I promise, he's done a lot more of this than you, and he knows what he's talking about.
I see...
How dare I appear to disagree with Slippy...
hand slapped by Light. I'm not disagreeing and dude I was reading that when he was writing it... over a very long period.
You're being presumptuous... and condescending.
What I'm referring too, and I read it often, is advising to turn the gain down when the the writer has not heard the tone he's advising about... as though that will be a panacea. It's a premature judgment and a poor rule of thumb.
It's just as silly as advising to use lower output pickups, move the mic back, move mic closer, pull tubes or others without the benefit of being on the spot.
No different than randomly advising to cut/boost frequency A or B to fix an issue when not really knowing the issue.
The gain of an amp should be set based on the tracking result only and nothing else. Dial the amp accordingly.
Maybe an example will serve. Here's a sampling of several songs that I reamped recently
Reamp
We moved the gain around on this before settling here and a lower gain setting just didn't do it.
IMO of course.
a little overdriven amp tone is fine but you do not want distortion when recording.
more distortion can be added during the editing process
I don't have a clue what you're talking about especially about adding distortion later. Maybe we're talking about two different things.