the E7 and move it chromatically below and then back to E7. It's a classic Cory move and one which you'll need to master! As always, be sure to learn the tab at a nice slow pace, with the importance of good left and right-hand technique being the main goal. After that, your focus is to build the speed without losing the clarity of the sound. Add it to your practice routine, and take your time gradually building it up!
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