nah son, there are so many things that can ruin a tone in the virtual amp realm, you need to go one thing at a time or you'll get lost in the haystack.
1. load an IR from another preset that in your expert consumer opinion doesn't suck.
1.a. MAKE SURE THE CAB BLOCK PARAMETERS ARE THE SAME (save it as a global block and drop it in to save 10 minutes)
2. turn master volume off. turn off the 5 band EQ.
3. set all knobs to noon. on mark series amps, turn the bass OFF. you don't need the bass knob.
4. set master to off, output to 0 db.
5. crack master volume slowly so as not to kill yourself
6. play and walk up the master volume slowly and adjust the output level if it gets too loud.
7. somewhere between off and noon the master volume will stop getting any louder and just start to break up more. stop at the point where it feels good. the more master volume, the less the tone knobs will do anything noticable.
8. once you like the way the master feels, leave it there.
9. with gain starting at noon, adjust to taste.
10. turn the treble knob to max and get your face ripped off. turn down to taste.
11. turn middle knob off while playing to see what it does. then turn it to max and see what it adds to the gain. adjust to taste.
12. crack bass open slowly while playing and notice how everything starts flubbing out past about 8 o'clock.
13. between gain, drive, treble and middle, build your distortion circuit that breaks up how you like.
14. after getting the preamp to breakup how you like, turn on the 5 band EQ and hold onto your butt.
15. Mark amps have the tone knobs before the gain, so adding treble or bass feeds the gain circuit with that energy, it effects the distortion characteristics. that's why there's an EQ at the end, so you can dial your distortion type, then still be able to shape the low end and mids and highs.
16. lastly, dial in a tone with the model that has the bright switch presence knob modeled off and you can get away with a lot more with the treble knob on that version. the model with the bright switch presence knob pulled on gets really peaky without much help.
this is for the metal tone version, Mark amps can do abused AC30-type clean break up too, just turn the gain back down and turn up the bass knob, then crank treble until you get your desired amount of string chime come back in.
