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→Pre-EQ or Boosting
The Treble Booster effect also works well as a boost, but I find it doesn't offer enough control - it's basically a high shelf. It can be a bit more transparent than the Screamer and doesn't cut any high end, so the tone can get quite harsh if used excessively. The Lead Booster is more tame in that it is more of a hump than a shelf, taming both highs and lows; however, I find again that it is a bit too limited for my purposes. The Pure Booster only boosts the signal level, similar to adjusting the Gain knob. It is only really useful to toggle on/off to switch between cleaner and dirtier levels of distortion.
== Swapping Cabs ==
Often a profile can sound a bit off at first glance. If reverting to default Amp/Cab block settings don't help, the issue may be with the Cab profile which can sound far from ideal. This is often due to a poor room, microphone, or microphone placement during the profiling session, which is often the case when one is trying to mic the cab in the same room as he is monitoring the mic's sound. Sometimes the amp profile comes out great, but until it is paired with a good cab profile, you will never know how great it is.
When browsing rigs, I like to save the Cab blocks of my absolute favorite rigs. These should have a great tone with little need to dig into the ToneStack or use Post-Stack EQ effects. Once you have a few stored, you should try these on rigs where the tone sounds off and tweaking isn't helping. You may find a rare amp profile get new life.
Keep in mind that the profiling process is not intelligent enough to completely segregate the characteristics of the real amp and cab. Much of the resonant characteristics of the power amp portion of the amp is tied to the cab being used, so by switching the cab profile, you are likely getting a sound that would not accurately match that same real amp paired with the real cab and mic setup of the new cab block. In most cases, the difference is somewhat subtle; and the tone of new Amp/Cab still sounds like a real rig rather than some digital concoction. This is especially the case where you are switching from similar cab profiles. For example, if the original rig used a '''''Mesa/Boogie''''' ''Rectifier 4x12'' cab profile and the new cab profile used the same cab, the impact to the amp's tone should be negligible.
FW 3.0 may alleviate some of this. It allows the creation of "merged" profiles, where a DI profile (no real cab) is merged with a "full" profile (real cab was used). These calculate the difference between the DI and full profiles, and push much of the resonance that is characteristic of the power amp into the amp profile. This allows more of the amp's character to be retained when switching cab profiles.