What's happening? Welcome to Wong Notes podcast. I'm your host, Corey Wong. I'm on a cruise ship right now.

I'm pacing back and forth in my state room, they call it. It's like a hotel room slash festival on a ship.

I'm on the cause cruise. It's a jazz cruise. I'm looking out my window at Glasgow,

Scotland right now, just outside of Glasgow. It's a wonderful time. I'm on a music cruise. These

things are actually pretty fun to do if you just have to play like once a day and then go see

these beautiful places. That's where I am right now. That's where I am

recording this intro and outro. I did an interview a couple weeks ago with one of my favorite

guitar players in the world, Eric Gales. He is my favorite blues player. Controversial, maybe, but no,

because he's dope. I mean, a lot of people would go, like, yo, you kind of can't say a modern

blues, a modern player is your favorite blues player. Tell you what, I can't. My favorite blues player is

Eric Gales. And I've been trying to study Gales playing for a while because he has an interesting

way that he plays. He plays left-handed, but he uses right-hand string.

So it's upside-down and backwards, basically, to most of us.

And he has a unique sound to it, and he has something that just sounds different about his playing.

I've been trying to figure it out for a while, and I was watching videos the last couple days,

and I realized I think there's something about playing upside down and backwards

with the kind of traditional way you're supposed to hold a pick, where it's kind of nose down,

I guess. The way that I pick is kind of reverse grip, where the pick is kind of backwards slanted and it's it's the way that

Benson plays it's the way that Mathini plays Isaiah Sharkey and myself we hold our our

picks that way and it's it's kind of well Troy Grady calls it the the trailing edge leading or

whatever but Eric Gales plays regular but because his

guitar is strung backwards his lines sometimes sound a little bit bensony but in a blues way and then

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