I get killer tone when I plug straight into my amps; I don't have to work for it (aside from working very hard on my playing, of course...that's a given...and that's where I'd rather spend my time). I have enough knobs to twist, if I so desire--and I often do.
What you wrote above makes me wonder if the Axe is for someone like me. I may discover that it's not. But with everything that's coming with 6.0, I'm interested in giving it a shot.
I have a theory about this kind of thing. And no this isn't directed towards you, it's a general impression I get (mostly from guys over at TGP to be honest).
Basically we have all heard somebody talk about how they've dialed in the perfect tone on a given piece of gear. That may happen with an amp with just 2 or 3 knobs on it. But that tone isn't perfect; it's 'as good as its going to get' with what they have available. It has less to do with getting a perfect tone and more with maximizing what they have available. Now that person could get out a soldering iron, a multimeter and some resistors and caps and all kinds of stuff and just start modding the crap out of that amp and end up either making it better or worse. My point being that they can go further; most of the time they won't because it's either unnecessary or impractical as hell.
Now on the other side if you put 50 knobs on an amp most people will feel compelled to touch each and everyone one of those knobs to dial in the tone. You can delete 45 of those knobs and the person will use the 5 he has in front of him and dial in a 'perfect' tone. What's the difference? He didn't see those knobs so they weren't part of his process. Out of site, out of mind.
What I'm trying to say here is that the advanced parameters don't have to be touched to make it sound good and to be honest the less time you spend in there the happier you are usually going to be. Now don't get all "well why are they there" or anything; I mean play with them, learn them, etc, but just don't feel like its got to be a required part of the process every time you create a patch. They should be used more as advanced parameters which is exactly what they are called. If you were playing an amp would you immediately go for the screwdriver and open it up to dial it in? Of course not, you'd mess with the tone, drive and master volume mostly. You'd get a good sound out of it too. If not then you'd go onto another amp...that's a whole other hang up that we seem to have.
And I think that a lot of the problem really comes down to the idea that we're going to find that magic knob or button that simply doesn't exist or we get obsessed with optimizing a patch to perfection. No amp on the planet is the end all be all, defacto, or perfect solution in every given situation. If you've got a patch that sounds great live, but you have to change a few things for it when you record there shouldn't be such resistance to just making a copy of that patch with the adjustments. Use a different guitar? Set up an X/Y switch in there to compensate.
And lastly I really think that people get way too hung up on using a specific amp model because its got a name on on some code. If your idea of the perfect plexi tone isn't anywhere close to the one that's in the AxeFXII (or any modeller for that matter) then don't be afraid to try a different amp type. We're talking about code here; no two amps are exactly like in real life, there is no reason to really expect a piece of code to sound exactly like a specific amp you heard that you liked.
Like I said, I'm not dogging or pointing fingers or anything; it's more like me just wondering out loud here. I get a bit obsessed with tone myself, but with the AxeFXII I find myself usually starting on something and happening upon a lot of things that I don't look at so much as "that's not right" but more like "how could I use this?" I think that if we spent more time listening to what we have and not what we don't that there'd be a lot more playing going on.
), and try to work out amp settings that help get your poor-sounding/great playing guitar to sound like your great-sounding/poor playing guitar. Or just to help allow the approximation of various different pickups (or how about "between pickups" like having a 3 pickup/5 position setup in a guitar with only 2 pickups/settings.
