The three pedals on my board that are the most important are the Revival Drive, which is my core tone, the MEQdriver, which is my lead tone, and the Space Echo which is always on and beat timed to the song I'm playing. The rest of the stuff (other than the tuner of course) is just icing on the cake. I only use trem and reverb on one or two songs a night. And the Sunface, an excellent fuzz, doesn't really get the use since I got the MEQdriver. And I don't really need the sex drive if I have time to dial in the two other gain pedals for the venue I'm playing in. And actually I could get away without the MEQ driver if I have time to dial in both sides of the Revival Drive, because it has variable mid boost, but the MEQ driver is easier to dial in my lead tone with on stage. Frankly I was always a plug straight in to the amp kind of player but this band of mine covers a lot of different tones in the songs I write, so having the pedals makes it bit easier because I'm not having to tweak the amp from song to song.
When I record the song demos though, I almost never use pedals. It's just an amp, and an attenuator if I'm recording at night. I almost always prefer that tone to pedals.