Originally Posted by: SuperhumanActually, you get a much heavier tone by reducing the gain. The higher you crank the distortion the muddier & fizzier things end up getting. Ultra heavy guitar tones on most cd's have the gain between about 5.5 and 7.5 on a range of 0 to 10. You really notice the effectiveness of less gain when you start layering guitars.
If you are playing with a band you need to cut the low end out and let the bass guitar fill those frequencies in. Guitars on most cd's sound pretty empty by themselves, the power comes from the bass gutiar (usually overdriven through a tube amp) while the guitars themselves add the mids and highs.
For a guitar by itself to sound heavy you don't need much more than 6 on the bass setting - a lot of guys also go for the scooped mids which give a real early 90's thrash metal tone.
As mentioned above, the Boss pedals are great, very cheap and very reliable. Satch and Vai even used them up until recently for live and studio use. An overdrive pedal onfront of the distortion on most amps will really add some burn and boost to lead tones.
If you are looking for a modeller in the reasonable priced category I would either recommend a Digitech GNX 3 or 4 or a Boss GT-8, the Vox Tonelab is also pretty good for getting brutal tones. FOr amp it has to be either Marshall or Mesa, I love those tones and they almost always sound excellent. Beside your pickups and actual playing technique the main thing to remember is less gain = heavier tones!

I have a fender strat so it's had the opposite effect on me.I get good gain from anywhere from about 8-10(with a wah as a filter).On solos it's very effective for me to have the gain at this level especially for that slicing sound.But for rhthym guitar I see where your coming from.I feel i can get a nice warm chunky sound from the aformentioned levels you where talking about.