For playing live or jamming with folks (which may or may not happen again for me), I've decided to really simplify my Performance approach. I'm down to a clean rig, a dirt rig, and lead rig. With the dirt rig, I'm staying somewhere around 4-5 gain on the profile. For the lead rig, it's 5-7...maybe a bit more...for the gain. However, I do want to add a means to bump that dirt rig by about +1 in the gain dept, relatively speaking. There are times where I want the tone that lives in that 5-6 range for my rhythm, but I'm trying to see if I can get it by pushing the dirt profile vs. setting up another profile that I have to balance. I've played around with:
- Pure Booster - Simple...1.0-1.5 value. It seems pretty natural and transparent. However, it does boost the bass which I'm not a fan of. This is the same thing a boost on an amp tends to do and I don't like it for that reason either.
- Kemper Drive - going for a Timmy approach i.e. transparency and accommodating for the gain increase by slimming the bass so it's just more of the same core dirt tone without boosting the bass frequencies too much. This is probably my favorite approach of the two, but, it does color the tone and definition of that profile when added...moreso than the pure booster.
I'm also kicking around trying the morph button for a simple gain increase of 1 to the profile itself and adjusting down the bass if necessary.
What do you find works best in this use case? Anything else you guys are using?