Changes

Power amps are usually difficult to drive into heavy distortion and distort in a rough, somewhat nasty manner. Sometimes this is all you need to give your tone that edge that a smoother preamp doesn't provide. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to control, requiring loud volumes to achieve. Also, distortion is frequency response dependent, but you don't have much wiggle room here. If you use the pre-amp's EQ or an EQ in the effects loop after the pre-amp distortion to prep the signal for power amp distortion, you may get the distortion tone you want, but the frequency response after the power amp may need some EQ tweaks. Yet it's impossible to EQ after the power amp and before the speakers. You ''can'' EQ post-mic'ing, but this won't help for practice/gigging applications. However, this doesn't matter if it's all emulated in a modeler, which is a big benefit of such devices.