Newbie rig question

you cna get an idea by looking at their equipboards.... page Hamilton for example has very little gear on there and he gravitates toward gain banging amps which gives you a clue.... lowest gain head he ever used was an 800.... he's got like 2 distortion pedals? I think these days he uses an axe fx or soemthing like that right to the desk, but we're talking simplistic, so the amp is doing the work

if you're looking to cop that kind of tone you need to look at what you have at your disposal... if you're new and you have a solid state practice amp that's probably not going to do what you want and its time to amp shop...

Speaking of Helmet, Page Hamilton actually uses quite a bit of effects on his board. You can check out his DVD/Video "Sonic Shapes", he goes over how to play with sounds using multiple effects, drone riffs, music theory. It's actually really good.

But if you're going off of studio album sound you're going to get lost in the abyss trying to copy something exactly. For example, if a guitarist uses a Marshall JCM800 on a recording, but it's a hot-rodded mod and there is a lot of track layering going on, you're not going to get that sound with a single stock amp at home.

Some argue that there are amps that are too good to put pedals in front of, other guys wouldn't have the tones they have without stacking multiple distortion pedals all dialed in at different settings.

You're obviously going to have to experiment, because buying a certain amp or pedal based on watching a demo video doesn't mean that's what you'll get. Different pickups, strings, speakers, etc., are all going to change the character of the sound you heard in the demo.

Good luck on your journey!

yeah, album tones are something else.... when I mix I try to respect the recorded sound as well as the live sound of the band (before covid, now I have to guess and hope the tracking engineer did right) but if its just not happenin' I might get pretty aggressive with EQ or even compress.... not to mention I usually have guitar going at least a little into one or more parallel group compression busses that color the sound as everything hitting the bus will push and pull that circuitry and there's typically like some transformers and maybe inductors in the path.... and that's just if you can pick out 1 guitar part to reference because there might be layers as you point out.

I would think most bands push tube amps hard. But there is definitely many people switching over to modeling. Based on the bands you like, Joe Duplantier from Gojira has gone plug-in style https://neuraldsp.com/plugins/archetype-gojira.

I think you can build it either way, so you can go with what feels best to you. There are advantages and disadvantages to everything.