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I just got back from their show in SLC. I just thought I'd post a few quick notes while their still fresh in my mind. Doug seems to have a bit of a different setup than I've seen before. He isn't using a wah expression pedal anymore (I've seen him in the past with a Buddha Wah). Nor did he have the echoplex with him.

He had 2 homemade pedals. One had 5 knobs and a green LED. The other had 3 knobs and red LED. I'm not sure what either of them were but at least one must've been an overdrive/distortion. It seems like I'd read an interview in the past that told that Jim Roth makes the pedals for the guys in the band but I didn't notice Jim having any homemade pedals in his gigantic array. (He must've had about 20 pedals in total) Brett Netson had a few homemade pedals too but they were smaller and different from the ones doug had.

Doug was using an electro-harmonix 16 second digital delay but he seemed to be using it very sparingly. just some very short delays and certainly no knob twisting or freak-outs as he has done with the echoplex in the past. He had a Morley A-B switch that toggled his amps. I think his blackface is something like a 65 Bassman and his other amp was what looked like a twin cabinet but with some custom single channel chassis with no markings. I kind of guessed that it's comparable to the vibrato channel of a twin but I really have no idea. I don't think I ever heard him play it clean and sparkly (as a twin would be) because he usually had at least 1 if not both of the homemade drive pedals engaged when he would switch to that amp.

Brett had a rack mountable effect of some sort on a chair. I was surprised to see it as it seemed very new-school and was probably digital. I wasn't close enough to either Jim or Brett to get too much more info on what they had going on.

Oh and of note, Doug played the whole show with his trusty red "Ben" strat. I had never noticed that the 2 tone knobs and pickup selector have been removed from this guitar leaving just empty holes in those places. I didn't see the black "anti-W" Tele this time. Jim played his black tele and may have pulled out a blonde strat for a song or two. Brett played a "corporatists" strat that had both the neck and middle pickups removed and a gibson style humbucker in the bridge position. His old "Kill the rich" strat was on stage but I don't recall him picking it up for sure.

Brett was playing through a 64 blackface Bassman (the transitional year that had the black control panel with white knobs) as well a his homemade amp (who knows what that thing is?). Jim played through a blackface Super Reverb with a smaller extension cabinet with casters tipped on it's side (I think it may have been a tweed).

yeah, he only had the 2 home-made pedals and the EH-delay. And of course the line switcher for his amps. It sounds like the shows since my post have been better. I'm a little jealous. Oh and yes I'm pretty sure the pots and pickup selector were completely gone from doug's guitar. i was about 3 feet from him and could see the holes. he still had all 3 pickup covers but I have no idea which ones were actually wired up.

Brett's guitar definitely only had the 1 bridge pickup in it. You could see right through the middle and neck pickup holes of his guitar into the cavity of the body. I think his volume pot had a knob but the 2 TONE pots didn't have knobs like you're talking about.

Another thing that I thought was kind of interesting is that Doug and Brett have both been playing Fender Strats this tour. While these guitars look similar, their sonic characteristics are probably very very different. Doug is likely playing the neck position with Fender a single-coil pickup and a rosewood fretboard. Brett is playing the bridge position (generally more treble than the neck position) with a custom Gibson-style humbucker pickup (hotter output than single-coils) and a maple fretboard (brighter sound than rosewood).