I realized the only effect is distortion. Luckily, my little ibanez (15W) has an overdrive that gets some pretty good distortion. I have the gain way up with the mids and trebble low (around 10-12 o'clock) and the bass way up as well. But I wasn't 100% satisfied with the tone.
So, the only problem I was having was minor sustain problems (don't usually have to much of a problem with my epip les paul) and a noise problem. When you pump on the overdrive and turn the gain way up on my Ibanez, you get a lot of noise crap. So, never having done this before, I plugged an additional cable into the 'phones' jack on my Ibanez, and plugged it into my 20-30W fairly old Crate amp. This just acts as basically a noise cutter and makes the tone on my guitar sound so awesome. Plays like a gem now.