Ok man,
here's the deal. a good pedal will give you a pretty usable tone for whatever you are wanting, but the biggest issue in getting the tone you want is gonna be the guitar you're using and the amp you're using, and most importantly (and obviously) the way you play. I play a PRS Custom 24 10 top through a Sovtek mig-50 and a 2x12 cab with celestion greenbacks. the head is all tube, so i get a nice warm tone with pretty good sustain and natural breakup on my distortion. if i was playin through a solid state amp, no matter what distortion pedal i use, i wouldn't get the same results. generally solid state amps have a more brittle and sterile sound. With regards to good pedals, this is going to rely heavily on what price range you wanna go with. One of my favorites is a Mesa Boogie V-Twin. I love the smooth thick crunch of this pedal, and it has a tube preamp section. unfortunately, a used one on ebay is still gonna run you $250-$300. if you don't mind spending that, a couple of other good ones are the Budda Zenman & Phatman, and the fulltone full-drive 2, '69 pedal,'70 pedal, & distortion pro. if these are out of your budget, the metal zone is a decent pedal if you have the time to tweak it the way you like it, the md-2 is also a decent pedal. a couple of others are the Proco Turborat, the Electroharmonix big muff, and the marshall jackhammer. Most of those run for around $100. Hopefully this will give you some stuff to check out. you can find some sound clips of a lot of these by searching the name of the pedal on
www.altavista.com under the music tab. Once again hope this helps you out man.
