I've tried many different pedal effect over the years and now I'm really enjoying the Lin6 Spider amps with the built-in effects.
I had never tried the POD but I guess they use the same effects in the Spider. I've been able to tune in some great metal toens from it.
As far as recording goes, the tricky part with recording and mixing metal is that we use a lot of distortion so it's easy to have one big mess while mixing.
The best results I've got over the years was to use panning a lot and to use 2 different effects for my rhythm guitars. By that I mean I often double my rhythm tracks and pan them but I'll never use the same effect for guitar 1 as I will for guitar 2. This makes a huge difference.
I also use a completely different effect for lead and again if I use multiple guitar tracks for lead I'll modify each of them a little so they aren't using the exact same effects.
