Funny you mention the rolled back gain thing, too. I've almost always ran an OD infront of my Rivera, just because there aren't fuckloads of gain on it and also because the extra sustain and harmonics helped with my lead work. I've gotten a lot better over that time, but I've been fighting string noise and focusing almost solely on picking and fingering cleaner. On a whim, last night, I turned off the OD and went over my same routines and SURPRISE, my playing sounded 1000x cleaner. I'll still use the higher gain for straight lead work in a full band/live setting but it definitely inspired me to work start working with medium gain for more things.