cheez : it's all cool man. if I had midi questions you'd be one of the first person that I'd ask and by that time i'll be asking for your patience haha.
yes indeed the end result is different from live. this all depends on the guitarist/bassist preference of tone, sometimes they don't want it to sound "live" , they usually have this say "oh I love the sound of this iron maiden guitars." and we'd work towards that sound and skip any form of recording that wouldn't come close to that sound like probably the raw guitar DI sound. some want sounds that are a mixture of distortion/overdrive but "clean" mixed in together. and of course end of the day, it depends on the amp used the mics I have and the guitars setup and the player. we can only make the best out of the worst we got compared to the real deal. esp when i'm mobile recording.
and yes myself I give the band a say in the sound rather than run through template-sounds (most of the studios have their own sound), because end of the day they are the paying client. even if their choice of tone sucks ,you just gotta mix the best compromise between band , mixing engineer (myself) , and the audience (as producer).
and of course there are times the guitarist doesn't know much about "music producing" , like if the guitarist is heavily metal influenced (iron maiden) for example and he plays in a alternative pop rock band. the sound is just going to turn out really weird. metal high gain guitars on an alt pop rock band. so that would be the case where I step in and say "i know you like that sound but that is not going to work. go form a metal band and find me again."
as for percentage formula, there really isn't a fixed one, i may use 25-25-25-25%, I may use 100-100-100-100, but bring all the volumes to level. , or each with different compression/gate off. like if a song has alot of palm muted riffs, but guitarist has abit of overdrive + delay pedal going there, he doesn't want the palm mute riff to sound too muffled by the overdrive, he wants each note to be heard clearly via the delay pedal. so how? usually the "clean raw guitar DI" riff + delay sounds clearer, so just as an example I'd gate + compression (add the attack) of each note on the clean guitar track. and then the one with the overdrive will have lesser attack. so combined it should be what he wants like :
|----------------------within like 0.5 seconds, one note played--------------|
jeng(cleandelay).gated.+jeng(overdrivedelay) the "resonance/sustain/watever"
so end of the day, my "TRADE SECRET" (if it's considered) would be "if there's an idea with a problem, don't correct yourself with written theories on how it's impossible. f*ck up on purpose, then rephrase theories to correct that problem to possibility."
a person who hasn't failed once in his life probably hasn't succeeded in anything too.
alot of my influence comes from the quote of
thomas edison -
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
earlier on I mentioned condenser/dynamic/DI to record etc, condenser mics can't be put too close for risk of damaging the mics. so think of DI+condenser mics (recording for high frequencies) and dynamic mic (recording for high mid / mid frequencies) , and if the song has alot of "low tone guitar riffs" some even resort to using a kickdrum mic. so this one is just a situation of having access to different "frequencies" of the sound source. record now dump it later. you may never know what works.
as you know I use cool edit. I understand how almost every mixing engineer mixes is via "real time" , put a plugin/vst and listen preview "live", utilizing cpu resources/ram. for me actually I don't even need more than 1gb ram. I actually process the sound permanently (of course keeping a raw backup) so I barely use any cpu resources. I think what they call it in cubase is "freezing" or something. it's very inconvenient as advised by many of my friends but heck, if it works, why not? this method made mobile mixing on my asus EEE 4G possible too.
hope this's of help, whatever I've shared is quite generic, but should give you a wide range of ideas like it did for me.