Thanks for replying
@austinbuddy, much appreciated.
What I want is to adjust things so I'm hearing your presets as they were intended, as clean and as dirty as you meant them. I'm aware of the dynamic range difference between cleans and overdriven tones, Fletcher-Munson, and all that -- I've been playing well over 50 years.
To answer your questions...
I'm playing an EJ strat with the stock pickups pretty exclusively, no humbuckers. Those are pretty vintage-ish relatively low output units I think, but this is the first strat I've had since high school, so I don't really have anything to personally compare with. I have another guitar with 3 old DiMarzio PAFs, but I haven't tried it with the III yet.
I use all 5 pickup switch positions. I typically roll tone down for bridge pickup by itself, for some more fullness and tonal balance with the other positions. That's pretty common for me, any guitar, any pickups. Bridge pickup is probably closer to the strings to even out volume. I may swap it out, maybe for an HS-2, looking for that fullness. I lowered the middle pickup recently, didn't care for its tone by itself, lower is better. I think
I want to be able to play clean solos as well as driven ones, but I know how to adjust output volume, by preset, scene, or an ad hoc footswitch, that's not the issue. My questions are about getting the amount of drive you intended for each patch, which means having roughly the "standard" input signal level coming in.
Sounds like my original thought was right: If drive tones are significantly louder than cleans, that's not how they are for you, or others who have this pack, so my guitar needs to be louder, but without causing cleans to break up unattractively. Will investigate.
Hope this all makes sense, and thanks again for jumping in.