Wonderful post from Austin Buddy!
What I find is every few months I have another breakthrough and all of a sudden, presets which I loved sound horrible and I re-program them.
Big recent discovery for me was the Pete Thorn presets, simply because if you listen to the cab - it’s really bright, more by a long way that I’d ever have chosen.
But in using these, and then ‘compensating’ with the amp settings - it sounds much more ‘real’. For example with the Jubilee/AFD amp - I’ve just started using the ML Labs Appetite IR. I always found this much too bright before, now I selected the IR first and dialled in the amp after (something I’ve never done before) - wow!
Then - again and again, watching out for compression throughout the signal chain, try and reduce as much as you can - only put it in where it should be. I find this is a common trait in digital - it’s just too, too easy to go overboard
Similarly, reducing the amount of delay/reverb - that makes it sound much more in the room.
Finally(!) - I’ve rediscovered the factory IRs, they really are good - I’ve bought nearly 2000 IRs (my III is basically full) - but actually there’s so much quality in the factory set, for the vanilla stuff why not?
Finally(2)! - experiment with the IR length parameter, changes the character of the IR quite drastically on occasion