Re: GE-7 Users, share your settings..??!??
Oh yeah,
I like to use an EQ to sculpt a gain stage. If you drop one of these bad boys after a distortion pedal or in the loop after your preamp distortion you can clean up and focus the distortion to where you want it.
For instance, the Big Muff is a huge sounding pedal with lots of gain and lots of bottom end. The trade off is that it doesn't palm-mute worth crap. Drop an EQ after it to tighten the bottom end and add some mids and you get your high gain mutes back.
I also like to use an EQ as a clean boost. Throw one of these in front of a gain stage and you can drive it harder for more saturation.
For instance, the Big Muff is a one trick pony. But, drop an EQ (or any kind of boost, in all honesty I usually use a TS-9 for this) in front of it and you can drive that high gain Big Muff to extream high gain levels. This works wonders on tube preamps as you can set your amp for rhythm gain levels and then kick the EQ (with the level boosted) and it'll ram the front end of your amp with more signal, causing the tubes to overdrive giving you that lead boost your looking for. Add a little bit of a mid hum to the sliders and it'll give you the cutting power for your leads to slice through the rest of the band.
You can also setup your EQ to do the opposite. If you set your amp for your lead gain, you can use the EQ pedal to drop your signal and scoop your mids to rhythm levels. Although for this, I'd just use your volume knob or a volume pedal. It's cheaper.
Lastly, you can use it to shape your overall tone. I set mine up in that extream upsidown V to give me a raspy garage tone. If I set my amps EQ that way it sounds thin and one-dimensional, but by using the EQ to do it, I still get all the fullness possible with such an extream EQ setting.