And what style do you play. For me, I use 50% of the gain available to me. Anymore and its way too thick and undefined, any less and notes dont ring out clearly and certain techniques become impossible.
Oh yea I forgot to mention I play metal.
Matt – There is no such thing as "better" in music. There is only what you like, and what you dont.
I have three pedals on my board: a Digitech Hot Head, a Behringer Vintage Distortion (Big Muff Pi knockoff) and a Digitech Grunge. I'm normally clean in verses, and I'll use the Hot Head for choruses. I've got it set with the gain at one o'clock, so it's a crunch tone…similar to a fully cranked Vox AC30. That has a fair bit of growl, decent sustain, and it still has a lot of dynamic variety. If I want a bigger, richer sound I use the Behringer, with the fuzz all the way up and the tone at like two o'clock. That just drenches the whole thing in fuzz, like a Smashing Pumpkins kind of tone, a wall of sound effect. I use that with open drone strings to make almost just a blur of noise. And the Grunge I kick in for solos; I don't have it anywhere near cranked, and I keep the volume way down, but it saturates my tone until it screams. I play alt-rock and grunge, mostly; you can hear the tone I mean at myspace.com/joecotten or Last.fm/artist/Joe+Cotten.
By the way, Matt's an idiot. Neither acoustic or electric guitar is "better", which is why I play both. If you look at it objectively, though, acoustic doesn't have any advantage except that it doesn't need an amp.