Over the summer, Reverb’s Joe Shadid got the first-hand lowdown on Cory Wong’s warmup routine.
The video is chock-full of great practice ideas… that I didn’t implement.
Maybe I’m just a weirdo, but seeing things written down makes them way more actionable for me. So I went through the video and wrote down each exercise. Text explanations, timestamps, TAB, chord grids, all of it.
I’ve editorialized a bit, made some guesses as to where he plays the things he didn’t demonstrate, and added a “how to practice this successfully” section.
Grab the PDFs, DAW files, drum loop, & setup guide here.
Cory Wong Warmup #1: Arpeggios Around The Circle
In this warmup, you’ll play the three notes of a triad in three octaves. He says he tries to put each three-note arpeggio in its own position:
- root-third-fifth (shift)
- root-third-fifth (shift)
- root-third-fifth — fifth-third-root (shift back)
- fifth-third-root (shift back)
- fifth-third-root
(He also says he doesn’t stress out about it being so rigid, so no worries if you want to abandon the script and find your own way to play them.)
From there, he plays that chord’s relative minor, then moves counterclockwise around the Circle Of Fifths. In other words:
- C —> Am
- F —> Dm
- Bb —> Gm
- Eb —> Cm
- Ab —> Fm
- Db —> Bbm
- Gb —> Ebm
- B —> G#m
- E —> C#m
- A —> F#m
- D —> Bm
- G —> Em
But this isn’t just a finger exercise. It’s also an exercise in fretboard knowledge and music theory. So I HIGHLY recommend that you:
- memorize this—get it off the screen and onto the fretboard as soon as you can
- do Say It As You Play It—say the name of each note OUT LOUD as you play it. This will really help your fretboard knowledge and teach you what notes go into which chords.
Cory Wong Warmup #2: Chromatic Approach Arpeggios
Once he’s done the three-octave triad arpeggios in every key, Cory takes another lap around the Circle Of Fifths, playing chromatic approaches. He uses two octaves plus an extra root up top as a turnaround point:
- root-third-fifth,
- root-third-fifth,
- root
- fifth-third-root,
- fifth-third-root…
…but he approaches each target note by playing the two notes above it:
After each major triad, he does its relative minor, only approaching from below.
For these chromatic approaches, he uses fingers 123 for the first half, then switches to 432 at the halfway point (Gb).
Just like with Warmup #1, this isn’t just a finger warmup—it’s a mental warmup too. So again, I HIGHLY recommend that you:
- memorize this—get it off the screen and onto the fretboard as soon as you can
- do Say It As You Play It—say the name of each target note OUT LOUD as you play it. No need to say the name of the approach notes, only the target notes.
[At this point in the warmup, Cory recommends stretching. I’m on the fence about the wisdom of yanking on the delicate machinery of your hands & wrists. If you’re gonna do it, be gentle and take your time.]
Update: Should you be stretching? We ran it past an experienced occupational therapist who specializes in hands.
She said that while these were good stretches to do, Cory isn’t doing them properly. Specifically, hyperextending your elbow while doing these stretches is a bad idea—keep a slight bend in the elbow instead.
She also said that he’s being overly aggressive—you should be more gentle, and hold the stretch for 15 to 20 seconds.
Keep in mind that I’m not a doctor, I’m just a guy who writes stuff on the internet. If it hurts, stop. Go see someone who’s qualified to give medical advice.
Cory Wong Warmup #3: Displacing Accents
In this warmup, you’ll practice accenting muted strums. Mute the strings with your fretting hand and playing sixteenth notes.
You can think of this as four notes per beat—tap your foot and count “1 ee and uh, 2 ee and uh, 3 ee and uh, 4 ee and uh” over and over with the numbered beat coinciding with your foot tap.
Alternatively, you can use “rhythmic solfege,” verbalizing the subdivisions as takadimi, takadimi, takadimi, takadimi (pronounced “tah kuh dee mee”), with “ta” landing on the beat.
Put on a metronome click or drum loop. Cory demonstrates it around 95 bpm, but experiment with going slower. As you slow down past ~60 bpm, this exercise actually becomes more difficult to keep lined up with the click, so experiment until you find something you can mostly keep in time.
