with the whole pickups thing i was sort of amused at how you'd manage to fit a humbucker in a guitar that only has room for single coils, but then of course i realised you can get single coil sized humbuckers! so you can get massive distortion from something that's the size of a single coil. i think emg and some other companies make em. fx loop's not a bad idea, i'm not sure that the line 6 spiders have those.