Totally agreed that the mixes included in the packs are very sweet.
The sad truth is that people generally "misunderstand" how blending microphones work. 99% of the time when I see people mixing IR's they start with getting the main mic (usually a 57) and place it somewhere they like it. Then they take the next mic and find a position where it sounds good on it's own as well and then they blend them together.This is how the stock IR's are designed to work as well.
I'm pretty sure you already guessed that I'm going to tell you that
it's not the way to get an awesome multi-mic sound. The above mentioned method usually leads to having a main mic that's usually the 57 and then you blend some flavor to it with a "blend mic". There's a reason why I spend half a day fine tuning single mics positions and a full week fine tuning multi-mics for each pack.
Here's an example for you. This is the IR that I called "the best IR in the world" and it's free:
http://bit.ly/MLSoundLab It's best for my personal use case as I'm sort of an alternative rock/metal-ish guitarist.
The mic positions that make this mix are way too bright or too dark to be in the pack as single mic IR's. They don't have any other purpose to be in a pack besides to be a part of this IR mix. They don't sound too good on their own which is the way people judge IR's.
I can tell you that this is the original V30 speaker spec from the 90s. Try to get that kind of sound using the stock V30 IR's and you will fail. That's all I'm saying.
Sometimes less options is better though. Imho.
I'm all for "less is more". That's my mantra in life.
That being said, the best tip for better tone I can give is that
tweaking the amp block is a much bigger rabbit hole than IR's. If you spend a few hours (and the price of one nice dinner) on finding the IR's that you love you will notice that most amp blocks sound amazing with their default settings. That's just the reality coming from someone who's gone through hundreds of thousands of IR's. Once again I'm sure everyone else making this for a living will agree with me.
My main preset right now is this "best IR in the world" that I shared and the new Friedman HBE 2018 with default settings. That's one of the best tones I've ever gotten out of a Fractal unit and it took me
under a minute to tweak because I had done my homework and used the best of the best IR's for my use case.