Why Cory Wong doesn’t need a complex setup to create great recordings

Cory Wong has built his reputation primarily as a formidable guitar player – both as a solo artist and alongside others like Vulfpeck. But as he tells MusicTech in a new interview, his latest album, Lost In The Wonder arrives to showcase, primarily, his production chops.

“A lot of people know me as a guitar player – and rightfully so – because I’m a guitar guy!” he says. “But with this album, I wanted to really showcase a lot more of my songwriting, my production and my arranging.”

Lost In The Wonder was recorded mostly at Minneapolis facility Creation Audio alongside producer John Fields – and as he explains, his philosophy towards gear was kept basic.

“I don’t need them to have fancy outboard gear,” he says. “I track into a Universal Audio Apollo, just using the internal preamps, you know, just one rack space. I don’t need a whole rack of extra gear. If you have that, cool! But just get me the good sounds. I don’t care as long as the sounds are good.”

He continues: “Because the musician and the decisions that they make is going to be the most compelling thing. How can you capture the essence of that? How can you capture that in the most pure way? 

“A lot of times, for my guitar, it’s just plugging directly into the console. If you listen to a lot of the early Prince rhythm guitar stuff, or a lot of the Nile Rodgers guitar stuff, that’s what a lot of that is. Direct into the console.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Wong notes the meticulous process of perfecting his signature Archetype plugin with leading guitar modelling brand Neural DSP.

“I was like, ‘The only way this thing goes out is if I am 100% satisfied, and if you are 100% satisfied,” Wong recalls telling Neural. 

“They sent me version one, and it was pretty good. And we made revisions. By version five, I was still like, not yet. It is great, but I don’t plug into it right now and think, ‘I have to use this for everything’. So we got to, like, version nine!”

You can read the full interview with Cory Wong via MusicTech. And check out Lost in the Wonder’s title track – with Benny Sings – below:

Sam is the Associate News Editor for Guitar.com and MusicTech. Thoroughly immersed in music culture for the majority of his life, Sam has played guitar for 20 years, studied music technology and production at university, and also written for the likes of MusicRadar, Guitar World, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer.