“I finally had to accept the reality that single coils weren’t going to give me everything the world has to offer”: Cory Wong on his new humbucker-loaded EBMM StingRay II
Ernie Ball Music Man’s StingRay II – revealed at NAMM this year – marked Cory Wong’s foray into the world of humbucker-loaded signature models.
And in a new interview with Guitarist, the jazz/funk maestro explains why single coils were no longer cutting it, and why he chose EBMM to get the job done.
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“I’ve been looking for a humbucker guitar for a lot of years,” he explains. “I finally had to accept the reality that single coils weren’t going to give me everything that the world has to offer – because, well, they’re just different. It’s a different tool, right?”
He goes on: “I love my Strat; I’m a Strat guy through and through, but I just needed a guitar with humbuckers. If I go out on tour, I just want two guitars: I want a guitar that can do everything the Strat doesn’t do. So I want something to give me the George Benson, Larry Carlton thing.
After realising it was “maybe impossible” to get the sound he was looking for out of one guitar, he set about trialling some different pickups and guitars to hone in on the tone he was after.
“I got pretty close with some of them,” Wong says. “Then one day, I was just scrolling the internet and I saw [Vulfpeck/Fearless Flyers bassist] Joe Dart texting me, he’s like, ‘Yo, so the Joe Dart Jr bass is coming out, check it out!’ And he sent me a picture. This thing looks amazing. It’s basically just like a miniature StingRay, and it had one pickup and whatever.
“I emailed Brian Ball [Ernie Ball CEO]. I was like, ‘Hey, can you just slap six strings on there and a humbucker and send me one?’ He’s like, ‘No, I can’t. That’s not how it works.’”
After pushing Brian to experiment with a render of a six-string StingRay, he realised he and Wong had already begun collaborating. “I feel like we’re kind of collaborating on this,” Ball said. “How involved do you want to be in this?”
Wong replied: “However involved you want me to be. Because what you’re doing right now is making the guitar that I want to be a companion to my Strat.”
A longtime Fender endorsee, Wong was quick to call the Big F to clear his potential collab with Ernie Ball Music Man.
“I was like, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a humbucker guitar, and blah, blah. I’m exploring this space with Music Man, I mean, it’s a completely different guitar, you know? It’s a totally different tool.’ So it’s like, ‘All right…’
Take a look at the StingRay II at Ernie Ball Music Man.
The post “I finally had to accept the reality that single coils weren’t going to give me everything the world has to offer”: Cory Wong on his new humbucker-loaded EBMM StingRay II appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