Now we’re going to add accents to our strums, playing one note of each four louder than the rest.
- 1e+a 2e+a 3e+a 4e+a (or TAkadimi TAkadimi TAkadimi TAkadimi)
- 1e+a 2e+a 3e+a 4e+a (or taKAdimi taKAdimi taKAdimi taKAdimi)
- 1e+a 2e+a 3e+a 4e+a (or takaDImi takaDImi takaDImi takaDImi)
- 1e+a 2e+a 3e+a 4e+a (or takadiMI takadiMI takadiMI takadiMI)
Work each of these until you can play them, then play your way through 4 beats of each.
Once you can play four beats of each accent, switch to two beats of each accent:
- 1e+a 2e+a 3e+a 4e+a (TAkadimi TAkadimi taKAdimi taKAdimi)
- 1e+a 2e+a 3e+a 4e+a (takaDImi takaDImi takadiMI takadiMI)
And once you can play two beats of each accent, cycle through with one beat of each accent.
- 1e+a 2e+a 3e+a 4e+a (TAkadimi taKAdimi takaDImi takadiMI)
Feeling good on that? Now play through all three variants ( 4 beats each, 2 beats each, 1 beat each) without stopping.
Now that we’ve gone through this exercise with accents, we’re going to repeat it with chords in place of accents.
Cory demonstrates this with an E9 chord (x78777), and cycles through the same accents.
You’ll find all the TAB, fretboard diagrams, DAW files, drum loops, and setup guide here.
Up Next: Gridding
Cory refers to this last warmup as a “gridding exercise,” and talks about recording his practice into a DAW and examining the waveforms against the grid.
This is some Matrix-level special sauce that will dramatically accelerate your progress if applied regularly.
How To Practice This Successfully: A Brief Pep Talk
Recently I started working my way through Tom Quayle’s excellent material on developing fluent legato chops, and he said something that jumped out at me.
He said that transforming his legato from awful to amazing “only” took him six months of daily practice.
Every day for six months!?!?! That means he practiced a half-hour of exercises one hundred and eighty-three times before he was any good at it!
That’s almost a hundred hours spent on one aspect of his playing.
But hey: the time is going to pass with or without us working on our playing. Wouldn’t you rather have something to show for it?
If you want to see huge improvements in your playing, you need to figure out how to show up consistently. I can’t give you super-detailed advice that’s specific to your life situation, but I can show you where to start looking.
1. You need to reduce the friction so that it’s effortless to start.
For me, this means keeping a specific DAW project file for each exercise.
- The tempo is already set.
- The drum loops are queued up.
- There’s an amp & pedalboard model ready to go.
- There’s a tuner on the track.
- I’ve already flown in the video lesson and created an arrangement track so I can see where each section begins & ends (and I can easily loop them).
All I have to do is plug my guitar into my interface and start playing.
2. You need to track your wins & build streaks.
I’ve noticed that loads of successful games & apps employ a streak counter to gamify the act of showing up regularly. Whether it’s Oak for meditation or DuoLingo for language learning, they know that once we get a streak going, we don’t want to let it drop.
It’s the digital form of Jerry Seinfeld’s Don’t Break The Chain method.
I use Strides for iOS, but I hear good things about Loop Habit Tracker for Android.
- Download the app and add a category for “5 minutes of fundamentals practice.”
- Every day that you work on your fundamentals, you get to check the box.
- Keep the bar absurdly low—don’t get overly specific about which fundamentals, and don’t demand more than a few minutes. You can always do more. Don’t raise the bar when you’re successful.
Recap
Download the TABs, fretboard diagrams, DAW files, drum loop, & setup instructions.
Then watch the video section by section. You’ll get a lot more out of it once you’ve memorized it, and exponentially more out of it if you say the names of the notes out loud as you play them.
This is going to take awhile before a) you get good at it and b) you get all you can from it. Which means you gotta show up regularly. Get a habit tracker like Strides (iOS) or Loop (Android). Set the bar absurdly low (and keep it there).
