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.
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Slayer guitarists Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman formed the original searing 6-string front line of the most brutal band in the land. Together, they created an aggressive mood of malcontent with high-velocity thrash riffs and screeching solos that’ll slice your speaker cones. The only way to create a band more brutal than Slayer would be to animate them, and that’s exactly what Metalocalypse (and Home Movies) creator Brendon Small did.
From his first listen, Small has been a lifetime devotee and thrash-metal expert, so we invited him to help us break down what makes Slayer so great. Together, we dissect King and Hanneman’s guitar styles and list their angriest, most brutal songs, as well as those that create a mood of general horribleness.
This episode is sponsored by EMG Pickups.
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At 26, Blu DeTiger is the youngest musician ever to have a signature Fender bass guitar. The Fender Limited Player Plus x Blu DeTiger Jazz Bass, announced in September, pays tribute to the bassist and singer’s far-reaching impact and cultural sway. She’s played with Caroline Polachek, Bleachers, FLETCHER, Olivia Rodrigo, and more, and released her own LP in March 2024. In 2023, Forbes feature her on their top 30 Under 30 list of musicians. So how did DeTiger work her way to the top?
DeTiger opens up on this episode of Wong Notes about her career so far, which started at a School of Rock camp at age seven. That’s where she started performing and learning to gig with others—she played at CBGB’s before she turned 10. DeTiger took workshops with Victor Wooten at Berklee followed and studied under Steven Wolf, but years of DJing around New York City, which hammered in the hottest basslines in funk and disco, also imprinted on her style. (Larry Graham is DeTiger’s slap-bass hero.)
DeTiger and Wong dish on the ups and downs of touring and session life, collaborating with pop artists to make “timeless” pop songs, and how to get gigs. DeTiger’s advice? “You gotta be a good hang.”
