Everyone has personal preferences on how their guitar should sound. The guitar tones I like are for example from Periphery, Meshuggah, Mick Gordon but also from Mattrach, Slipknot and We Butter the Bread With Butter. My biggest inspiration though is Mattrach: he often plays metal with traditional guitars like Fender Strato & Telecaster.
This explains the reason why I early bought a telecaster as well and in my cover of the Gym Leader Battle from Pokémon RBY, I slowly started my early age of "djenty" guitar rhythm tone instead of using power chords. For me, a telecaster with an octaver sounds pretty badass so I worked on that sound for hours and days.
Most of the time, I used my telecaster to play djenty sounds but since the beginning of my Team Fortress 2 album, I came back to, let's say, guitar's that are more suited with metal. The first songs of my Team Fortress 2 album though were made using Guitar Rig 5. It's a virtual amp software by Native Instruments, which I personally do not recommend. The Sound is, in my opinion, very weak for djenty stuff - at least I did not find a good one.
So I started exploring the world wide web to check, if something happened in the world of free software. The independency of no license hassle is, what I enjoy the most so I urgently persist to find a good free amp. After a while, I stumbled over the Ninja VST plugin site. This new amp from 2019 seems to have everything I need - nice distortion with a built in screamer. Check it out yourself!
Check out Ninja Amp by NaLex here
My Ninja Amp settings are based on my personal preferences. Be aware that this amp has a screamer integrated, that means I can go such low on the gain knob. Even the bass feels, depending on your cabinet, very high so I like to reduce it here too. All in all, you can not really misadjust something in this amp, it is pretty straight forward and yet a great sounding amp. For impulse responses, there are some recommend ones on his page, however the one I am using is if you just google for "Best IR in the world" ;)
For me personally, a good distorted metal tone needs to have presence and treble but also very mid-heavy, it needs less bass but enough to have beefy, grumbling palm mutes and it needs to djent. If I find the perfect sound, then I rely on two different IRs that will create the doulbe tracks! Once setup, panning left/right is mandatory for a big sound. You could do more than two tracks for a rhythm guitar track but in my opinion, left and right panning makes the wideness, while the bass stays in the metal and gives you the low end crunch you want in metal. But be sure to check out more triple or even quadruple track recording - it may sound heavier. Just be sure you record it clean enough.
Guitar Tones are a very precise topic. This means that a small, minimal change leads to a new sound and mixing experience. This also can be very frustrating, as it is a common situation, where you have made a great new cover/song with your current setting, then you are about to use this mixing preset again and for whatever reason, it does not sound good anymore. Why is that? I can not say. My assumptions are that in the new song, you might play on a different scale, different strings and obviously a different arrangement. A song being mostly played on Drop C and the lowest string is just different than the other song being played on G# on Drop C. Other melodies to different chords lead to different frequencies interference. And as I just said above, small changes make the big difference. Especially metal and other heavy genres are having wilder waveforms than orchestral music. Or did you encounter with mixing problems with your guitar and piano cover? Probably not. But a huge orchestra is again a different choice. The more sounds, the harder to mix - mostly.
This is, in my opinion, why I think, it is not possible to just learn mixing theoretically. Sure, the basics can be learned. The rest is experience. What I just can recommend is what I have just said: Make music. And if you don't have any song in your mind, then covering music of your favourite soundtrack or band is likely the best way to achieve better mixing results and guitar tones. It's a tricky topic but everyone can do it! Try building my sound, if you want it, to build yourself and see what you like better. A preset is nice and all but the process of making a certain sound can help you understand the fundamentals. Go ahead and give it a try !