guitars

You might give a TC Electronic Magus pedal a try. It's basically an updated version of the old RAT distortion pedals, and it's really pretty versatile. You can get light, almost clean tones all the way to a pretty punchy rock distortion. There's a little bit of a learning curve learning to balance the gain and volume knobs to get the distortion level you want (both knobs kind of control both volume and gain, but in slightly different ways), and the tone knob is reversed from most pedals, but it's not difficult to get the hang of. It's also not very expensive. When I bought mine I think it was like sixty bucks. That was pre-pandemic though so they've probably gone up in price since then, but I'd be surprised if they were more than $80 or $90.

I bought mine on a whim and not really expecting much, but it ended up being my go-to distortion for pretty much everything except super high-gain metal distortion.