Help with tone

I want to get a tone just saturated with overdrive and sustain, like Vai on "The Animal" for instance. I'm having trouble getting this without getting a really muddy sound though. I should mention that I only have a POD in terms of effects however. I use a rectified setting with a little chorus and a fair amount of echo. I realize the echo causes some muddiness but it helps give me teh sustain I love. Maybe I need to change my pickups? I have stock ones that are in my yamaha eg303 (don't laugh) :(. Any other suggestions?

You may have fallen victim to the temptation to use too much gain.

I'm not at all familiar with the POD, but if you can apply some compression after the distortion, it might sound more like a saturated tube power amp.

It's always surprising to know just how little gain is used for tones that sound so full of it. Compression will do aq lot to keep your notes sustaining, though you again need to be careful with it or it will make your tone even worse. In most cases, less is definitely more. Too much reverb can cause the sound to become a bit muddy as well, as will echo (obvously similar effects) so be careful with that.

Don't know if you've already tried this, but adjust your pickups so they're as high, or as close to the strings as possible. I know my Gibson loses all it's balls if I don't raise the pickups until they're almost touching the strings. Once you raise em though, check to make sure you can still play all frets without the pickups blocking the strings...especially on bends.

thanks for the advice guys, I'll toy around with some compression and definatly try raising the pickups.