You guys are helping me, too! I'm very grateful.
Early EVH is one of the top five tones I wanted to deep dive on when I got my FM3 last week. It's also really cool to come here to hang out and get to see posts by the folks from YouTube who helped me commit to joining the Fractal Audio movement (finally) and also helping me get to work right away. There is so much about this layout that isn't intuitive to me yet. I'd tag them all but don't want to be rude. If you suspect you're among them and you're on YouTube, you're probably right.
I'll keep following your lead while i try to personalize the tone for me.
As a noob I am currently just trying to nail down great "naked" amp sounds on my own. Not for performance, but for building a small stable of go-to amps that respond well to my hands (performance later, learning-curve first).
The element I'm focusing now is figuring out how to pair and dial in IRs that draw me closer. I use Leon's method of auditioning cabs, and once I find a pair that I like (they need to complement each other, imho, say one that's a little bassy and one that's sharper) I pan them L/R (75-100%) and use the room/air controls to put just a tight room ambience on them to give them presence in space. I have also had good results adding in a little Air at the default (?) 5kHz. It sizzles so nicely! Panning the guitar sound hard left and putting a reverb on the right (as it sounds on the album) is the sort of stuff I would do in my DAW so unless I was jamming with backing tracks I wouldn't use a preset that way. I also need to play with the mic-pre, since I grew up micing cabs and still tend to think that way. Also, the reverbs really do sound a lot better at Normal and above but the CPU hit suggests to me that I should save reverb blocks for playing live and doing the rest in the DAW with plugins when recording.
Since I am so very new here I'll round out that top five tones in no particular order (get to know meee!):
SRV
EVH
Robben Ford
Ty Tabor (Dogman era)
Jake E. Lee (Badlands era)
I'd swap out Jake for Nuno's tone on Punchline, it's one of the best tones put to tape despite the difficulties birthing that album, which are legendary. I can happily wait and will be fine if we don't get a '63 Vibro-verb, since I already have more awesome amps, most of which I only know by reputation, to keep me busy for the forsee-able right here in this magic box.
Still having a hard time believing that part, but every time I turn it on and plug it in... it's still real. Someone pinch me.