> If anything having a saturated tone will make wrong notes stick
> out more.
My point is that if you get anything like the right note, distortion will cover everything else.
It covers bad right-hand/left-hand synchronization, inconsistent picking, misfretting and soforth. It covers up an
amazing amount of terrible technique. This is just a fact. Try it.
My own opinion is that if you want to play guitar, don't touch an effect or even a tube amp until you can sound good all the time on something like a Telecaster into a squeaky-clean solid-state amp. A rig like that will show every single technique error you make and throw it square in your face until your nose bleeds.
You can bury a ton of slob technique under the compression, saturation, distortion and the rest of it, and all these bedroom warrior types using all this stuff since they first started playing probably have no idea how bad their technique really is.
Drop 100% of the effects and distortion and play squeaky-clean for a week and see what you think about your playing then. It will be a very humbling experience for a lot of players...whether they'll admit it here or not.