[The live rig rundown Veil of Maya's Marc Okubo did for us last year was so popular that we've decided to make it into a regular column! Welcome to Rigged. In this inaugural edition, Between the Buried and Me guitarists Paul Waggoner and Dustie Waring take you through their live setups piece by piece. Coming soon, BTBAM drummer Blake Richardson and The Ocean's Robin Staps. Between the Buried and Me and The Ocean begin their MS-sponsored tour with Job For A Cowboy (and on select dates Cephalic Carnage) next week. Get dates here.]

To all our fellow string pluckin’ heavy metal headbangers, howdy! This is Paul Waggoner and Dustie Waring, and together we are the guitar duo for Between the Buried and Me. It’s come to our attention that there are some folks out there speculatin’ on what sorts of gear we put to use in conjurin’ up all these rowdy sounds. Well, here we are, to do right by all who take up an interest in such matters.

We both use PRS Custom 24 guitars strung up with D’addario strings.

I (Paul) stock my guitars with Dimarzio D-activator pickups while Dustie elects his own custom Dimarzio pickups.

From our guitars, the signal magically travels without use of a cable on account of a Line6 Relay G50 digital wireless system.

When the Line6 is done doing all its space-age sorcery, the signal goes into a TC Electronic Polytune tuner pedal. This little doohickey sees to it that all our notes sound the way we mean for ‘em to.

After the signal runs through the little tuner box, it makes it’s way over to a crazy little contraption called the Fractal Axe Fx Ultra. Dustie and I both use this little gizmo. We ain’t for sure how it does it, but it can take our guitar signal and circulate it through any assortment of digital amp models and effects, as many or as few as we see fit. I’ve gnawed up many a piece ‘o ragweed contemplatin’ on how the Axe Fx can muster up all this fancy hocuspocus voodooism, but I just end up stumpin’ myself and being worse off than I was before. After all the opining I’ve done on the subject, I can only ‘spect it must be some sort of witchcraft going on at the factory.

All our presets are controlled live with a fancy little switchboard called an All Access by Rocktron, which sits underneath our feet. We mash the buttons as needed.

When the Axe Fx has sufficiently lacquered up the guitar signal, it’s sent onward to a Mesa/Boogie Stereo 2 Fifty power amp. This scary lookin’ contrivance takes the processed sound and makes it big and brawny, making use of power tubes which I can only assume are filled with the spirit of the devil himself.

Now the sound is finally ready to go to the speaker cabinets so that it can be unleashed at punishing levels to unsuspectin’ ears. I prefer a Mesa Recto Cab while my cohort Dustie uses a high power Orange Cab.

Well folks, there it is. A basic rundown of our live setup. I hope y’all find time to get away from the facebooks for a long enough spell to check out some of the things we mentioned. We both reckon they’ll all fall in good favor with y’all if you’re willing to give ‘em a fair shake.

- Paul Waggoner and Dustie Waring / BTBAM