I run an AG as the basis of my whole sound. It's always on, running into a 4 knob TC Spark.
I almost never have my bass's volume knob above 30-40%. At this level of input the AG will give you a really nice overdrive sound, a lot like maybe Geezer Butler or Glenn Cornick from the early Jethro Tull days. I would say it sounds more like real overdrive than overdrive the effect. It feels very wide and open, pillowy, and with a lot of air. It sounds like if you put your hand in front of the speaker hot air would be coming out. If you dig in hard, there's a vicious top end distortion that comes through, and certainly if you turn the volume on your bass up the AG becomes a savage near-fuzz. The way it responds to what you put into it is like blowing on hot coals and having flames jump out.
It's nothing like the Erupter at all. There's more of a searing top end to the AG. It doesn't squash the signal and get lost in the mix like the Erupter can in certain situations. There's no similarity in sound, and crucially the Acapulco Gold's one knob is volume, not bias. More than anything that's what differentiates the two. Having a volume control makes the AG so much more accommodating of what you want to do than the Erupter, whose volume is fixed for all intents and purposes. You can run the AG at low gain and then have it make up the difference in volume. Or you can keep its output volume low and run it into another pedal that does something cool with low input, and make up the volume even further down the line.
There is a slight low end loss with the AG, or a perception thereof, so I run the TC Spark after it to add some back.
