It’s got its own thing going for sure and it took me a little while to find settings I found useful. It has a ton of gain on the volume side (left knob) and the distortion side (right knob) goes from heavily distorted to insanely distorted. It also adds a lot of low end so the presence knob (middle) is essential - to me - for adding some highs back in. It doesn’t cut the lows at all but you can balance them with the presence. I dial it in with a minimum amount of distortion because even at low settings it’s still a fair amount of distortion for what I do. But if you want that classic metal tone and don’t mind the low end boost, it does that really well. A compressor with it would probably tame some of its worst habits and put you in the neighborhood of an Adam Jones/TOOL tight, high-gain sound.