Pairing Master volume with guitar's volume control

I've tried putting on more gain and turning the amps up so that everything is TOO loud and a lot of distortion.  Then I roll my guitar's volume back so it smooths everything out and now I have my normal rhythm volume.  For a lead, I'd turn the guitar volume up and the added distortion helped thicken up my solos and volume of course too.  If I played the guitar maxed out, it would naturally be unruly but since I was only doing it for solos it worked fine.  Joe Satriani uses some pretty aggressive settings but since he primarily plays melodies all night, it works.

My biggest problem is that my drummer, who whines I'm always too loud, hits the drums so hard that I have to constantly turn up my amps volume as the night goes on.  So I just found it easier to use a booster pedal for leads and keep my guitar loud with a good bit of gain otherwise.  Basically I use the "It's better to have and not need" approach.  Nothing much you can do without a sound man!

also, did you decide on a power conditioner yet by chance?

What you need to do is get a buddy to stand in front of your band playing have every one turn up to their loudest level.  Let the buddy be the judge on who needs to turn up and who needs to turn down.  You want your loudest level so if your going to be using a boost turn it on too.  You want the other guitarist to be as loud as you are at your loudest and at his loudest.  Now once this is set you should be able to roll back on your controls on your guitar but if you touch your amp or your pedals you've screwed up.  DON'T TOUCH THEM!  My buddy in our band will do sound check and swear he knows where he left the volume on his amp and it never fails he'll turn it to 0 and then turn the amp off.  Why???  I don't know!  Then we'll get ready to play and 2 songs in I swear he's blowing everybody off the stage.  You can't fix stupid I guess at least thats what Ron White says.  We call this the small setup where we take a power mixer and use it for vocals and maybe some keyboards as well then let the amps do the rest.  When we play bigger shows we use our big setup where you have a mixing board take care of all your problems.  So I hope this helps, I've always used my volume control even before I knew who Bonamassa was, I'm a Clapton fan.  I rarely use pedals for boost anymore.  Just an amp turned up really loud and a volume control works for me.