Hi Todd, I will handle the first question before power washing the entire farm house.

Others feel free to answer questions or offer alternative opinions.

“I’m the worship leader at church. I play direct in to mixer, so I’ve been using a Joyo American Sound as a kind of pre-amp/modeller. Being that I play at church, “dirt” isn’t really a common thing, so I keep the gain pretty low”.

Sounds to me like what you really need is a way to get your clean tones on and the best way to do that is with a real amplifier. There are many new “small” amplifiers out there, even pedal size ones that will give you great clean tones which can then be fed to the mixer. The other thing you need is a cabinet emulator. Many of these new small amplifiers have switches on them to emulate real speaker tones.

To me getting the pure tone you need that actually sounds like a real amp with a speaker cabinet is the most important part.

The Joyo American sound is a preamp however the pedal is assuming you are playing through a guitar amplifier or running through some type of “power amp” with a speaker emulator. The Joyo pedal itself does not do either of those. That is why it does not sound great.

Here is a list I grabbed at random which contains small portable amps that have emulated speaker outputs for a mixer except the Vox and I believe are all under $200. https://www.guitarhabits.com/top-6-best-guitar-amps-practice-small-gigs/

There are many more options than just those linked above so Google things like “worship amps”, “small amps” etc.

Here are some options that are in Pedal format so no speaker however they have speaker emulation which is key. These are relatively newer products and the prices vary widely from cheap to very expensive:

https://www.guitarworld.com/features/best-pedal-amps-for-guitar

That is my advice to establish how you are going to achieve your base tone first because that is the tone that is going to carry the rest of your sound. Then once you have your clean tone established (with mic’d  speakers or emulation) you can add all sorts of tones on top of that including gain tones and a world more.

Here is an interesting read as well: https://reverb.com/news/the-gear-tones-and-techniques-of-modern-worship-guitar

I guess I could have stumped for the Tone TwEQ or Tube Screaming Preamp but I know how important it is to have an excellent Canvas (your pure amp tone) before adding the paints.

I hope that helps!

Here is a speaker emulator for $69 on eBay:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/DigiTech-CabDryVR-Dual-Speaker-Cabinet-Emulator-Pedal/363160055471?

That would certainly go a long way to make things better than they are currently. Run it Mono right after the JoYo.

Then build all the GuitarPCB pedals you want and throw them in the mix.

If you want to go cheap, the Blackstar Debut amps have a speaker-emulated output and a tape-based delay effect for $80-100.  I bought one of these for my wife who was using my 1976 Marlboro 10W practice amp, but it was starting to have some issues (fading in and out on low volume settings).  It is more than an adequate replacement due to the delay, speaker emulated output (which can be used with headphones or out to a PA system), and MP3 input if you want to play along with backing tracks.

Yah hard to imagine worship tones without a Mini-Me.