How to thicken up a good tone

[Calvin Phillips]

My rhythm tone is really nice. Chuggy. But.. not good to really play melodies over. When I solo over top I usually have to change to a lead channel.
Are there any tricks I’m possibly missing to thicken up the rhythm tone to be better to solo over or am I essentially stuck switching.. as I’m sure most do. It’s just a complex switch due to the lead being an amp channel and the rhythm is a pedal.
I thought about just adding the grunge pedal over top but the feedback is pretty intense. I imagine if I set it up right itd work right? Or any distortion pedal. Anything.
The rhythm pedal is the me-25 boss pedal. I think the tone is a present I never changed. Maybe the pedal has options too? Better ones.. theres so many possibilities.
Anyways.. I was reading I could play with my treble and mid and bass to make it thicker. I also was reading slight delay or chorus.
If you watch my videos you can hear the 2 tones. They dont sound the same at all. Most of the solos are lead. Its significantly thicker sounding. Theres also using the solo lead for rhythm which can work.. but I feel it’s too thick for rhythm. Maybe thinning that out is the way to go?
Anyone maybe have good suggestions to change the amp up to sound chubby but thick. Maybe some have settings for certain situations.. let’s hear then! What do you got?
My set up tends to me.
Bass 90%
Mid 50%
Treble 90%
Pregain 50%
Post gain 90%
My pedals do the rest.

 

[Noah Berends]

Give the lead tone a lot more mids than the rhythm. Give it a place in the mix to sit where there’s not a lot of other frequencies. So less mids on the rhythm tones, and make the lead tone predominantly mids. That’s how it’ll stand out the most against the other. Some kind of volume alteration will also help, such as giving leads a 15db boost over the rhythm.

 

[Calvin Phillips]

I want to basically merge the two together. I’m not exactly looking for a balance. But rather a setting where both work under the same channel. Maybe I didnt explain it well enough.
Both are great on their own. But I want to use one channel to play both rhythm and without switching.

 

[idssdi]

Usually I have a distortion pedal and an equalizer on when I play rhythm. When I get to the solo I’ll press an overdrive pedal to sweeten it up a little bit. I’m that overdrive pedal the gain is not really that high and the bass is at about 8 and treble is at about 6.
Besides that I have reverb and delay on for my solos and like to have only reverb on for my rhythm. I have my amp on bass 3, mids 8-9, treble 5-6. The equalizer I have in front of my distortion pedal also mostly boosts the mids.

 

[Calvin Phillips]

So if you can do that with over drive I should be able to with any other pedal I’d imagine. Maybe I’ll play with my one pedal a bit to see if I can find a sweet setting for the lead parts when I do things in a jam like setting.

 

[Ed Seith]

Before I went Fractal, my lead tone was basically just my rhythm tone with different EQ curve (mids boosted and cut lows, like Noah said) and a little more reverb (I’ve never really been a delay guy). That worked really well, even in a two guitar band.

 

[Calvin Phillips]

In the basic terms I’m just looking for tricks to thicken up a tone or thin out.. like is it something that you adjust dial wise. Or can I just add the pedal. My me 25 has a good clean chug sound to the tone but it’s not really deep and chuggy. It could be as simple as the amp settings. But that’s an area I’m not strong in I usually use the same ones and just go with it. But in at a point where I’d like to experiment maybe with different amp settings to see different results.