I have been using 4~5 drive pedals in front of my Axe III for late night practice with headphone for a while now, e.g. treating a Fender tone patch in Axe III as the pedal platform.
I found I really like how things feels with analog pedals in front, i.e. it feels more real.
I have A/B compared a bunch of real analog pedals with the one modeled in Axe III, tone-wise, they can be dialed quite close, but feel wise, the real pedal clearly impart their own characters which is often lost in the digital model. The pedals I compared includes Timmy (V2 and V3), OCD (V2 and GE), Fulldrive V2, Prince of Tone, etc.
I found I really like how things feels with analog pedals in front, i.e. it feels more real.
I have A/B compared a bunch of real analog pedals with the one modeled in Axe III, tone-wise, they can be dialed quite close, but feel wise, the real pedal clearly impart their own characters which is often lost in the digital model. The pedals I compared includes Timmy (V2 and V3), OCD (V2 and GE), Fulldrive V2, Prince of Tone, etc.