TL;DR: Pick a clean tone you like, then pick a drive pedal that gives you the right character, then set the drive levels between the amp & drive blocks to put you at the level you want to be. Make magic.
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I'm playing through a traditional cab, so not sure if it translates well into an IR, but I've been having a lot of fun with the CA3+Clean (stock settings, actually) paired with a couple different drives... So far I think I'm using the tape drive, keeps it a clean tone but makes it a lot bloomier/bigger, a ruckus to juuuust barely break up, a face fuzz in a middle ground area and a zen drive to go into more of a real crunch. Really been loving it.
I think tomorrow, or maybe tonight...I'll try to find a single amp model instead that I can do the scene controller on the input drive trick instead, see what happens.
Basically I just scrolled through a bunch of clean amps until I found the clean tone I wanted, then rolled through a bunch of drives until I had the breakup/crunch tones I wanted. It was all in an effort to flesh out my main high-gain preset into one big useable/giggable preset, so now I have the clean, 4 different drives, and high-gain, along with verb/delay/chorus all in a preset. Granted, there are certain combinations where the reverb dumps, but I've taken no steps to mitigate that. Pretty good I'd say. Oh and there's a cab block active even though I'm running into an amp...I have it set up so I can always record that direct out with an IR while I'm monitoring through my cab.
