“I look up the tracks, I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s him.’ It’s the tone, the touch, the feel, the voicing choices”: Rhythm guitarists are harder to identify on recordings than lead players. But there’s one rhythm king that Cory Wong can pick out without fail

Cory Wong plays an Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay II electric guitar.

Cory Wong is one of today’s leading lights of rhythm guitar, taking the Nile Rodgers school of funk and teaming it with Steely Dan voicings and George Benson melodic sensibilities to forge a sound that has won him not one, but two signature guitars with two separate companies.

When Guitar World caught up with him at NAMM 2025 to promote the second of those models, the dual-humbucker Ernie Ball StingRay II, we hit Wong with a theory: that given social media algorithms favor pyrotechnic lead playing, the art of good rhythm guitar is getting lost in the noise.