Experiment with placement to find a sound that seems natural to your ears. Neither seems to get the vicious, scooped-mid distortion tone I'm looking for. I've tried a couple different distortion boxes, but they just seem to muck up the sound. I realize that it's often the player, not the gear, but I can still tell there's an obvious difference when these guys just punch out a power chord. Hawaii Let's talk about what distortion does to your sound, and how this might be getting in the way of a huge guitar tone.
Distortion increases the higher harmonics present in a sound.
The more distorted your tone, the brighter and thinner it becomes. Next, distortion reduces your dynamic range. With a clean sound, picking harder or softer dramatically affects volume and tone. As you increase the distortion, your picking has less influence over the volume of your instrument. There's no way a little extra picking-hand punch will actually make the guitar any louder.