Achieving great distortion with boosts

Starting with your initial amp sound you should dial in a balanced EQ. I suggest starting with bass mid and treble in the center of their range at 12 o'clock, then make subtle alterations to taste from there. Once you're satisfied bring the available gain up till the amp is just breaking up in a "bluesy" way. From here you should introduce an overdrive to the front input of the amp to boost the signal making it "clip" or distort harder. The overdrive settings used by many high gain aficionados is to put the level or volume on the pedal way up, adjust the tone options to taste and turn the gain right down. The objective of this method is to increase gain by boosting the volume of the input signal, not to introduce excessive amounts of pedal gain. Doing things this way helps to maintain the clarity of your guitar tone so it doesn't become an over distorted mess. It pays to understand that tones which are too gain saturated may sound fun in the bedroom but when introduced to a band scenario basically disappear. Nobody will be able to define what you're actually playing as your EQ becomes redundant in the wake of the over distorted muddy fuzz background mess. And no matter how much volume you use the more defined sounds of your band mates will drown you out. You're looking for power and push, not bass and fizz.

Now having said these things I know there will be some saying what about Death metal and HM2 sounds? Well most brutal death sounds are achieved in the way outlined above but there are some bands that are really pushing the envelope of what can work distortion wise and in another blog I will talk about the tricks used to make those tones usable but for now 99% of players are going to get the heavy sounds they are seeking using the methods described above.

And now for the gear heads who are thinking "well which overdrive do I get?" I'm going to outline a few distinctive types of boost/overdrive that can be utilised to get useful saturation in a variety of different tones.