some of the greatest live performances I've witnessed involved a guitar player (or bass player - Hansford Rowe, Gongzilla) that played an wide open amp and controlled his or her tone only with the volume pot.
simply turning down the gain doesn't give you the same results, there's something about a weaker signal hitting a higher gain stage as opposed to a stronger signal hitting a lower gain stage.
anyway,
while you can easily control your rig's distortion with the aforementioned volume pot, here's a very simple way to make this process more controllable and repeatable:
Insert a Pure Boost in slot A, if you already have an effect there, use the 'move' function to create an empty slot there.
My personal sweet spot for less gain on my guitar is around '7' of the Volume pot - I can recreate this by setting the Pure Booster to -2.6.
Bingo - instantly switchable alternate gain setting!
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