As much as I love getting all my sounds from my Kemper, albeit using an eventide H9 for some effects here and there, I do miss the tactile feel and what you see is what you get flexibility of overdrive pedals, and even have a couple on my board just to give me a few more options. Mostly, I missed the last minute tweak without worrying about messing with my presets thing. (You know, you have a dozen presets with many of the same amp profiles, feel like tweaking that sound, yet don't want to mess with saving all the ones that use that sound) I often love the tone of many guitarists that stack overdrive pedals. However, in my own experimentation I find it extremely useful to do in practice.
Obviously, the various combinations of OD pedals, which can be put in different order, set differently, with different guitars, primary pickup choice (bridge or neck) and amps and the way they are set up, aside from style of music, the technique of individual guitarists, and desired tone make pedal suggestions almost worthless. Rather, I'm curious about how you use them.
My issue: Let's say I stack two overdrives with both of them being engaged in order for that to be my highest gain. In which case I turn one of them off so that I have a lighter gain sound. Finally, both off for my cleanest sound. What I find, is that if I like the way the combined drives sound and tweak the pedals individually so that sounds good to me, invariably when I go to just one of the OD's, I don't like that way it sounds without tweaking it. The biggest limitation is the volume jump. If you set up your first OD to push the second, and then turn the second off, there will be a big volume jump. In any case, it always seems to be a compromise between what tweaks sounds best when just one is one to what tweaks sound best when both of them on.
So far, I have the best success setting up the second OD to be on for mid/light gain by itself and only using the first when combined with the second for the high gain sound. However, even in this case, I cannot find settings that allow both OD's to sound good by themselves and good together, let alone not have volume balancing issues. And this isn't even taking into account different guitars and different pickups selected on the same guitar. Any suggestion? are some of you doing this or are you taking the opposite approach, leaving the first OD on and turing the second OD on and off for higher gain?