Paul Waggoner

Paul Waggoner is one of the two guitarists in Between the Buried and Me, sharing the guitar duties with Dustie Waring. Fractal Audio describes the pair as the builders of the band's soundscape, "sometimes heavy and melodic, sometimes rhythmic and intense, sometimes lush, and always epic"¹. Waggoner's rig is built around a Fractal Axe-Fx rather than a wall of amplifiers, with a small pedalboard of expression pedals, a tuner and a boost in front of it.

He came to the Axe-Fx through Daniel Klein from Port City Amps, a friend of the band, who told them to check it out as a replacement for all of their amps, effects and cabling; touring with Cynic and Devin Townsend, who used it, pushed them the same way¹. The band ended up with two Axe-Fx Ultras, and Waggoner later moved to the Axe-Fx II¹.

Rhythm tones on Parallax II

For the rhythm sounds on Parallax II: Future Sequence, Waggoner and Waring worked inside the Axe-Fx rather than with real amps. Waggoner says:

The T808 OD is a Tube Screamer-style overdrive model, and using one to tighten the low end of a high-gain amp model is the same trick players use with physical pedals. One patch carried over from the earlier Ultra to the Axe-Fx II: he ported the Organ Grinder patch across and tweaked the delay tempo a bit¹.

Clean tones on Parallax II

For clean tones on the same album, he again blended two amp models:

He placed delay and reverb at the end of the chain for these tones¹, which lines up with standard signal-chain practice. Delay is typically placed after modulation and overdrive, before reverb, toward the end of the chain³, and reverb usually works best as the final link after the delay, because delayed reverb can sound muddy⁴. Placing reverb last, or in an amp's effects loop, also keeps it from being distorted by anything ahead of it⁵. Guitar World's guidance puts it the same way: delay and reverb are ambience effects, so they belong at the end of the chain, with the delay in front of the reverb⁶.

Waggoner's ear for that kind of tonal color comes from outside progressive metal. He listens to old country and bluegrass: Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and Johnny Paycheck, along with Joe Bonamassa¹. He says he sets up presets in the Axe-Fx to copy those old single-coil slap-back delay tones and then brings some of that into his own patches¹.

The live rig

On tour, Waggoner and Waring carried a matched setup built around the Axe-Fx. Both guitarists use Mission expression pedals for volume and wah through the Axe-Fx, TC Electronic PolyTune tuners, and a Port City Salem boost on their board². Waggoner's board also carries a Wampler Faux Tape Echo delay and a Wampler Levithan².

He controls the Fractal with a Rocktron All Access foot controller, a MIDI floor unit Rocktron lists among its artist gear²⁷. Rather than browsing patches by type, he sets them up in song mode, with rhythm, lead and other patches assigned per song, including a banjo-sounding patch when a song calls for one².

The signal path runs from a Line 6 Relay G50 digital wireless unit² into the pedalboard, then into the Axe-Fx Ultra, which feeds a Mesa/Boogie Simul-Class 2:90 power amp driving two Port City 212 cabinets running in stereo, each loaded with Celestion Vintage 30s². A Mesa/Boogie Stereo 2:50 sits in the rack as a backup power amp².

His guitars are PRS Custom 24s fitted with Bare Knuckle Blackhawk pickups², tuned to C# standard with a custom gauge set of D'Addario strings: .011, .014, .021 wound, .032, .044 and .056².

Signal chain at a glance

One placement note worth keeping in mind when building a chain like this: a volume pedal near the end of the signal chain, just before delay and reverb, lets you fade or mute the guitar without cutting delay or reverb tails short⁶. Waggoner's own volume control lives earlier in the concept, as a Mission expression pedal feeding the Axe-Fx², but the principle is the same trade-off every player makes between swells before the dirt and clean fades after it.

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